One of the hidden gems of the Library of Congress is the Congressional Research Service (CRS). With a staff of about 600 researchers, analysts, and writers, the CRS provides "policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation." It is kind …

According to reputable sources, this blog contains 0.00006% of the world's knowledge.

1. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie tools like ChatGPT and Bing-AI are being used as question-answering tools. If you listen to the hype surrounding what LLMs can do, you can hardly be faulted for thinking that …

It's coming up on four months this week since I left Twitter, and I started wondering about the impact of that. On the whole, I'm still quite fine with the decision. (If you need an itemized list of how Twitter is falling short of its history and its idealized self …

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive action. (See Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?, Thursday Threads issue 89.) A year later now, that discussion has …

On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey. The suggested links from the end of the presentation are listed below followed by a rough transcript of the talk.

As I noted in the talk, the judge in the Hachette …

This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law. Cecil Mae was a wonderful person. I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy. She enjoyed playing …

If you have been following social media news, you know that Twitter is having its issues. Although there is still a bit to go before it goes away (or, more likely, puts up a paywall to view tweets), it seems prudent to save Twitter content so it can be viewed …

This week we look at time from a few points of view:

• Eliminating the leap second
• If adding a second causes problems, imagine removing …

The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. (This specific field of artificial intelligence is "large language models" or LLM). There were two LLM threads in DLTJ Thursday Threads issue 95 and a whole issue six weeks ago (issue 93). I want to promise that …

The day after I posted LibNFT: a Project in Search of a Purpose, the project proponents held their CNI project briefing. The recording of that briefing is now online, and I've made some annotations on the recording transcript. I came away with a more nuanced understanding of the proposed project …

Metadata is at the core of what libraries do. ("metadata" is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.) We gather information about the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …

This week we revisit threads from a month ago, a year ago, and 12 years ago.

• ChatGPT references a non-existent book
• AI generating news articles
• Cryptocurrency miners in Texas forced to shut down due to electricity shortage
• Lament for a future that could have been: A Web presence for every …

E-books are a prominent theme looking back at a couple of year-end issues of DLTJ Thursday Threads. In 2010, a writer in Boston Review wondered about "books after Amazon." In 2011, an author for O'Reilly Media's Radar blog wrote that "readers sure to like ebooks" and "DRM is full of …

My relationship with Twitter crossed a new line yesterday. As I posted on Mastodon (one, two):

Have just deleted the Twitter app on mobile. Felt the need to ramp down stress this week, and the current owner’s meltdown is unnecessary drama. There are still a few people there that …

This week we jump into the world of chat-bots driven by new artificial intelligence language models. The pace of announcements about general-purpose tools driven by large training sets of texts or images has quickened, and the barrier to experimenting with these tools has dropped. There are now fully-functional websites where …

At first, I thought this was a parody.

LibNFT is an R&D initiative exploring the impact of blockchain and the digital asset economy on library archives.

However, it seems like a serious proposal that was presented today at a CNI project briefing. I did not attend …

Back again. Thanks for the comments on the return of the newsletter. I've heard that Microsoft Outlook isn't playing nice with my email theme. (It also isn't playing fair...someone forwarded the newsletter back to me, and when I replied that person said the view of the newsletter in the …

A number of Mastodon operators have started to report the impact of the #TwitterMigration on their instances. I started gathering these because I was curious about what it takes to run a public or semi-public Mastodon instance. These reports are full of those kinds of details, but they also describe …

Well, this newsletter was off the air longer than I anticipated. A lot has happened since issue 90 in late March: cryptocurrency value falling, Twitter spiraling (maybe a death-spiral...can't be too sure), and (in the U.S.) a whopper of a mid-term election season. All is well here in …

Much has been made about the differences between Twitter and Mastodon: the challenge of finding a home for your account (and the corresponding differences between your “local” timeline and your “global” timeline), the intentional …