Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Reflections on four-months-after-Twitter

    It's coming up on four months this week since I left Twitter, and I started wondering about the impact of that. On the whole, I'm still quite fine with the decision. (If you need an itemized list of how Twitter is falling short of its history and its idealized self …

     Posted on  April 16, 2023
     and last updated April 16, 2023
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Backing Away from Twitter in Measured Steps

    My relationship with Twitter crossed a new line yesterday. As I posted on Mastodon (one, two):

    Have just deleted the Twitter app on mobile. Felt the need to ramp down stress this week, and the current owner’s meltdown is unnecessary drama. There are still a few people there that …

     Posted on  December 19, 2022
     and last updated December 19, 2022
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Issue 91: Bibliographic Records and Mastodon Migration

    Well, this newsletter was off the air longer than I anticipated. A lot has happened since issue 90 in late March: cryptocurrency value falling, Twitter spiraling (maybe a death-spiral...can't be too sure), and (in the U.S.) a whopper of a mid-term election season. All is well here in …

     Posted on  December 01, 2022
     and last updated November 30, 2022
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • With Mastodon on the Rise, Who Archives the Digital Public Square?

    DALL•E generated image

    DALL*E prompt: photorealistic waves of twitter logos and mastodon logos crashing onto a sandy beach

    Much has been made about the differences between Twitter and Mastodon: the challenge of finding a home for your account (and the corresponding differences between your “local” timeline and your “global” timeline), the intentional …

     Posted on  November 27, 2022
     and last updated November 27, 2022
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Idea for an NPR Twitter bot -- Tweet me about that story I just heard

    So I had an idea for a Twitter bot I would like to see. Occasionally I'll be listening to a story on NPR and I'll want to know more about it. Sometimes the host will say something like: "come to npr.org for more information and click on..." Other times …

     Posted on  February 17, 2016
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Thursday Threads: Twitter Timeline Changes, Report on Future Library Technology, USB Security

    Two weeks in a row! This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at how Twitter changed its timeline functionality to include things that it thinks you'll find interesting. Next, for the academic libraries in the audience, is a report from the New Media Consortium on trends and technologies that will libraries …

     Posted on  August 21, 2014
     and last updated August 21, 2014
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • Collector of Code4Lib Conference Tweets Now Turned On

    As I did last year, I've set up Martin Hawksey's Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet (TAGS) to cover this year's Code4Lib conference twitter hashtag. This is a really neat tool that comes with its own dashboard, links to various visualizations, and access to the complete archive so you can make up …

     Posted on  March 18, 2014
     and last updated March 18, 2014
  • Archive and Visualization of LITA Forum Tweets

    Using Google Spreadsheets, the Twitter API, and the TAGS document template from Martin Hawksey, I've set up an archive of tweets with the hashtag #LITAForum.

    Martin has also created a couple of visualizations of tweets based on the archive:

    • TAGS Explorer
    • TAGS Archive

    The archive is updated automatically every 5 …

     Posted on  November 09, 2013
     and last updated November 09, 2013
  • What You'll Find in My Twitter Stream

    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 …

     Posted on  September 29, 2012
     and last updated September 30, 2012
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • The PERL Way to Add OmniFocus Inbox Entries from Twitter

    Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen …

     Posted on  October 19, 2010
     and last updated October 20, 2010
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness

    Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn't rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get …

     Posted on  August 31, 2010
     and last updated September 01, 2010
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • On Being Fodder for Questionable Twitter Posts

    Okay, I know this is starting to seem like an obsession, but I can't figure out why someone(s) would be constructing tweets that consist of my blog post headlines and links back to my postings. I'm wondering how wide spread this problem is, so I constructed a list of …

     Posted on  December 30, 2009
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  12 minutes reading time
  • Why I Need Twitter Distillation Tools

    The following may not be news to those who regularly hang out in Twitter-land, but the extent of the problem recently became clear to me: there is a bunch of spam in Twitter. More specifically, there appear to be robots that do nothing but scan the web for keywords and …

     Posted on  December 29, 2009
     and last updated December 29, 2009
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • Shared Twitter Updates Done Right: The Case of NPRTechTeam

    Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account.
    Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account.
    All day today, the staff at NPR's Digital Media team have been preparing to launch a new version of their website, and we've been able to follow along via tweets on the NPRTechTeam Twitter account. It looks like it was a marathon …

     Posted on  July 26, 2009
     and last updated July 27, 2009
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • On the Pitfalls of Social Media: Learning from Clinical Reader

    As a youth I remember intently studying the troubles of others -- what they did when they got into trouble and how they got out of it. If the saying "You Learn From Your Mistakes" was so true, I wanted to be able to learn from the mistakes of others. I …

     Posted on  July 19, 2009
     and last updated July 20, 2009
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • On the Pitfalls of Social Media: The Case of Clinical Reader

    As libraries feel the need to join the social media landscape to meet a segment of their user population already there, it is useful to step back and get acclimated. There is a pace of information flow that is unlike anything else in the physical world, and a minor incident …

     Posted on  July 19, 2009
     and last updated July 20, 2009
     ·  30 minutes reading time
  • ALA Annual Goes Social

    The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA's electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger's Room. Initially just a …

     Posted on  June 20, 2008
     and last updated June 20, 2008
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • The Jester Joins Twitter

    It was only a few months ago that I was teasing Dan Chudnov for joining Twitter. Now I've gone and done it myself. I don't expect to be using it much, but after observing the "Falls Church, VA" incident yesterday, I thought it would be an useful tool to have …

     Posted on  May 07, 2008
     and last updated May 08, 2008
     ·  3 minutes reading time