If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of "disruptive innovation" in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to …

This is the second week of this Thursday Threads experiment and already we have a bonus edition. Two other items crossed my browser today that were just too good to pass up: how statistical techniques are improving the aggregation of political polling and a visual representation of lifespan versus income …

Week #2 of this new project to highlight interesting tidbits from the previous seven days. Well, things that were interesting to me that I hope will be interesting to DLTJ readers. Time will tell.

Technical Debt: A Perspective for Managers

What is Technical Debt? It’s all “those internal things …

One of the baffling elements I've found in discussions of the history of OCLC is that of its tax exempt status under Ohio law. The latest example of this comes from documents filed in the SkyRiver/Innovative-vs.-OCLC case that make disparaging remarks about how OCLC got its state tax-advantaged …

I'm starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads -- summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter …

Within the span of a recent week we've had two views of the OCLC cooperative. In one we have a proposition that OCLC has gone astray from its core roots and in the other a celebration of what OCLC can do. One proposes a new mode of cooperation while the …

News of my joining Lyrasis has been officially reported ("Timothy Daniels and Peter Murray to Lead LYRASIS Technology Services" [PDF]) so I can talk about it here now. On September 10th I left OhioLINK to join LYRASIS on September 13th as the assistant director for the newly emerging LYRASIS Technology …

On September 9th, OCLC filed its first substantial response with the court to the antitrust lawsuit file by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces. And in a motion where OCLC requests a change of venue from the Northern District of California to the Southern District of Ohio — something seemingly mundane — they certainly …

Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn't rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get …

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is "Resource Description and Access" -- the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you …

Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their "paper tool" work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.

The title of …

At the American Library Association conference this weekend, I'll be part of a panel presentation from the LITA Emerging Technologies Interest Group with the title "What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?" The presentation will be on Saturday, June 26 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in room 103B …

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a "hybrid optical and packet network" being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the …

OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of Brill Neumann Associates, and the position description is linked from their current searches page (direct link to PDF, cached link to PDF).

The text was modified to …

Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I've forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess …

This week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded again about the principles of Universal Design. The presentation was "Universal Design: Ensuring Access to All Learners" by Maria Morin from Project Enhance at the University …

I'm working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of …

First, sorry about this getting posted prematurely through the DLTJ blog. I was trying the post-from-Flickr function, and it was telling me that the posting wasn't working. So, it got posted here twice. And it got posted before I was ready; I was hoping it would land in the draft …

Joshua Kim, senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth College, recently had a series of posts about working with software vendors. Although Joshua's focus is with learning technologies (course management systems, lecture capture systems, etc.), these are general enough to be useful in a variety of library …

Ron Murray, a colleague at the Library of Congress (and no known relation to me), sent me a note about the history of the term "mash-up" in the Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required). The definition of the first sense is "A mixture or fusion of disparate elements" with the notation …