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 …

OhioLINK is not participating in the Google Summer of Code this year (too many other things going on for our staff to be effective mentors), which is why it is refreshing to see work on the wider adoption of JPEG2000 — one of our core goals — continue on other fronts. Among …

John Nack, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, posted a query recently to his blog seeking customer reactions to the possibility of removing JPEG2000 support from Photoshop:

Adobe developed the plug-in in anticipation of cameras entering the market with native JPEG 2000 support on board. The thing is, that hasn't …

Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), question a perceived division of library automation vendor technical staff with that of open source solution technical staff. I wasn't at Code4Lib this year (I'm going …

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to …

This month I've come across one great article and one great report on Service Oriented Architectures. The first came from Sally Rogers at Ohio State University in the form of an article from CIO magazine last year:

Koch, Christopher. 2006. The Truth About SOA. CIO Magazine, June 15. http://www …

DLTJ was upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 tonight. Everything looks good so far; please let me know if you disagree...

On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study — an examination of reader behavior in the print and online mediums. An article on their website goes into more detail about the initial data but what caught my eye …

Early last month I mentioned what was happening to NDIIP funds with the impending passage of what became Public Law 110-5 [PDF] and posted a copy of a letter I sent to my senators urging them to reconsider the funding rescission. Of course, I wasn't the only one who asked …

There are just a few days left to respond to the "International Digital Preservation Systems Survey" being run by Karim Boughida and Sally Hubbard from the Getty Research Institute. From the survey description:

This survey is intended to provide an overview of digital preservation system (DPS) implementation. DPS is defined …

Update 19-Jan-2011: I've decommissioned this service. Talkr seems to be unavailable, and I haven't had time to find a replacement.

If reading the thoughts of the Jester via this blog wasn't enough, you can now hear this witty (witless?) insights read to you through your favorite podcast player. I've been …

I had a need for a survey of the metadata namespaces used by OAI-PMH repositories, so I wrote up a quick shell script and XSLT style sheet to parse through the list of Registered Data Providers at the OpenArchives.org website. The results of this effort are pretty interesting. Some …

A note on the LITA-L mailing list from M. Claire Stewart (a member of the American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy Task Force on Digitization Policy) announces the availability of the Draft Principles for Digitized Content in the form of a series of blog postings on the ALA …

As others have noted, there is now an online petition in support of public access to publicly funded research in the United States. The text of the petition is short:

We, the undersigned, believe that broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America’s …

This could easily go in the "Disruption in Libraries" category of DLTJ, but it is a disruption of a different sort. Are you making contingency plans to continue library services in the event a Bird Flu pandemic (or an event of similar sort) happens? A recent posting on the Sakai …

A few months back I referred to a project that used video to present information about accessibility needs in the classroom. That article was about how difficult it is to create markup for embedded video that is universally accessible and valid HTML. Late last month the larger project that used …

Today I received an e-mail from ALA asking me to renew my membership. An excerpt of the e-mail is included below. There is a confrontational tone in the message that is very off-putting and also resonates with the reasons why I dislike ALA. My own emphasis added:

Thank you for …

Well, something is still going wrong on dltj.org — despite previous performance tuning efforts, I'm still running into cases where machine performance grinds to a halt. In debugging it a bit further, I've found that the root cause is an apache httpd process which wants to consume nearly all of …

Last month was an interesting month for discussion and news of JPEG2000 as an archival format. First, there was a series of posts on the IMAGELIB about the rational for using JPEG2000 for master files. It started with a posting by Tom Blake of Boston Public Library asking these questions …

Here is something to keep an eye on. Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, is demonstrating the concept of fair use to her class by going head-to-head …