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Colorado Community College System Announces Flat-price Electronic Textbooks from Pearson Education
Colorado Community College System (CCCS) signed an agreement with Pearson Education for flat-rate access to Pearson textbook content online. News of this comes by way of a link left by Lorcan Dempsey in a comment to an earlier DLTJ entry that pointed to a blog entry by Michael Cairns talking …
Posted onand last updated July 11, 2008· 7 minutes reading time -
The Complex World of the Textbook
Who knew the college textbook marketplace could be so complex? The agents in this ecosystem and their interests are so intertwined that as a whole it poses a massive amount of inertia for those who attempt to change the marketplace. I've been involved for about a year with an effort …
Posted onand last updated July 08, 2008· 16 minutes reading time -
Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000: ALA Annual Conference, June 29, 8am-10am
The JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries Interest Group of the LITA division of ALA is pleased to present a program on Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000 on Sunday, June 29th from 8am to 10am in Ballroom E, Anaheim Convention Center.
The lead presentation will be given by …
Posted onand last updated June 24, 2008 -
A Catalog for the "Next Generation" or the Current Generation?
Are we building the "next generation" catalog for us (librarians) or our users? As a read a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance, I have to wonder. Portions of this report are dated ((Although the report itself does not contain a …
Posted onand last updated June 23, 2008· 4 minutes reading time -
ALA Annual Goes Social
The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA's electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger's Room. Initially just a …
Posted onand last updated June 20, 2008· 2 minutes reading time -
Riding the Waves of Content and Change
Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful …
Posted onand last updated June 20, 2008· 5 minutes reading time -
A Note to ILS Vendors: Can't We All Just Get Along?
In the course of putting together the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the authors interviewed the four major vendors of integrated library systems in higher education in the U.K.: Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix and Talis. Among the "who are you" and "what do you do" questions were …
Posted onand last updated June 16, 2008· 4 minutes reading time -
A "Vision for Development" -- Excerpt from the JISC/SCONUL Study
As our profession re-examines itself and the services we provide to users, we seem to spend a great deal of time concerned about the way our "web front door" looks and operates. That is, we expect web users to come through the front page of our website and so we …
Posted onand last updated June 13, 2008· 2 minutes reading time -
Collocating Serial Formats Via "Linking ISSN"
Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the director of the ISSN International Center announcing a session at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim to talk about the "linking ISSN". Abbreviated ISSN-L, this is a new addition to the revised ISSN standard (ISO 3297, published last August) that allows …
Posted onand last updated June 06, 2008· 7 minutes reading time -
Selling Placement in Library Search Results
This morning's Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title "Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?" that links to a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking …
Posted onand last updated June 04, 2008· 4 minutes reading time -
"Object Reuse and Exchange" Beta Specifications Now Available
Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:
Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object …
Posted onand last updated June 03, 2008· 1 minutes reading time -
Fixing a Mac OSX Leopard Login Loop Caused by Launch Services
After the release of the latest update to the Macintosh operating system (10.5.3), some users were reporting a "login loop" to MacFixIt.com. I followed the always helpful advice on MacFixIt for updating the operating system, and after the first reboot everything came back fine on my PowerBook …
Posted onand last updated June 03, 2008· 3 minutes reading time -
"We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
May 30, 2008Towards the end of the last chapter of his book, Nicholas Carr relates an anecdote about the visit of a guest speaker to the Google …
Posted onand last updated May 30, 2008· 2 minutes reading time -
Downloading the ALA Annual Meeting Planner to Your Mac iCal
First, kudos to the vendor that runs the ALA Meeting Planner website. They listened to suggestions and now include a way to download your event planner information to your desktop/handheld device using the iCalendar standard. It is available from the "Downloads and Printing" page of your meeting planner homepage …
Posted onand last updated May 27, 2008· 2 minutes reading time -
Long-term Preservation Storage: OCLC Digital Archive versus Amazon S3
Last month OCLC announced a new service offering for long-term storage of libraries' digital collections. Called Digital Archive™, it provides "a secure storage environment for you to easily manage and monitor the health of your master files and digital originals." Barbara Quint has an article in Information Today called "OCLC …
Posted onand last updated May 16, 2008· 12 minutes reading time -
JPEG2000 to Zoomify Code4Lib Lightning Talk Video Now Available
Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:
Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists …
Posted onand last updated May 15, 2008· 1 minutes reading time -
Getting a Hyperlink of the Last Sent Message from Mail.app using Applescript
I've been a fan of Getting Things Done as a technique for managing projects, but it was only recently that I settled on OmniFocus as the "trusted system" collecting all of my next actions. One of the things I like about OmniFocus -- as a rich, Mac-only application -- is its ability …
Posted onand last updated January 15, 2018· 6 minutes reading time -
The Jester Joins Twitter
It was only a few months ago that I was teasing Dan Chudnov for joining Twitter. Now I've gone and done it myself. I don't expect to be using it much, but after observing the "Falls Church, VA" incident yesterday, I thought it would be an useful tool to have …
Posted onand last updated May 08, 2008· 3 minutes reading time -
Passion Quilt Meme: Take Time to Wonder
I found this meme via Karen Schneider's entry. Although I wasn't explicitly tagged, I thought it was interesting enough to add an entry to the meme's Flikr pool.
With all due respect to Karen -- and I agree that a love of reading is important -- but it is a sense of …
Posted onand last updated May 03, 2008· 1 minutes reading time -
Passing on ResearcherID
This morning I got an invitation to join ResearcherID, a new author profile service from Thomson Scientific. The service sounds nice enough -- who doesn't want to take steps to avoid confusion between authors? -- and if you have access to other Thomson products (like ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of …
Posted onand last updated May 02, 2008· 17 minutes reading time