Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday's Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language was, admittedly, sloppy. I was fired up last night...distracted, if you will, by what was happening at a really good conference. Please allow me the …

While in UNC-CH for JCDL I've had occasion to rant with/at some people about the state of the integrated library system marketplace — including, of course, how we got into the spot we're in and how we might get out of it (and those people were kind enough to engage …

During the cookies and lemonade break during JCDL this afternoon I surprised one of the well-respected elders of the field with this question: are we really making progress? are we winning a fight against entropy Defined as: "Measure of disorganization or degradation in the universe that reduces available energy, or …

If you look along the right-most row in this picture, about midway vertically in the shot, you can see someone in a cream-colored shirt with an Apple laptop. (You can tell it is an Apple laptop because of the glowing white logo in the center.) That's me.

ZoneTag Photo Monday …

The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled "Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal." This was so good that I couldn't stand to stop and take notes. I did write down one bit: "Libraries are the best hope...for the …

JCDL is ranking high one of the most useful (and when not useful one of the most interesting) meetings I've attended. This is my first time here, and although I'd heard about it before I did not realize what a treat it would be to attend. I'm a practice-oriented guy …

An attempt to upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.3 a few days ago resulted in the Wordpress installation being blown away. It is hard to tell whether it was my fault or a bug in Gentoo's webapp-config, but in either case it is back now.

I've got a ton of work to do, but I couldn't let this announcement from Brad LaJeunesse via Dusty Gres on Pub4Lib via Karen Schneider on the newNGC4LIB list go by without comment:

The Evergreen software development team is proud to announce the Evergreen ILS Beta release. Evergreen is …

I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to "Catalog the Internet" -- to create descriptive records and controlled vocabularies for every resource out there deemed useful. The early Yahoo!, with a librarian on the staff, was going to …

I am excited almost beyond description to be sharing a panel with Sandy Payette (Cornell
University, USA), Andrew Treloar (Monash University, Australia), Matthias Razum (Fiz
Karlsruhe, Germany), and Carl Lagoze (Cornell University, USA) at the upcoming Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. The tutorial is on Sunday afternoon (Sunday, June 11 …

At OhioLINK we've reached the conclusion that coding would be easier if we created a modestly robust JAR file that is an implementation of the AXIS-based web services interface to a FEDORA server. Our initial effort is ready for public consumption; you can check it out of our Subversion repository …

OhioLINK is pleased to mentor three students working on projects for Ohio's higher education and libraries around the world during the Google Summer of Code 2006. The three projects are:

JPIP Browser Applet and Streaming Server

JPIP is Part 9 of the JPEG 2000 specification and is used to stream …

I think it is safe to say that most everyone favors using "fedora-dr" as a common tag for FEDORA(.info) activities. If you want to take a stand on moral grounds, you can also tag your items as simply "fedora", but please also use the "fedora-dr" tag until we've gotten …

My undergraduate background is in computer science, and from that perspective I have a great deal of admiration for MARC and AACR as well as their creators and proponents: Henriette Avram and Michael Gorman. At their creation, MARC and AACR propelled library services to new heights of efficiency and usefulness …

Michael Giarlo and I have been having a comment conversation in the Fedora Disseminators to Enable Accessible Repository Content posting about coming up with a common del.icio.us/technorati/flikr/etc. tag to help us find each others stuff. I'll claim modest ignorance, as I did in the comments …

The New York Times Sunday Magazine had an article with the title Scan This Book! that one could consider to be the best (latest) summary of the race to digitally scan and serve up books. This is an article I could give my mother (Happy Mother's Day, Mom!) that would …

In an earlier post, I extolled the virtues of Fedora as an ideal candidate for digital preservation because "[a]ll of the metadata (descriptive, preservation, and relationship to other objects) and managed datastreams that make up a digital object are 'serialized' to a single XML file on a file system …

Although we were a little concerned right about this time last week, you came through with a wonderful suite of applications with OhioLINK as the mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code. In the end, we are blown away not only by the increase in quantity over last year …

OhioLINK has received fewer applications for the Google Summer of Code than last year and have a number of areas not yet covered by proposals. Our project ideas page has suggestions related to applications we currently have under development, most dealing with applying JPEG 2000 to still image and moving …

Calling all accessibility technology experts! What follows is a line of thinking about using characteristics of the FEDORA digital object repository to enable access to content through non-graphical interfaces. Thanks to Linda Newman from the University of Cincinnati and others on the Friday morning DRC Developers conference call for triggering …