Earlier this week, Aaron Swartz of the Internet Archive announced the demonstration website of the Open Library project, a new kind of book catalog that brings together traditional publisher and library bibliographic data in an interface with the user-contributed paradigm of Wikipedia. Okay, I'll pause for a moment while you …

A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Wired Campus" section describes the new iTunes U portal, "a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost." (If you have iTunes on your desktop/laptop, you …

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 …

"Participatory Digital Libraries" is the name of a talk Paul Jones, Director of ibiblio.org, gave this morning at OCLC's Kilgour Auditorium. Known as "The Public's Library," ibiblio is a large, diverse digital library. His talk offered insight on how ibiblio works and commentary for applying the same successful techniques …

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 …

Update 19-Jan-2011: I've decommissioned this service. Talkr seems to be unavailable, and I haven't had time to find a replacement.

If reading the thoughts of the Jester via this blog wasn't enough, you can now hear this witty (witless?) insights read to you through your favorite podcast player. I've been …

Last month was an interesting month for discussion and news of JPEG2000 as an archival format. First, there was a series of posts on the IMAGELIB about the rational for using JPEG2000 for master files. It started with a posting by Tom Blake of Boston Public Library asking these questions …

Two previous posts on dltj.org have described the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project and the theory behind what has become known as the 'Web Architecture'. These two areas meet up now in this post which describes the issues surrounding the raw Web Architecture as applied to a …

There was a great crowd at the University of Windsor "Future of the ILS" symposium. The presentation is available from http://dltj.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/200611-uwindsor-soa/. An outline of the presentation is given below with links into the presentation slides. Amanda Etches-Johnson has also posted a great summary …

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 …

This post is the second in a series about the application of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system design pattern to library services. The first post in this series focused on defining "Service Oriented Architecture" using the analogy of a transportation network. This post goes into some detail about what …

This post is the first in a series over the next few days that in total will attempt to lay the groundwork for a discussion of applying the Service Oriented Architecture (or SOA) software design pattern to systems and solutions in the library space. It starts with comparing the SOA …

Where can faculty, administrators, librarians and technology gurus all meet to discuss learning, libraries, technology and the convergence of these activities? At the Ohio Digital Commons for Education 2007 – The Convergence of Learning, Libraries and Technology Conference, of course!

Be a part of ODCE 2007! The Ohio Digital Commons for …

When it comes to seeking a full-text copy of that known-item citation, are our users asking "what have you done for me lately?" OpenURL has taken us pretty far when one starts in an online environment -- a link that sends the citation elements to our favorite link resolver -- but it …

What of a service existed where the patrons selected an item they needed out of our library catalog and that item was delivered to the patron even when the library did not yet own the item? Would that be useful? With the growth of online bookstores, our users do have …

I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of "Don't fear Google; Don't Chase Google; Let's Out-Google Google!" After allowing the confused stare linger for a moment or the hysterical laughter die down, I explain my thesis: we have something Google doesn't …

Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the "Where have all the programmers gone?" post that deserves top billing For those that have not yet encountered this idiom, "top billing" is a motion picture industry term that refers to actors whose …

What follows is a summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting at ALA annual conference in New Orleans on 25-Jun-2006. What I've tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off as such from the rest of the summary …

FEDORA Workflow …

Last week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) with the title "Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?" (subscription required). An excerpt from the beginning:

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every …