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 …

It was announced on December 13th last year with much discussion here on DLTJ and elsewhere on the blogosphere. It would seem uncharacteristic of Google to announce something like that and keep the world waiting for months to see at least a beta of the concept. Is there some sort …

As a result of discussions coming from the OAI-ORE open meeting in Baltimore in the first week of March, the document editors released a new version of the ORE alpha specifications (labeled "0.3") earlier this month to coincide with the open meeting at Southampton, UK. In a message …

Last month the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force of the DLF called a meeting of library system vendors (including one commercial support organization for open source ILS software) to talk about the state of computer-to-computer interfaces in-to and out-of the ILS. The meeting comes as the work of the task …

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we …

Unlike previous upgrades, this left some functionality broken -- notably some of the links in the second block under the "about" heading to the left (if you are reading this from http://dltj.org/ itself). But, you know what? -- it's Friday afternoon and all of the important bits are working. I …

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was giving $3 million in "funding, software, technological expertise, training and support services" to the Library of Congress to build on-site and online exhibits of LC historical collections. Others have commented on this. From a Jester's point of view, I've got problems with …

Below are the supplemental links for the presentation at the NISO workshop on discovery layers in Chapel Hill, NC, on March 28, 2008.

Update 20080404T1124 : Carolyn McCallum at Wake Forest University posted a great summary of day two of the NISO discovery layer forum, including an overview of my talk …

Wired magazine published a brief story and online photo gallery of the book scanning and print-on-demand projects at the Internet Archive. It is a fascinating glimpse into their vision and processes. Included below are cropped thumbnails and part of the text captions that accompanied the pictures in the Wired online …