Edited after initial publication to add: My thoughts are with the people in and around Charleston, South Carolina, this evening. What is making it out of the media fog to me tonight is your compassion for each other. Please be well as you absorb, internalize, and recover from this shocking …

This week's threads:

• Let's Encrypt announces its launch schedule, so soon everyone can have web servers with encrypted transmissions;
• Ploys by businesses to get you to come into the office, if you work at a place where coming into an office is optional; and
• A summary of Open Repositories 2015 …

I threw my hat into the ring to be on the LITA Top Tech Trends panel at the ALA annual conference later this month in San Francisco, and never could I say that I was more excited not to be selected. (You can find more info on this year's Top …

In just a few weeks there will be a gathering of 25,000 librarians in the streets of San Francisco for the American Library Association annual meeting. The topics on my mind as the meeting draws closer? How patrons intersect with advertising and privacy when using our services. What one …

One of the things discussed in the NISO patron privacy conference calls has been the need for transparency with patrons about what information is being gathered about them and what is done with it. The recent announcement by Google of a "My Account" page and a privacy question/answer site …

Yesterday Bobbi Newman posted Thinking Out Loud About Patron Privacy and Libraries on her blog. Both of us are on the NISO committee to develop a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems, and her article sounded a note of discouragement that I hope to …

Dear Colleagues,

Know of someone looking for a skilled library technologist? The funding for my position at LYRASIS will run out at the end of June, and I am looking for a new opportunity for my skills in library technology, open source, and community engagement. My resume/c.v. is …

I was asked recently to prepare a 15 minute presentation on lessons learned working with a remote team hosting open source applications. The text of that presentation is below with links added to more information. Photographs are from DPLA and Flickr, and are used under Public Domain or Creative Commons …

In this week's threads: a protest -- or maybe just an art project -- by a reader who saves his e-book copy of Orwell's 1984 by photocopying each page from his Kindle, the "AutoAwesome" nature of artificial intelligence, and a call to action for libraries to implement encryption on their websites.

Feel …

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting a short talk at the second virtual meeting of the NISO effort to reach a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems. The slides from the presentation are below and on SlideShare, followed by a cleaned-up transcript …

Via Gary Price's announcement on InfoDocket comes word of a cost-benefit analysis for the wholesale adoption of ORCID identifiers by eight institutions in the U.K. The report, Institutional ORCID, Implementation and Cost Benefit Analysis Report [PDF], looks at the perspectives of stakeholders, a summary of findings from the pilot …

Welcome spring in the northern hemisphere! Thoughts turn to fresh new growth -- a new tool to help with writing documents for procuring library systems, a fresh way to think about how libraries can transform and be transformed, and spring cleaning for your browsing habits with a do-it-yourself VPN.

Feel free …

This article has been translated into Polish.

Over the next couple months, NISO is managing a project to "develop a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems." ((From NISO's March 11, 2015, press release about the project.)) I'm honored and excited to be on the …

In this week's Thursday Threads we look at the rise of fake social media influence, how a young media company (Netflix) is now bigger than an old media company (CBS), and a reminder of how secrecy in constructing trade agreements is a bad idea.

Feel free to send this newsletter …

This weekend I was at the second "DPLAfest" for the Digital Public Library of America. For a while I was in the national e-book program track. Participants from public and academic libraries, from consortia, from publishers, and from authors discussed what a national ebok program for libraries would look like …

My Communications of the ACM came in the main recently, and in an article about the future of scholarly publishing in computer science (in general -- and what the ACM Publications Board is thinking about doing), there was this paragraph about the attitudes of a subset of ACM members towards open …

We've seen big announcements recently about unlimited cloud storage offerings for a flat monthly or fee. Dropbox offers it for subscribers to its Business plan. Similarly, Google has unlimited storage for Google Apps for Business customers. In both cases, though, you have to be part of a business group of …

In this week's DLTJ Thursday Threads: the introduction of a web service that points you to old copies of web pages, dispelling illusions of engine noise, and admiring the technical architecture of Amazon Web Services that gives us the power to witness Kim Kardashian’s back side.

Feel free to …

Three threads this week: how mapping technologies have come such a long way in the past few years, and why explaining digital rights management is bad for your sanity, a cautionary tale for those trying to be more conscious about security their …

Are you paranoid yet? Are you worried that the secret you shared anonymously might come right back to you? Or wondering why advertisements seem to follow you around from web page to web page? Or just creeped out by internet-enabled services tracking your every move? Or angry that mobile carriers …