Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Digital Books, Layperson's Summary

    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 …

     Posted on  May 15, 2006
     and last updated May 15, 2006
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Fedora, Objects, Datastreams, Filesystems, and a Correction

    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 …

     Posted on  May 14, 2006
     and last updated May 14, 2006
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Thanks to Summer of Code applicants

    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 …

     Posted on  May 13, 2006
     and last updated May 13, 2006
  • OhioLINK seeking additional applicants for the Summer of Code

    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 …

     Posted on  May 06, 2006
     and last updated May 06, 2006
  • Fedora Disseminators to Enable Accessible Repository Content

    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 …

     Posted on  May 05, 2006
     and last updated May 06, 2006
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Processing Raw Fedora Objects

    Michael J. Giarlo wrote a very nice summary of my FEDORA trilogy (only three parts so far -- I think there are more good things to say about FEDORA; and besides, I like Douglas Adams' concept of what a trilogy should be), and added a piece that I hadn't considered:

    1. Having …
     Posted on  May 03, 2006
     and last updated May 03, 2006
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Thinking about Our Fedora Disseminators

    Another reason to consider the FEDORA digital object repository system, if having the ability to put all of your content in one place and reducing the complexity of digital preservation aren't enough, is the capability to create and define behaviors that the content can perform. In the FEDORA world, these …

     Posted on  May 02, 2006
     and last updated May 02, 2006
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Fedora plus Sakai: A view from 30,000 feet

    Please note: the living, editable version of this document is now on Sakai's Confluence in the "Resources" project area.

    Edited by Peter Murray, OhioLINK. This document represents a summary of comments on the Sakai Developers mailing list on April 26-28, 2006 to a question posted by this document's editor regarding …

     Posted on  April 29, 2006
     and last updated April 30, 2006
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • OhioLINK's Google Summer of Code ideas

    Student applications for the Google Summer of Code program are being accepted starting on May 1st. In preparation for that date, OhioLINK has finished up its list of ideas and other supporting documentation. We welcome student applications seeking to further the development of information technology in academic libraries in Ohio …

     Posted on  April 28, 2006
     and last updated April 28, 2006
     ·  10 minutes reading time
  • "Have you seen AccessMyLibrary?"

    I got a note recently from a colleague with the subject "Have you seen AccessMyLibrary?":

    This is a Thomson Gale new thing: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/. I clicked on the link under the search box to view a list of publications, and then tried to drill down to a specific …

     Posted on  April 26, 2006
     and last updated April 26, 2006
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • OhioLINK Selects the Affero License for DRC Development

    Selecting an open source license was really much harder than I thought it would be. The OhioLINK executive director and I talked for about 90 minutes over the course of yesterday afternoon to reach a conclusion. The factors driving our decision where:

    • A license that promoted the "open source" availability …
     Posted on  April 25, 2006
     and last updated April 25, 2006
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • "Archiving and Preserving the Web" from the Internet Archive perspective

    In case you were wondering what some of the back-channel discussion on the #code4lib IRC channel was on Tuesday, Ed Summers and I were watching an EDUCAUSE webcast on the Internet Archive's Archive-It project. Archive-It is a subscription service that allows institutions to crawl and search their own web …

     Posted on  April 20, 2006
     and last updated April 20, 2006
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • OhioLINK Joins the Google Summer of Code

    [Google(tm) Open Source Program]Google is sponsoring the Summer of Code, a program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development. OhioLINK is pleased to participate again as a mentoring organization, furthering the development of information technology in academic libraries in Ohio and around the world. We have a page …

     Posted on  April 17, 2006
     and last updated April 17, 2006
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Fedora plus Sakai — not quite that easy

    In previous post I described to how easy it would be for Fedora to be integrated into Sakai and offered as reference the Entity.java interface as evidence. Well, it isn't quite that easy. Two big clues:

    1. It is in the "legacy" part of the source code tree; and
    2. The …
     Posted on  April 16, 2006
     and last updated April 16, 2006
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Google's "Related Links" as a library's "Find More Items Like This"?

    On Thursday, Google announced a new service in the labs: Related Links

    Last week, we quietly rolled out Google Related Links, which lets you display a unit of useful links on your web site related to your site's content, including relevant news, searches, and web pages. It is a great …

     Posted on  April 15, 2006
     and last updated April 15, 2006
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Fedora plus Sakai — a marriage made in heaven?

    Note -- there was a follow-up to this post.

    What happens when you mix two Mellon-funded projects? Perhaps a nice bit of what they call synergy. The thinking goes something like this...

    Sakai

    "The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new …

     Posted on  April 12, 2006
     and last updated April 13, 2006
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Why Fedora? Because You Don't Need Fedora

    I'm often asked "Why is OhioLINK using FEDORA?" (Just to eliminate any confusion at the start, I'm referring to the FEDORA Digital Object Repository, a project of Cornell's computer science department and the University of Virginia Libraries, and not the Linux operating system distribution by Redhat.) There are many reasons …

     Posted on  April 10, 2006
     and last updated June 23, 2021
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Resources for Describing Visual Materials

    A recent thread on describing visual materials from the IMAGELIB mailing list sparked the descovery of these resources.

    First was this bibliography of thesauri-related materials by Leonard Will of Willpower Information, an information management consultant in the U.K. It looks like a really good synopsis, and will be useful …

     Posted on  April 06, 2006
     and last updated April 06, 2006
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • AJAX-based Video Editing Tool

    This is amazing stuff -- an AJAX-based video editing tool...in your web browser! I haven't looked at the underlying technology or it's licensing terms (the message announcing it says that it is tied to the 'eyespot' service) but it may be possible to port this to a generic repository. If …

     Posted on  April 05, 2006
     and last updated April 05, 2006
  • Berkeley's "bSpace Images" project

    Word of this Fedora-based image collection tool comes from the Sakai Library & Repositiories discussion group [Sakai Collab account required].

    Project Name & Description (Short)

    bSpace Images Version 1.0
    The initial version of bSpace Images will focus on personal collections and provide "baseline" functionality found in existing tools like Course Gallery …

     Posted on  April 05, 2006
     and last updated April 05, 2006