There was a time when I was moving in both the worlds of the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment and the Fedora Commons digital content repository. It seemed like a good idea to bring these two worlds together -- Fedora as a content repository for Sakai learning objects. Back in 2006, I …

I have to give the creator of the blog spam below points for trying. This is what I found in my WordPress spam queue this morning, embedded here as an image so as not to give Google juice to the spammer:

Honorable mention? Yes. An approved comment? Sorry.

Thursday will be a big day in the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: the parties to the lawsuit, along with the objectors, supporters, and friends-of-the-court, will be in the courtroom of United States District Judge Denny Chin offering oral arguments in the final settlement/fairness hearing. In his order, Judge …

My place of work has installed a VPN that moderates our access to the server network using the OpenVPN protocol. This is a good thing, but in its default configuration it would send all traffic -- even that not destined for the machine room network -- through the VPN. Since most of …

A popular topic coming across my radar screen is the future of reading, and more specifically the role of libraries in the future of reading. Much of commentary seems to have been inspired by the announcement of the Apple iPad device, but it isn't necessarily limited to that. Here are …

Last month, the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project posted job openings for Java developers. These are short-term, grant-funded projects and, having been on the hiring side of that equation before myself, I know how difficult it is to get good people for a one- or two-year project. The XC posting is …

This morning I attended a presentation on "Using QR Codes and Mobile Phones for Learning" at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference. Presented by Thomas McNeal and Mark van't Hooft from Kent State University, the example used in the presentation was their GeoHistorian Project from the 2009 …

This year the ALCTS Forum at ALA Midwinter brought together three perspectives on massaging bibliographic data of various sorts in ways that use MARC, but where MARC is not the end goal. What do you get when you swirl MARC, ONIX, and various other formats of metadata in a big …

Jay Jordan's remarks during the OCLC Update Breakfast and the discussion at the Developers Network table at that breakfast generated further fuel for my previous philosophical thoughts on "Who is a member of the OCLC Cooperative?" In the context of things like Developer Network API keys (("API" is an acronym …

I think it is a statistical anomaly that many of the meetings I attended during ALA Midwinter were somehow related to OCLC. That statistical anomaly has certainly played out in postings here on DLTJ of my impressions of Midwinter meetings. Continuing with this thread of OCLC events, I attended the …

On Saturday morning of ALA Midwinter 2010, Dr. Jennifer Younger moderated a session on the progress of the OCLC Record Use Policy Council. The meeting started with an introduction to the reasons behind the creation of the Record Use Council, the charge of the Council from the board of trustees …

This morning I was at the OCLC Americas Regional Council Meeting just prior to the opening of the ALA Midwinter 2010 meeting. In addition to the prepared talks and remarks, there was a series of breakout sessions the end of the meeting. Ever sense the record use policy kerfuffle got …

Most e-mail messages I send are digitally signed using a process called "Pretty Good Privacy", or PGP. In e-mail applications that don't understand PGP, this digital signature will show up either as an attachment called "PGP.sig" or as a part of the message starting with "BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE" at …

It is the start of a new year ((Some have even said it is the start of a new decade, but of course that isn't true. We won't start a new decade until 2011, just like we didn't actually start a new millennium until 2001.)), and it seems like a …

Okay, I know this is starting to seem like an obsession, but I can't figure out why someone(s) would be constructing tweets that consist of my blog post headlines and links back to my postings. I'm wondering how wide spread this problem is, so I constructed a list of …

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 …