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 …

There are these places popping up around the country where people are putting out books in containers ranging from little huts to hutches to converted fire extinguisher cases for others to take, share, and return or substitute with a …

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 …

It is time for New Year's Resolutions, and the new habit I aim to pick up is setting aside some serious, concentrated chunks of time for writing each day. In taking a high-level review of goals and tasks at the end of the year, I found that I was tending …

Welcome to the new year! Threads this week include a brief analysis of the legal problems in store if SOPA and PROTECT-IP become law, what an analysis of the problems with Best Buy might teach libraries, and why open source licensing of clinical tools is important.

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As the last DLTJ Thursday Threads of the year, the stories in this post look back to what we saw in 2011 and look forward to what we may see in 2012. Looking backwards is a list of five things we learned about publishing from O'Reilly Media and Google's 3-minute …

[openbook booknumber="OLID:OL24906649M"]
Pluck a string and it vibrates. As it vibrates there are points along the string where it is absolutely still. Pluck a companion string and sometimes those points line up. If you pull that string tighter there are more points of stillness and a greater chance …

This is the just-in-time-for-the-holidays edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee suspended work on SOPA, and there was much relief from the technology community. The Palo Alto Public Library announced plans to lend Chromebooks (laptops with Google's cloud-based operating system) to patrons. And OCLC announced a …