I really like Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Innovation (as he proposed in his book The Innovator's Dilemma). It succinctly describes the challenges, if not the fate, of academic libraries as we navigate through changing expectations and fast-moving, turbulent technologies. In fact, I often find that in explaining my point-of-view …

An e-mail from Leslie Daigle, chair of the Internet Architecture Board, crossed my inbox tonight through the IETF-announce list (excerpted below) that brought back memories of the mid-90s and the Internet growth explosion that spurred the deployment of NAT (Network Address Translation) devices, the shift in large scale Internet routing …

Ron Murray (no relation) from the Library of Congress sent me this announcement about a joint NASA/Google partnership, which starts:

NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from …

ODCE 2007: The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology conference is set for March 4-6, 2007. You can view the preliminary program and pre-conference workshop descriptions as well as register online for ODCE 2007, Ohio's premier higher education conference.

This year's conference will feature five pre-conference workshops, more than 40 …

Long time readers of DLTJ know that I rarely post commentary outside the realm of disruptive library technology to this blog, much less reflections of personal, non-work life. This will be an exception, though, because it straddles that boundary between technology and family. It is called REST for toddlers and …

We had a need today to transform an XML file with a custom DTD into Dublin Core; the custom XML file is a datastream in our FEDORA repository and we want to put the Dublin Core XML file back into the FEDORA object as the DC datastream. This took a …

Recently, I was asked to outline a plan for a structured process for software development that maximizes productivity and reduces bugs that reach the user. This was originally an internal OhioLINK document, but the process described is pretty traditional and others might find a use for this as well. You …

There was a great crowd at the University of Windsor "Future of the ILS" symposium. The presentation is available from http://dltj.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/200611-uwindsor-soa/. An outline of the presentation is given below with links into the presentation slides. Amanda Etches-Johnson has also posted a great summary …

I got an e-mail tonight from Franziska Marks, Senior Communications Manager at CompuMentor (and home of TechSoup & the TechSoup NetSquared Initiative), about the newly created MaintainIT Project, promoting sustainable best practices and models of technical support for public libraries. They have just launched their "Share your story" campaign to collect …

Earlier this year, I was on a quest to hook a FEDORA content repository into the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. What looked at first to be a fairly easy integration turned out to be rather complicated and I set the project aside for another time. Today brings word from …

It is my honor and pleasure to be asked to speak at a one-day symposium called "The Future of the Integrated Library System" hosted by the University of Windsor on November 15, 2006. More information can be found at the symposium wiki. I have a one-hour talk with the title …

Proposals for the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2007 Conference — The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology — are due on Friday, November 17, 2006. The conference committee established these tracks:

• E Squared: Effectiveness and Efficiencies
• STEM2: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine
• Who are the Learners? Serving New Audiences
• WMP …

Earlier I mentioned creating a Google Custom Search for Planet Code4Lib. The Google-supplied markup puts a form on your web page that leads to Google's server farm. (Alternatively, you can create a custom URL that points to an HTML page at Google which contains the form.) Well, that's really neat …

On Friday, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries announced the creation of a consortium-wide digital repository project similar to that of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons.

Colorado Alliance Digital Repository Project Approved

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide …

We're beginning a new phase of our digital library development at OhioLINK and an oversimplification of one of the consequences of this new phase is that we will be developing more software from scratch rather than adapting stuff that we find out there on the net. (Another consequence of this …

I wanted to mess around with Google's new Custom Search Engine feature and in casting about for a list of URLs to feed it I thought I'd try the list of blogs at Planet Code4Lib. As it turns out, this might be a modestly useful search if you remember reading …

DLTJ is now listed...how about your blog?

Calling All Academic Librarian Bloggers

A few months ago I came across a just developing project of Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University. He was in the …

I know I said I would only be taking "a day's break" from posting about applying the Service Oriented Architecture pattern to library services but, well, real work gets in the way. Thoughts are still bubbling around — some of them have even reached draft form — but nothing new yet. In …

OhioLINK was excited and privileged to participate in the second annual Google Summer of Code -- a program to inspire young developers and provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer, and to support existing open source projects …

The word "Successful" in the title, when juxtaposed with "Standards-Compliant" and "Accessible," should be big, bold and flashing (except that the flashing style would then go against web accessibility best practice). The goal is to embed a video clip into a web page that validates as "XHTML4.01 Transitional", includes …