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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

After a longer than intended hiatus, DLTJ Thursday Threads is back.

Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like a more raw and immediate …

Back in April, Google announced its announced its A Google a Day project as "a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google." For example, today's question is "This planet’s slow retrograde rotation results in the …

It might have been the week of the annual American Library Association meeting with all the news and announcements and programming that came from it -- as well as getting into the dog days of summer -- but interesting news at the intersection of technology and libraries did not take a pause …

This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads is about data centers -- those dark rooms with all of the blinking lights of computers doing our bidding. Data centers hit the mainstream news this week with the outage at one of Amazon's cloud computing clusters. And since computers and their associated peripherals consume a …

Another week, another set of threads of library and library-related topics. (Who ever said this profession was boring? Well, I once did, but that is a thread for another day.) Information literacy hit the mainstream this week with noted usability analyst Jakob Nielson noting that internet users need to learn …

It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you …

This week is a mostly Google edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Below is a high-level overview of Google's Book Search algorithm, how Google is helping web servers improve the speed at which content loads, and how Google's internet traffic is growing as a percentage of all internet traffic. But first …

I'm starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads -- summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter …

Late, late in the day last Friday, the principle parties in the Google Book Search case submitted a revised settlement agreement agreement to the court. This post takes a look at the changes to the settlement from a library perspective. To keep this manageable, I'm not including discussion of library-oriented …

EBSCOhost Connect was announced in the spring of 2006 as near as I can recall. (I can't find the press release about it on the EBSCO website. As close as I can come to a date is from an announcement at the Oregon School Library Information System.) After three …

It has been a wild few weeks in search engines -- or search-engine-like services. We've seen the introduction of no fewer than three high-profile tools ... Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft Bing, and Google Squared ... each with their own strengths and needing their own techniques -- or, at least, their own distinct frame of reference …

On Tuesday, the University of Michigan and Google executed an amendment to the original agreement that started Google's efforts to create a collection of scanned books. The amendment was publicized in a press release by the University of Michigan and described in a page that summarized the changes. That summary …

Via a post and an interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Google announced limited support for parsing RDFa statements and microformat properties in web page HTML coding and using those statements to enhance the relevance of search results as so-called "rich snippets". In looking at the example review markup outlined …

Today was to be the deadline for objecting to, opting out of, and/or filing briefs with the court on the Google Book Search Settlement. That was the plan, at least, when the preliminary approval statement from the court was issued last year. That deadline changed, and that is part …

The American Library Association (through the Association's Washington Office and the Association of College and Research Libraries Division) and the Association of Research Libraries filed a brief [PDF] with the court in support of the Google Book Search Settlement while asking the judge to "exercise vigorous oversight" over details the …