This year has seen the release of two personal repository services: http://PublicationsList.org/ and the U.K. Depot. These two services have an admittedly different focus, but I think it is still interesting to compare and contrast them to see what we can learn.

The Depot

The Depot provides …

A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Wired Campus" section describes the new iTunes U portal, "a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost." (If you have iTunes on your desktop/laptop, you …

A post by Bill Harris at "Dubious Quality" with the title Information got caught up in my Technorati filter for disruptive change in libraries. Geoff Engelstein, a colleague of Bill's mentioned this in an e-mail:

We were a generation of information explorers. They [Geoff's thirteen– and eleven-year-olds] are a generation …

OhioLINK is engaged in building a "trusted digital repository" on behalf of its membership. As we build it, we want to have an understanding of what "trusted" means, and so we are engaging in an audit process to assess whether we can claim to be trustworthy. This process is panning …

In case you haven't run across Gapminder.org yet, I encourage you to carve out about 45 minutes of a day to do so. Even before going to the URL above, your first stop should be this 20 minute video by Hans Rosling -- professor of global health at Sweden’s …

I will never fly U.S. Airways again, if I have a choice. A competing airline's ticket is going to have to be substantially more expensive for me to even consider U.S. Airways as an alternative.

This all started with a trip to Ithaca two months ago. There was …

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University demonstrates principles of fair use to give an overview of U.S. copyright principles in A Fair(y) Use Tale -- a 10-minute video in five acts. Using clips from dozens of Disney films, Faden gives the historical perspective and underlying principles for copyright law …

I'm looking for information about the formation and management of regional digitization centers for one of the OhioLINK strategic task forces. For our purposes, a "regional digitization center" is a place that has the hardware, software, and human expertise to convert a variety of media to digital form. (We're primarily …

Activity still continues on the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP). There were two stories in Washington DC newspapers in recent weeks. The more interesting of the two came from the May 16th Washington Post in a column by Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman called Saving our Digital …

"Participatory Digital Libraries" is the name of a talk Paul Jones, Director of ibiblio.org, gave this morning at OCLC's Kilgour Auditorium. Known as "The Public's Library," ibiblio is a large, diverse digital library. His talk offered insight on how ibiblio works and commentary for applying the same successful techniques …

So here is my role on the internet — a Connector: "Connectors combine a sense that information technology is good for social purposes with a clear recognition that online resources are a great way to learn new things." That definition comes from the Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users by …

Following in the footsteps of last year's annual conference and the midwinter meeting earlier this year, there is now a conference tracking page on the HitchHikr service for the 2007 Annual Conference in Washington DC. The URL for the tracker is:

http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=212

From this …

A reader of DLTJ sent me a private comment this afternoon pointing me in the direction of a post on wisegeek with the title How can I Avoid Library Fines? This reply may never reach 246 Diggs (at the time of writing) ((I hope this post doesn't get that …

This posting used to have the tag "-- Except for Grayscale?" appended to the end of the title. That is no longer needed; see the bottom of the post for an explanation. We have been implementing University of Michigan's DLXS software, and DLXS uses JPEG2000 for its image masters. We have …

Jenny Emanuel, Electronic Services Librarian at University of Central Missouri, posted an invitation to complete a survey on how library professionals think of themselves to several mailing lists. As part of the ALA Emerging Leaders 2007 program, she is part of a team look for options on rebranding the librarian …

Here is a pair of papers that I'd like a chance to digest at some point. The first is "Recommending Related Papers Based on Digital Library Access Records" by Stefan Pohl, Filip Radlinski, and Thorsten Joachims. According to the notes on the paper, it is to appear in proceedings of …

I've been working to get JBoss Seam tied into Fedora, and along the way thought it would be wise to stop and document a core concept of this integration: the centrality of Fedora Disseminators in the the design of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons. Although there is nothing specific to …

The discussion has died down on Jack Nack's blog posting about the future of JPEG2000 support in Photoshop. Since I last updated my own commentary on the issue, there have been a few more comments, including one by Erich Kesse from the University of Florida. Jack has added a few …

With idle curiosity, I was poking around with what Google knows about DLTJ. Perhaps the most interesting piece was the company Google thinks I keep (found via a related:dltj.org search). Now most of the links are quite appropriate (the Library and Information Technology Association and ALA TechSource for …

Friend and former colleague Eric Meyer writes about the 2007 Web Design Survey (first annual) on his blog. It is an effort to "increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession" and asks questions to learn "Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles …