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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  • What EDUCAUSE's 2022 Top 10 IT Issues Mean for Libraries

    Last month, EDUCAUSE published its Top 10 IT Issues for 2022 with the subtitle "The Higher Education We Deserve". To reach the top 10, EDUCAUSE members were asked to prioritize 17 issues identified by the EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel members. The members of the Issue Panel then broke up into …

     Posted on  December 05, 2021
     and last updated December 05, 2021
     ·  10 minutes reading time
  • On the Code4Lib Journal's Two Proposed Metrics article

    Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) editor here. Becky Yoose's Twitter thread has stirred up a great deal of attention to an article published yesterday. This post has my own thoughts on the issue...published on Twitter to match Becky's medium and here on my blog for posterity.

    So yeah that Code4Lib Journal …

     Posted on  September 23, 2021
     and last updated September 23, 2021
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • DLTJ Now Uses Webmention and Bridgy to Aggregate Social Media Commentary

    When I converted this blog from WordPress to a static site generated with Jekyll in 2018, I lost the ability for readers to make comments. At the time, I thought that one day I would set up an installation of Discourse for comments like Boing Boing did in 2013. But …

     Posted on  July 11, 2021
     and last updated July 11, 2021
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Digital Repository Software: How Far Have We Come? How Far Do We Have to Go?

    Bryan Brown's tweet led me to Ruth Kitchin Tillman's Repository Ouroboros post about the treadmill of software development/deployment. And wow do I have thoughts and feelings.

    Featuring an ouroboros, a snake or dragon biting its own tail, a digital representation of a copy of a 1478 drawing by Theodoros Pelecanos of an alchemical tract attributed to Synesius.
    Ouroboros: an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Or—in this context—constantly chasing what you can never …

     Posted on  June 23, 2021
     and last updated June 23, 2021
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Thoughts on Growing Up

    It 'tis the season for graduations, and this year my nephew is graduating from high school. My sister-in-law created a memory book—"a surprise Book of Advice as he moves to the next phase of his life." What an interesting opportunity to reflect! This is what I came up with …

     Posted on  May 28, 2021
     and last updated May 28, 2021
  • More Thoughts on Pre-recording Conference Talks

    Over the weekend, I posted an article here about pre-recording conference talks and sent a tweet about the idea on Monday. I hoped to generate discussion about recording talks to fill in gaps—positive and negative—about the concept, and I was not disappointed. I'm particularly thankful to Lisa Janicke …

     Posted on  April 08, 2021
     and last updated April 08, 2021
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • Should All Conference Talks be Pre-recorded?

    The Code4Lib conference was last week. That meeting used all pre-recorded talks, and we saw the benefits of pre-recording for attendees, presenters, and conference organizers. Should all talks be pre-recorded, even when we are back face-to-face?

    Note! After I posted a link to this article on Twitter, there was a …

     Posted on  April 03, 2021
     and last updated April 08, 2021
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • User Behavior Access Controls at a Library Proxy Server are Okay

    Earlier this month, my Twitter timeline lit up with mentions of a half-day webinar called Cybersecurity Landscape - Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure. What had riled up the people I follow on Twitter was the first presentation: "Security Collaboration for Library Resource Access" by Cory Roach, the chief information security officer at …

     Posted on  November 28, 2020
     and last updated November 30, 2020
     ·  9 minutes reading time
  • As a Cog in the Election System: Reflections on My Role as a Precinct Election Official

    I may nod off several times in composing this post the day after election day. Hopefully, in reading it, you won't. It is a story about one corner of democracy. It is a journal entry about how it felt to be a citizen doing what I could do to make …

     Posted on  November 04, 2020
     and last updated June 23, 2022
     ·  10 minutes reading time
  • Running an All-Online Conference with Zoom [post removed]

    This is an article draft that was accidentally published. I hope to work on a final version soon. If you really want to see it, I saved a copy on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

     Posted on  May 05, 2020
     and last updated April 03, 2021
  • With Gratitude for the NISO Ann Marie Cunningham Service Award

    During the inaugural NISO Plus meeting at the end of February, I was surprised and proud to receive the Ann Marie Cunningham Service award. Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director, let me know by tweet as I was not able to attend the conference.
    Pictured in that tweet is my …

     Posted on  May 01, 2020
     and last updated May 01, 2020
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Tethering a Ubiquity Network to a Mobile Hotspot

    I saw it happen.

    The cable-chewing device
    The contractor in the neighbor's back yard with the Ditch Witch trencher burying a cable. I was working outside at the patio table and just about to go into a Zoom meeting. Then the internet dropped out. Suddenly, and with a wrenching feeling …

     Posted on  April 21, 2020
     and last updated October 04, 2022
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • Managing Remote Conference Presenters with Zoom

    Bringing remote presenters into a face-to-face conference is challenging and fraught with peril. In this post, I describe a scheme using Zoom that had in-person attendees forgetting that the presenter was remote!

    The Code4Lib conference was this week, and with the COVID-19 pandemic breaking through many individuals and institutions made …

     Posted on  March 14, 2020
     and last updated April 03, 2021
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • What is known about GetFTR at the end of 2019

    In early December 2019, a group of publishers announced Get-Full-Text-Research, or GetFTR for short. There was a heck of a response on social media, and the response was—on the whole—not positive from my librarian-dominated corner of Twitter. For my early take on GetFTR, see my December 3rd blog …

     Posted on  December 28, 2019
     and last updated April 03, 2021
     ·  14 minutes reading time
  • Publishers going-it-alone (for now?) with GetFTR

    In early December 2019, a group of publishers announced Get-Full-Text-Research, or GetFTR for short. I read about this first in Roger Schonfeld's "Publishers Announce a Major New Service to Plug Leakage" piece in The Scholarly Kitchen via Jeff Pooley's Twitter thread and blog post. Details about how this works are …

     Posted on  December 03, 2019
     and last updated April 03, 2021
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Reflections on "Responsibilities of Citizenship for Immigrants and our Daughter"

    Eighteen years ago, on Friday, September 7th, 2001, I was honored to be asked to participate in a naturalization ceremony for 46 new citizens of the United States in a courtroom of Judge Alvin Thompson in Hartford, Connecticut. I published those remarks on a website that has long since gone …

     Posted on  September 14, 2019
     and last updated April 03, 2021
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Engaging with Open Source Technologies

    These are the presentation notes for the Engaging with Open Source Technologies presentation during the Open Source Publishing Technologies: Current Status and Emerging Possibilities webinar on Wednesday, August 14, 2019.

    Webinar Description

    This session will focus on discussions of open source publishing platforms and systems. What is the value proposition …

     Posted on  August 14, 2019
     and last updated April 03, 2021
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Ensuring System Interoperability: Readers and Ebooks — A NISO/BISG Forum

    These are the presentation notes for the Ensuring System Interoperability presentation during the Readers and Ebooks: Making The Connection during the NISO/BISG Forum on Friday, June 21, 2019.

    • EPUB
    • NISO FASTEN Working Group
    • ONIX for Books
    • Project Counter
    • W3C Web Annotation Data Model, Vocabulary, and Protocol
    • Hypothes.is

    Presentation …

     Posted on  June 20, 2019
     and last updated April 03, 2021
  • Proxying FeedBurner MyBrand for HTTPS with CloudFront and Lambda at Edge

    So I'm paying more attention to the DLTJ blog now, and one of the things I quickly noticed is that the Atom syndication feed was broken. Or, at least modern web clients would refuse to retrieve the feed. The problem turned out to be not with the feed file, but …

     Posted on  January 09, 2019
     and last updated January 09, 2019
     ·  9 minutes reading time
  • DLTJ in another

    Well, we have reached the end of another arbitrary orbit around our small unregarded yellow sun1, and this primitive ape-descended life form2 is looking back on this blog's past twelve months. Not much to show for it -- this'll be just the third blog post this year.

    And yet …

     Posted on  December 31, 2018
     and last updated December 31, 2018
     ·  2 minutes reading time