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 …

Thursday Threads has been a back-burner activity for quite a while now. Blame it on too many interesting things happening at home and at work (to say nothing of the early arrival of spring weather). This week will be …

I've been away from DLTJ Thursday Threads for a while, but that doesn't mean the fun hasn't stopped. This week there are stories about the beginning and the end of the Research Works Act (again, one might add), Amazon's continuing shifts in the ebook marketplace, and an announcement of beta …

The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we're still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how …

The snow is falling here in central Ohio, so I'm eager to leave here and head to warm Dallas for ALA Midwinter 2012. I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues; making new acquaintances; learning the latest thinking on RDA, linked data, and standards activity; and talking about free/open …

Commentary, intentional and unintentional humor, and media from January 18, 2012.

http://storify.com/datag/the-best-of-the-sopa-blackout-1

This blog will be present first-time users with a warning page on January 18, 2012 -- the day that many internet sites are using to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- and January 23rd, 2012 -- the day before the U.S. Senate may vote on the PROTECT-IP act. DLTJ is …

One of the key activities that brought me to LYRASIS many months ago is going to see the light of day in about 10 days at ALA Midwinter -- a set of tools to help libraries determine if open source software is right for them and what open source software works …