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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Here is my planned schedule for ALA Annual in Anaheim. Reality, of course, may be different. If anyone is interested in talking about electronic textbooks, discovery interfaces and their underlying indexing structures, and service-oriented architecture for library services, please get in touch with me and let's see if we can …

There has been an increasing focus on the cost of textbooks in the mainstream media this year, and I don't think it is the case that I'm just becoming more sensitized to it. Take for example the editorial from the Washington Post on February 7th. The second paragraph succinctly describes …

In reading a background paper for the American Social History Online portal, I was reacquainted with a paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Thomas Habing and Tim Cole from UIUC called "Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services." ((Foulonneau, M., Habing, T.G., Cole, T.W. (2006 …

Blake Carver (of LISNews and LISHost fame) announced two new projects yesterday: LISWire and LISEvents. In the same spirit that I would categorize open source, open access, and open knowledge, these services level the playing field for the publication of library-oriented press releases and announcements of events.

LISWire - The Librarian's …