Stu Hicks, one of OhioLINK's systems engineers, told the OhioLINK staff last night about a new program at Microsoft called DreamSpark. Through this program, post-secondary students around the world who are attending accredited schools or universities can download some of Microsoft's big developer and designer tools free of charge. At …

Dear future self,

If you are reading this, you are remembering a time when you ran into a really nasty interception proxy ((Version of the "Proxy Server" Wikipedia page when this posting was written)) and you are looking for a way around it. Do you remember when you were sitting …

I've been following the discussion by Stu Weibel on his blog about the relationship between Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM), and I think I'm as confused as ever. It comes as a two part posting with comments by Andy Powell Pete Johnston (apologies, Pete), Mikael …

On the ImageLib mailing list, Rob Lancefield (Manager of Museum Information Services for Wesleyan University) posted a link to the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (UPDIG) for image creators. The introduction says: "These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues …

OhioLINK's Meg Spernoga pointed our staff to a 30 minute audio documentary called Who Needs Libraries? from Soundprint.org:

As more and more information is available on-line, as Amazon rolls out new software that allows anyone to find any passage in any book, an important question becomes: Who needs libraries …

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article today [subscription required] about legislation pending on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives that in part includes rules for disclosure of textbook selection and pricing. The lever is the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, a major law that …

Dorothea Salo started a conversation late last year that was picked up by Walt Crawford and others about receiving unsolicited "PR spam" with the expectation that the content of the message will be blogged about. In a related matter, I got my first example today of someone scraping DLTJ to …

The title of this post is true, under certain circumstances. Last week's e-mail brought word from Michael Robertson of Backdoor Dialing - Free Calling to Millions of U.S. Phones. By using Gizmo, the freely available, no-spyware computer-based telephony application, it is now possible to call about 10% of the mobile …

At least I hope that is the correct headline. I've been having some problems with this installation of WordPress lately -- in particular, I could no longer activate or deactivate plugins -- and the only solution offered in the WordPress codex was to start with a fresh installation of WordPress. Now you …

Wired Magazine's blog network says "Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data" while the National Science Foundation (NSF) is reviewing submissions to the DataNet solicitation "to catalyze the development of a system of science and engineering data collections that is open, extensible and evolvable." On the surface, you might …

What's the deal with NCIP? For those that don't know, NCIP is the NISO protocol that attempts to "define the various transactions needed to support circulation activities among independent library systems." For example, "patron and item inquiry and update transactions, such as hold or reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in."

I …

Last month, Ed Vielmetti posted about the …

Still deciding whether to attend the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2008 Conference – The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology? Here are 10 great reasons to register today.

1. Meet, connect and share success stories with colleagues from across Ohio. ODCE 2008 will provide endless opportunities to talk with 300+ faculty …

I've been collecting disclaimers that appear on the bottom of e-mail messages in a draft post on DLTJ for about a year now -- every time I'd get a new one with a different twist, I'd save it anticipating the day would come that there would be enough humor here to …

Here is a map of official conference hotels and a link to download the KML file into Google Earth.
ALA Midwinter 2008 Hotel KML Location file

I'm somewhat disappointed by the display of the KML file through the Google Maps API. The KML file contains

Two items of recent note in the JPEG2000 world. The first is the announcement of "the world’s first fully integrated wireless HDTV" that uses JPEG2000 over the air:

The High Definition LCD TV, featuring Pulse~LINK’s integrated CWave® UWB Wireless HDMI technology, will be on display for the …

This topic is a bit far from "library technology" but part of my day job at OhioLINK has been involved with research on digital textbooks. To that end, I've been looking at companies that sell a digital form of the printed-and-bound textbook. The sites that I've found are summarized below …

You may have given away your right to feel the holiday spirit via some click-through license dreamed up by an over-exuberant lawyer. Don't believe me? Anything is possible in the world of contracts; read on...

An in-law sent me a flash animation card from a site called "Elf Yourself" (tm …