It is a security/privacy edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. First a link to a 3-page PDF that talks about the use of password managers to keep all of your internet passwords unique and strong. Next a story about how the W3C standards body is looking at standardizing …

These are slides and audio from presentation given at the LOUIS Users Group meeting, on October 4, 2013, in Baton Rouge, LA. The description of the talk was:

Libraries have been digitizing materials for decades as surrogates for access to physical materials, and in doing so have broadened the range …

Three groups of stories in this long-in-coming DLTJ Thursday Threads. First, we look at the pent-up risks of running Windows XP systems given that support for that operating system is scheduled to end in April 2014. Second, a pair of articles that look at the ups and downs of open …

As you are planning your trip to the 2013 LITA Forum in Louisville in mid-November, plan to stay a few hours longer to attend the ResourceSync Tutorial happening after the close of the main conference on Sunday. Herbert van de Sompel will lead this 3-hour session where attendees can learn …

At the American Library Association meeting in Chicago last month I gave a 20 minute presentation that was a combination of an overview of interoperability and standards plus a brief overview of the ResourceSync activity for the NISO Update session. Included below are my slides with a synchronized audio track …

In the "very meta" category, this morning I gave a lightning talk about lightning talks to a crowd of about 150 at the LITA Lightning Talks session. More specifically, it was a brief presentation on how Code4Lib uses Google Hangouts-on-Air for its Virtual Lightning Talks. The slides and links from …

Earlier this month published 'reposervice' to GitHub. Reposervice is a "self-contained" Islandora installation source tree that is intended to smooth the LYRASIS deployment of repository services between development servers, a staging server and production servers. It is a bit of a work-in-progress at the moment, but others might find it …

Issue #20 of the Code4Lib Journal was just published, and I had the honor of being the coordinating editor for the issue. Being on the editorial committee of the Journal has been a heck of an experience, and I think I've had just a taste of what journal editors and …

Last week I emcee'd the second Code4Lib Virtual Lightning talk session and I wanted to record some notes and pointers here in case me (or anyone else) wants to do the same thing again. First, though, here is a list of those that presented with links to the talks archived …

My employer (LYRASIS) is a member of NISO (the accredited standards organization for information and documentation in the U.S.), and as the primary contact I see and consider ballots for standards issues that impact LYRASIS member libraries. The Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Application Protocol Specification (a.k.a. ISO 10160 …

I've put in a proposal on the importance of communities in open source software for an "ignite" session at the ALA Annual meeting in Chicago, and I'd appreciate your vote to get the talk into the program. If you have experienced the power and benefit of open source software, you …

This is a review of the Airbender Bluetooth keyboard by New Trent (model IMP38W). I have been testing this unit since January 28, 2013, and traveled with it to Code4Lib in Chicago where I relied on the combination of the Airbender keyboard and iPad for a day of presentations with …

ResourceSync -- a joint effort of NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team with work funded by the Sloan Foundation -- has published a draft specification that I urge members of the library technology community to look at. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project is modern web …

Last month's HathiTrust newsletter had an interesting technical tidbit at the top about access to out-of-print and brittle or missing items:

One of the lawful uses of in-copyright works HathiTrust has been pursuing is to provide access on an institutional basis to works that fall under United States Copyright Law …

On December 6, 2012, the Audience and Participation workstream met at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. About two dozen colleagues participated in person and remotely via Google+ Hangout to talk about processes and strategies for getting content into the DPLA (the content …

In September, Carl Grant wrote a blog post on the ownership of library data ("We have a problem... another vendor appearing to need education about exactly WHO owns library data") that has been rolling around my own thoughts for, well, months. The spark of Carl's post was a Twitter conversation …

Should librarians be learning to how to develop software? This theme has come up in the past few years ((Going back to Karin Dalziel’s 2008 Why every Library Science student should learn programming, continuing through Dianne Hillmann’s keynote at Code4Lib 2011 to this year’s LITA/ALCTS Library …

Earlier this month I found myself apologizing for some errant tweets that ended up in my Twitter stream ((The problem turned out to be a forgotten automatic posting of blog posts into Delicious. When I was cleaning up links in posts using, these post changes were being added as new …

Yesterday I heard Catherine Murray-Rust give a keynote at the Georgia Knowledge Repository workshop. She used the phrase, and I think I transcribed this correctly, "provisioning of knowledge" when describing the activities that institutional repositories can do. That phrase reminded me about a recent discussion on a mailing list (I …