Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase "Descriptive Enrichment" over "Bibliographic Control" in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and I'm stepping up to say -- I'm right there with you, Roy! ((And I would have said so in a comment …

Last night, Herbert Van de Sompel announced the availability of the draft specifications and user guide for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE). This effort, under the auspices of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), seeks to define a standard for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources.

If you …

On Monday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the NISO workshop "Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository" on the topic of The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship. The presentation abstract was:

[Academic] Libraries are gearing up for the third wave of information under our …

Boundaries are being blurred between the academic and commercial Web, between library resources, between the citation and the item itself. Students have no patience with these arbitrary boundaries; they want information, and they want it now, wherever it may be located. ((Cox, Christopher. An Analysis of the Impact of Federated …

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Richard Akerman's recent post highlighting SOA resources at Educause reminded me about the aggregation point on Educause Connect for SOA resources. I'm assuming significant number of those interested in applying SOA to library systems are at an institution of higher education or in some related organization, so I'm adding the …

Here is the press release describing the event:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Open Archives Initiative Announces Public Meeting on March 3, 2008 to Release Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications

Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM, October 31, 2007 - On March 3, 2008 the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) will hold a public …

Xerox and the Library of Congress announced a joint effort last week to study the use of JPEG 2000. This is welcome news! The project is "designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content," a result that will be most welcome for those of us that want …

At the Academic Library Association of Ohio meeting last week, I saw a presentation by John Burke, director of the library at Miami University – Middletown, and Krista McDonald, director of the library Miami University – Hamilton called "You Can't Do That! Library-Initiated Textbooks on Reserve Programs." It was an introduction to …

Earlier this year I posted a summary of planned JPEG2000 activity in the Google Summer of Code. As you may recall, there were two project: one mentored by the Mozilla Foundation and another by FFmpeg. This post is a summary of the results of the efforts of the GSoC students …

The blogosphere is abuzz with what would seem to be the final hurdle for open access to taxpayer funded research by the National Institutes of Health. Over …

The title of this post is the same as the report it describes, Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide [PDF]. It was announced by Ronald Deibert last week on his blog at Citizen Lab. The one sentence synopsis goes like this: "This guide is meant to introduce …

Back in June, Eric Schnell posted a five part introduction to applying Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts to library applications. Along with his comparison of the predominant ILS architecture with Henry Ford's application of assembly line manufacturing this is a great non-techie introduction to SOA form a library application perspective. I …

Last night DLTJ was upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As far as I can tell, everything is working okay, but please let me know in the comments or the comment form if something doesn't seem right. There were two tricky parts to the upgrade. (Well, three really, if you count …

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I'm outlining these four techniques in a report I'm editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on …

The past few weeks have seen announcements of large digital preservation programs. I find it interesting that the National Science Foundation is involved in both of them.

Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners

The NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure has announced a request for proposals with the name Sustainable …

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if your browser and/or RSS reader understands the …

In this How-To guide, I show a combination of software and configuration to clean up URLs by removing the port numbers of the Java servlet engine (Tomcat) and the context path of the application. The goal is to create "cool URLs" that are are short (removing the unnecessary context path …

I love my local public library system, the Columbus Metropolitan Library. I'm a big fan of its helpful staff, plentiful collections, and convenient delivery service. Today I appaud it for coming up with what I think is the best terminology for our patrons to understand what we mean when we …

The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on a study by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research on the usage of information technology by undergraduate students. Page three of the key findings report [PDF] contains this graph. One of the key findings that shocked me was the predominance of laptop …