Libraries place a good deal of emphasis on collection development policies -- a written statement of a library's intentions for building its collection. It describes the collection's strengths and weaknesses and provides guidelines for the purchase ("acquisition") and disposition ("weeding") of content. This is an activity that sets libraries apart from …

Why settle for mere digital copies of books (a la the Google Book Search project and the Open Content Alliance) when you can have an edition printed, bound and sent to you in the mail? That's the twist behind a recent partnership announced by Amazon.com, Kirtas Technologies, Emory University …

As a part of work for an OhioLINK strategic task force, I have been exploring the creation and operation of regional/collaborative/shared digitization centers. This is a report of findings to date after an open call for information. The report is structured with questions to be explored when considering …

A post by Bill Harris at "Dubious Quality" with the title Information got caught up in my Technorati filter for disruptive change in libraries. Geoff Engelstein, a colleague of Bill's mentioned this in an e-mail:

We were a generation of information explorers. They [Geoff's thirteen– and eleven-year-olds] are a generation …

Following in the footsteps of last year's annual conference and the midwinter meeting earlier this year, there is now a conference tracking page on the HitchHikr service for the 2007 Annual Conference in Washington DC. The URL for the tracker is:

http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=212

From this …

A reader of DLTJ sent me a private comment this afternoon pointing me in the direction of a post on wisegeek with the title How can I Avoid Library Fines? This reply may never reach 246 Diggs (at the time of writing) ((I hope this post doesn't get that …

Jenny Emanuel, Electronic Services Librarian at University of Central Missouri, posted an invitation to complete a survey on how library professionals think of themselves to several mailing lists. As part of the ALA Emerging Leaders 2007 program, she is part of a team look for options on rebranding the librarian …

Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), question a perceived division of library automation vendor technical staff with that of open source solution technical staff. I wasn't at Code4Lib this year (I'm going …

On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study — an examination of reader behavior in the print and online mediums. An article on their website goes into more detail about the initial data but what caught my eye …

Early last month I mentioned what was happening to NDIIP funds with the impending passage of what became Public Law 110-5 [PDF] and posted a copy of a letter I sent to my senators urging them to reconsider the funding rescission. Of course, I wasn't the only one who asked …

I had a need for a survey of the metadata namespaces used by OAI-PMH repositories, so I wrote up a quick shell script and XSLT style sheet to parse through the list of Registered Data Providers at the OpenArchives.org website. The results of this effort are pretty interesting. Some …

A note on the LITA-L mailing list from M. Claire Stewart (a member of the American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy Task Force on Digitization Policy) announces the availability of the Draft Principles for Digitized Content in the form of a series of blog postings on the ALA …

As others have noted, there is now an online petition in support of public access to publicly funded research in the United States. The text of the petition is short:

We, the undersigned, believe that broad dissemination of research results is fundamental to the advancement of knowledge. For America’s …

This could easily go in the "Disruption in Libraries" category of DLTJ, but it is a disruption of a different sort. Are you making contingency plans to continue library services in the event a Bird Flu pandemic (or an event of similar sort) happens? A recent posting on the Sakai …

Today I received an e-mail from ALA asking me to renew my membership. An excerpt of the e-mail is included below. There is a confrontational tone in the message that is very off-putting and also resonates with the reasons why I dislike ALA. My own emphasis added:

Thank you for …

The Honorable George V. Voinovich
524 Hart Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator:

I am writing to you in regards to House Joint Resolution 20, the Continuing Appropriations resolution FY2007, and in particular section 20703(D …

In a federal fiscal year that began without nine of the 11 appropriations bills passed, there is legislation pending in the Senate that would ax funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program for the remainder of the fiscal year. Given the current political tone in Washington, one …

I got an e-mail tonight from Franziska Marks, Senior Communications Manager at CompuMentor (and home of TechSoup & the TechSoup NetSquared Initiative), about the newly created MaintainIT Project, promoting sustainable best practices and models of technical support for public libraries. They have just launched their "Share your story" campaign to collect …

DLTJ is now listed...how about your blog?

Calling All Academic Librarian Bloggers

A few months ago I came across a just developing project of Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University. He was in the …

This is part three of a continuing series on the application of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern to library systems. In the first part, the SOA concept was compared to a transportation network and the basic foundation for defining SOA was set down. The second part described what …