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 …

ALA has its "Virtual Conference" coming up on July 18th and 19th. It is two days of at-your-desktop talks on some of the most interesting topics in libraries today. I'm presenting a derivative of the Introducing FOSS4Lib webinar and in-person. The version I'm doing for the ALA Virtual Conference has …

Do public libraries host birthday parties for children as part of their programming? I was with my son at a party for one of his friends a local bouncy inflatables place and happened to be thinking about library stuff while waiting for him to finish bouncing around. Suddenly (for me …

It is that time of year again where representatives from the library profession all gather for the annual Annual Library Association meeting. This year it is in Anaheim, California on June 21–26. And as the pace of technology continues to push libraries into new areas of content and service …

You could say "this is a service to watch" but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the 'Unglue.It' service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license. [caption id="p3675-tweet" align="alignright" width …

On the second day of the OCLC Global Council meeting [agenda PDF] there was a presentation by Robin Murray (VP, OCLC Global Product Management) and Jim Michalko (VP, OCLC Research Library Partnership) called "Linked Open Data". The title of the presentation was an understatement because the real heart of the …

You'll get the sense that this week's Thursday Threads is stacked towards cultural awareness. First is the view of a developer of the female gender in a room of peers at a meeting of the Digital Public Library of America. The second thread is a pointer to a story about …