The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. (This specific field of artificial intelligence is "large language models" or LLM). There were two LLM threads in DLTJ Thursday Threads issue 95 and a whole issue six weeks ago (issue 93). I want to promise that …

The day after I posted LibNFT: a Project in Search of a Purpose, the project proponents held their CNI project briefing. The recording of that briefing is now online, and I've made some annotations on the recording transcript. I came away with a more nuanced understanding of the proposed project …

Metadata is at the core of what libraries do. ("metadata" is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.) We gather information about the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …

This week we revisit threads from a month ago, a year ago, and 12 years ago.

• ChatGPT references a non-existent book
• AI generating news articles
• Cryptocurrency miners in Texas forced to shut down due to electricity shortage
• Lament for a future that could have been: A Web presence for every …

E-books are a prominent theme looking back at a couple of year-end issues of DLTJ Thursday Threads. In 2010, a writer in Boston Review wondered about "books after Amazon." In 2011, an author for O'Reilly Media's Radar blog wrote that "readers sure to like ebooks" and "DRM is full of …

My relationship with Twitter crossed a new line yesterday. As I posted on Mastodon (one, two):

Have just deleted the Twitter app on mobile. Felt the need to ramp down stress this week, and the current owner’s meltdown is unnecessary drama. There are still a few people there that …

This week we jump into the world of chat-bots driven by new artificial intelligence language models. The pace of announcements about general-purpose tools driven by large training sets of texts or images has quickened, and the barrier to experimenting with these tools has dropped. There are now fully-functional websites where …

At first, I thought this was a parody.

LibNFT is an R&D initiative exploring the impact of blockchain and the digital asset economy on library archives.

However, it seems like a serious proposal that was presented today at a CNI project briefing. I did not attend …

Back again. Thanks for the comments on the return of the newsletter. I've heard that Microsoft Outlook isn't playing nice with my email theme. (It also isn't playing fair...someone forwarded the newsletter back to me, and when I replied that person said the view of the newsletter in the …

A number of Mastodon operators have started to report the impact of the #TwitterMigration on their instances. I started gathering these because I was curious about what it takes to run a public or semi-public Mastodon instance. These reports are full of those kinds of details, but they also describe …

Well, this newsletter was off the air longer than I anticipated. A lot has happened since issue 90 in late March: cryptocurrency value falling, Twitter spiraling (maybe a death-spiral...can't be too sure), and (in the U.S.) a whopper of a mid-term election season. All is well here in …

Much has been made about the differences between Twitter and Mastodon: the challenge of finding a home for your account (and the corresponding differences between your “local” timeline and your “global” timeline), the intentional …

On November 7, 2022, OCLC and Clarivate announced a settlement in their lawsuit about using WorldCat records in the embryonic MetaDoor service. This ended the latest chapter in the saga of reuse of library metadata with little new clarity. The settlement terms were not disclosed, but we can learn a …

I'm finding it valuable to create annotations on resources to index into my personal knowledge management system. (The Obsidian journaling post from late last year goes into some depth about my process.) I use the Hypothesis service to do this—Hypothesis annotations are imported into Markdown files for Obsidian using …

Earlier this week, NISO held its one-day NISO Plus Forum for 2022.

This was an in-person meeting that is intended to feed into the online conference in February 2023. Around 100 people from NISO's membership groups—libraries, content providers, and service providers—attended to talk about metadata. The meeting was …

The People of Ukraine are not forgotten. The Tufts University newspaper published an article this week about a multinational effort to preserve the digital and digitized cultural heritage of the country. On the other side of the war, Russian citizens are downloading Wikipedia out of fear of more drastic network …

The first story below is one from National Public Radio on Ukraine libraries' efforts are undertaking. Let's not forget the terror they are facing, the people stepping up to meet their community's needs, and those who have lost their lives in the Russian war.

The threads this week:

• Ukraine Libraries …

What a strange article title to type: Sanctioning Governments on the Internet. What does that even mean? Who would decide? Who would implement the decision? To say nothing of the consequences of trying to impose an Internet Sanction on a government or a country.

The internet as we know it …

For this week's newsletter introduction, I searched the Flikr service for photographs of libraries in Ukraine. I thought that putting a picture here at the top of a grand reading room with dark wood shelves and neat rows of books would help us remember that a significant part of our …

We are one week into Russia's war against Ukraine. From here in America, it is hard to understand the reality of a country whose citizens seemed to be going about normal lives just a short time ago. I find it also hard to know what to say to people whose …