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 …

Where can faculty, administrators, librarians and technology gurus all meet to discuss learning, libraries, technology and the convergence of these activities? At the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2008 – The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology Conference, of course!

Be a part of ODCE 2008! The Ohio Digital Commons for …

DLTJ featured a discussion last month on what I saw as the outcomes of "clashing values" between the interest of businesses and that of not-for-profit higher education. The discussion started with "Educational Patents, Open Access Journals, and Clashing Values" and continued with a focus on open access publishing specifically with …

Just in case this might be useful to others, I've created a report template based on the "Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria Checklist" report. It has the section, subsection, criteria and evidence from the original report marked up in an HTML document -- ready for you to add the narrative on …

Two papers were published recently exploring the quality of Google Scholar and Google Books.

Google Scholar

Philipp Mayr and Anne-Kathrin Walter, both of GESIS / Social Science Information Center in Bonn, Germany, uploaded an article to arXiv called "An exploratory study of Google Scholar." ((Judging from the citation listed on Philipp …

Published in The New Yorker July 5, 1993.
Image from The Cartoon Bank

As the saying, now a part of Internet lore, goes: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." That may be true, but now we must add: "But we do know if you are from a major …

Marshall Breeding, editor of Library Technology Guides homepage, is conducting a survey on the trends in library automation. He describes the survey in a web4lib mailing list posting:

I am conducting a survey on library automation trends. The survey aims to measure how well libraries are satisfied with their automation …

This started out as a comment to a posting by Chris Coppola, president and co-founder of rSmart Group. The comment got longer and threaded with yesterday's posting about the nature of BioMed Central, so I moved it to this posting on DLTJ. For those in the library community who are …

My posting on Friday about the clashing values of academic institutions and businesses prompted a comment from Bill Hooker about linking to his blog posting about the pricing structure at BioMed Central (BMC). His comment and the e-mail I received this morning from BMC (reproduced below) got me rethinking about …

This posting has two goals -- first, to introduce DLTJ readers to the notion of "Educational Patents" or "edupatents" and provide an update on events of this week. Second, to frame the sometimes contentious interaction between academic institutions and supporting businesses as one of "clashing values." The former serves as a …