The following may not be news to those who regularly hang out in Twitter-land, but the extent of the problem recently became clear to me: there is a bunch of spam in Twitter. More specifically, there appear to be robots that do nothing but scan the web for keywords and …

The year is coming to a close, so that must mean that the midwinter meeting of the American Library Association is right around the corner. Yep, there it is -- just two and a half weeks away in Boston. A conference in Boston in January -- the rates have got to be …

OCLC announced on Monday the availability of a new API for querying the WorldCat database: the WorldCat Basic API. This is a big deal -- it opens up part of the metadata in WorldCat to anyone who wants it (for non-commercial purposes). Previously, access to WorldCat data through the developer network …

Late, late in the day last Friday, the principle parties in the Google Book Search case submitted a revised settlement agreement agreement to the court. This post takes a look at the changes to the settlement from a library perspective. To keep this manageable, I'm not including discussion of library-oriented …

I've run across a striking similarity between the bibliographic utility business and the newswire business, particularly in the area of cooperatives. Two cooperatives -- OCLC on the bibliographic utility side and the Associated Press on the newswire side -- have the same pattern of activity:

• both are membership organizations,
• both seek to …

There is an announcement on the OLE Project site that links to the final report as submitted to the Mellon Foundation. This version of the report has minor corrections in the text and now includes information about the group of libraries that have committed to the build phase of the …

My place of work, OhioLINK, is part of a larger group called the Educational Technology Division of the University System of Ohio. In that capacity, we're seeking two senior repository software developers to work in our downtown Columbus, OH, office.

The position description can be a little tricky to get …

North America is gaining its third ((or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?)) major bibliographic record utility server this month with the unveiling of SkyRiver

Just as it turns 40, the internet comes of age. One day before of the anniversary of the first two computers connected together by a prototype network in 1969 ((From the BBN Timeline for ARPANET:

On October 1, 1969, the second [Interface Message Processor] arrived at SRI and the first …

Late today comes word that the plaintiffs (authors and publishers) and defendant (Google) have asked the court to postpone the settlement fairness hearing originally scheduled for October 7th. According to the memo from the parties supporting the request, the spark for this comes from the U.S. Department of Justice's …

EBSCOhost Connect was announced in the spring of 2006 as near as I can recall. (I can't find the press release about it on the EBSCO website. As close as I can come to a date is from an announcement at the Oregon School Library Information System.) After three …

Today at IBC2009 Fast Forward Video (FFV) announced the launch of the JPEG2000 Alliance, "a consortium of broadcast industry leaders dedicated to ensuring that JPEG2000 continues to develop into a leading compression standard." According to the press release:

In addition to developing their own JPEG2000 technologies and products, these companies …

Earlier this year, Index Data started a new blog. I wanted to call out a series of posts (parts one and two) their newly started blog called Z39.50 for Dummies. Wolfram Schneider on the Index Data staff wrote these two posts.

In the introductory posting, Wolfram says:

Z39.50 …

Ah, it is the beginning of September when thoughts turn to going back to school, the days turn a little colder (in the northern hemisphere) and the smell of lawsuit briefs is in the air. Well, okay -- the latter might not be what you expect, but this is a special …

The theme of the 2010 Ohio Educational Technology Conference, P-20 Conversations: Shaping a Path for the 21st Century Student, addresses the need to provide seamless technology integration throughout students' careers. Reflecting this year's theme, the sponsors of last year's Learning, Libraries and Technology conference — Ohio Learning Network (OLN), OhioLINK and …

Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, posted a pair of messages on his corporate blog that it is worth calling attention to regarding the OLE Project final report, if you haven't already run into them: OLE; The unanswered questions and Library Software Solutions - We need a higher level …

The fact that the Higher Education Opportunity Act (Public Law 110-315) -- otherwise known as HEOA -- was signed into law last year is probably not big news to anyone. One of the parts of the bill that I have been following and commented on here in DLTJ is the textbook disclosure …

An interesting thing happened at my place of work (OhioLINK) today. We recently added links to our central catalog pointing to manifestations in Google Books. The way it was decided to set it up, though, was to only point to Google Books if the full text was available. We tweeted …