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 …

dltj.org runs on a relatively tiny box — a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. I'm running a Gentoo Linux distribution, so I actually have a prayer of getting useful work out of the machine (it server is actually a recycled Windows desktop), but the performance just wasn't great. As …

With the release of Microsoft's Windows Media Player version 11, the Microsoft Media Server (MMS) protocol is officially no longer supported. (Except, of course, for the confusing/amusing footnote on that page that says 'mms://' URIs are "highly recommended" as a protocol rollover URL — only Microsoft can at the same …

Two previous posts on dltj.org have described the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project and the theory behind what has become known as the 'Web Architecture'. These two areas meet up now in this post which describes the issues surrounding the raw Web Architecture as applied to a …

As you may have noticed, the web has evolved a set of common principles that are a mix of ratified standards and ad hoc practices. The notion of a Web Architecture was codified in a W3C technical report called "Architecture of the World Wide Web" http://www.w3.org/TR …

In the past few months a new group has formed to tackle the problem of representing and exchanging complex digital objects in a web-based environment. I am proud to serve on the technical committee for this group and over the next few postings I'm aiming to introduce the library community …

The Honorable George V. Voinovich
524 Hart Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator:

I am writing to you in regards to House Joint Resolution 20, the Continuing Appropriations resolution FY2007, and in particular section 20703(D …

In a federal fiscal year that began without nine of the 11 appropriations bills passed, there is legislation pending in the Senate that would ax funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program for the remainder of the fiscal year. Given the current political tone in Washington, one …

Here is a bit of personal news to report. Tom Sanville, OhioLINK's executive director, announced today that I am changing roles at OhioLINK. Here is what he said:

I'm pleased to announce that Peter Murray will assume the position of Assistant Director, New Service Development effective immediately. In light of …

Richard Rodgers presented this talk based on the work of he and MacKenzie Smith in the Digital Library Research Group at MIT. The original abstract of the presentation was:

Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories--is each repository an island or …

Chris Wilper gave this presentation on behalf of the work that he and Aaron Birkland did to improve the performance of the Fedora Resource Index.

Version 2.0 of the Fedora digital object repository software added a feature called the Resource Index (RI). Based on Resource …

This is a summary of a presentation by James L. Hilton, Vice President and CIO of University of Virginia, at the opening keynote session of Open Repositories 2007. I tried to capture the esessence of his presentation, and omissions, contradictions, and inaccuracies in this summary are likely mine and not …