I just returned from ALA Annual 2016 in Orlando, Florida, and besides enjoying more temperate weather I’ve also been thinking about some of what I experienced there. One experience in particular stands out. Every ALA in recent years my employer (OCLC) has sponsored a “Linked Data Roundtable” where practitioners discuss their cutting edge work with […]

Over 30 years ago I led a team at the UC Berkeley Libraries to use HyperCard to create a library orientation guide. This project, which we did not know at the time, formed the foundation of our web design work to follow in the early 1990s. What saddens me is that 30 years on I don’t […]

Recently I had occasion to visit the University of Florida Library’s digital collections. In poking around, I was reminded that they had developed their own content management system called SobekCM. Since it has been under development for a decade, it is a full-featured open source system grounded in library standards such as METS, MODS, Dublin […]

I’ve been troubled lately by what I perceive as a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of our transition from record-based bibliographic metadata to linked data. Although this misunderstanding can be expected, given how long our profession has been invested in a record-based infrastructure and standards, it is potentially disastrous should we prove not up to the […]

In an ongoing commitment to keep up with the changing world of preservation, the Library of Congress is doing it’s annual review of its “Recommended Formats Statement”. The stated purposes of the document are: One purpose of the Statement is to provide internal guidance within the Library to help inform acquisitions of collections materials (other than […]

If you weren’t there in 1989, this is going to be very hard to imagine. But go ahead and try to picture this: the world without the web, without mobile (let alone smart) phones, without so many of the things that we take for granted today. The Internet was here, certainly, but only for some […]

I’ve written before about two similar efforts to open up books by having individuals (Unglue.it) or libraries (Knowledge Unlatched) pledge money until a certain total has been raised. They both continue to work at these efforts, and KU recently announced a new offering for libraries to consider. The “KU Collection,” as it is dubbed, includes 78 new […]

Every programmer knows that any time you want to start a religious war just ask everyone’s favorite programming language and why. This will almost certainly touch off an ever-more-heated exchange as to why one’s particular choice should be every thinking person’s obvious selection. It may even devolve so far as to include name calling. But hey, […]

I was talking with my old friend John Kunze a little while back and he described a project that he is involved with called “Yet Another Metadata Zoo” or yamz.net. In a world of more ontologies than you can shake a stick at, it aims to provide a simple, easy-to-use mechanism for defining and maintaining […]

Those who have been paying attention to the cutting edge of digital libraries no doubt know about the Hydra project headed up by Stanford. Hydra is a digital repository system that is built using Ruby and is designed to accept the full range of digital object types that a large research library must manage. Built on […]

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