A non-librarian colleague forwarded a link to an essay by Mark Pesce called The Alexandrine Dilemma. From the context of one of the comments, I think it might have been the text of a keynote given at New Librarians Symposium in Australia last month. It is a thought-provoking piece that …

As part of our winter holiday activities, our family has been busily clearing out the basement to set up a play area for the kids. In doing so, we created a stack of old electronics -- monitors, printers, stereo receivers, and such -- that are of questionable working condition and worth. In …

I try to do the "right thing" in postings on DLTJ. In the context of this discussion "right" is an attempt to be progressive: including hCalendar microformat markupfor postings that include mention of events. The latest example of this was yesterday's posting of the Learning, Libraries and Technology Conference …

Why does Google do what it does? A report by the faberNovel management consulting firm describes Google's "key success factors" and how it goes about achieving them. The report talks about "Google as platform" and goes on to describe how it makes money serving the network effects of that platform …

Earlier this week, LITA announced its unconference event: LITACamp. The meeting is scheduled for May 7-8, 2009 at the OCLC Conference Center in Dublin, Ohio. (Map of conference center and surrounding facilities.)

For those that don't know, the unconference meeting format is one where the topics are picked by those …

The Google Book Search Settlement Agreement includes two points where library consortia come into play: discounts for institutional subscriptions and receipt of digitized books by members of a consortium. The Google Book Search Settlement calls such consortia "Institutional Consortia" and the definition of that phrase and the places in the …

On Friday, OhioLINK released an addendum to its inquiry for a comprehensive discovery layer that answers questions submitted from potential bidders. This is a distilled version of that addendum -- posted here with the desire to reach others that may be interested in submitting a bid. Please note that this posting …

The Associate Press reported on Monday evening that the court has given preliminary approval to the settlement negotiated between Google and book authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted materials in the Google Book Search Library project. In giving preliminary approval, Judge John E. Sprizzo authorized the publication of …

Coming out of the face-to-face meeting in Rutgers earlier this month, the OLE Project has posted a number of announcements for upcoming events. The first is a webcast on Nov. 20, 2008 from 3:00pm to 4:30pm Eastern Standard Time, US, free of charge and open to anyone. The …

One of the very relevant aspects of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement to libraries is the provision that allows for free public access to the full text of books in public and academic libraries. The Notice of Settlement summary says: "Google will provide, on request, 'Public Access' licenses for …

Update

On the Code4Lib IRC channel Thursday afternoon, Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Programs and Research, said that there is absolutely no connection between the policy change and the Google Book Search settlement.

The Original Post

Two big and seemingly unrelated things came to light on Tuesday of …

Beyond the public pronouncements of the Google Books Settlement ((See the bottom of this earlier post on DLTJ for a complete list)) are the documents that form the meat of the agreement. The full text of the proposed settlement agreement is 141 pages plus another 162 pages of appendices. The …

George Mason University issued a statement this morning regarding the lawsuit filed against it by the Thomson Scientific division of Reuters. It looks like GMU intends to fight the lawsuit. It has restored the functionality that allowed Zotero to understand the EndNote® citation style file format and announced that it …

Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers -- in the class action lawsuit about materials scanned for the Google Book Search application through the Google Book Search Library Project. This posting on DLTJ includes a …

Earlier today, Wright State University issued an invitation-to-negotiate ((Invitation to Negotiate: A competitive process whereby suppliers and contractors have an opportunity to initially submit pricing proposals for consideration. Once reviewed, the University has the opportunity to determine which proposers it wishes to conduct negotiations with for the purpose of arriving …

The first production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange from the Open Archives Initiative was published today. In the words of the release announcement, ORE provides "the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their …

This is a brief update on the EndNote/Zotero lawsuit. The story thus far: The Thomson Scientific division of Reuters, maintainer of the EndNote software, is suing George Mason University over the upcoming release of Zotero, the Firefox plugin for managing citations. More specifically, the complaint filed in Virginia state …

Last month, Clay Shirky gave a presentation with the title "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure" at the Web 2.0 Expo. ((Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O'Reilly Media, "is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next …

Don’t delay -- submit your proposal and be part of Ohio’s premier higher education conference, The University System of Ohio’s Learning, Libraries & Technology 2009 Conference! Proposals are due by Wednesday, October 15, 2008 for the conference on March 1-3, 2009.

The University System of Ohio’s Learning, Libraries …