The University of Michigan Library led the way in putting the books online that Google was digitizing from their collection, and to this day remains one of the few (the only?) to have made the effort. They were subsequently joined by the other CIC institutions (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) in a joint effort to mount the texts being digitized from all CIC institutions. The resulting effort is called, oddly enough, the Hathi Trust.

The Hathi Trust is building a shared digital repository, and although there isn't any information on the web site yet, there is information at the University of Indiana about the project. In reading that, I noticed that they were offering brief records describing all of the contents of the repository. Since I find it di...Read More

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I've written before about next-generation catalog projects based on Solr (which itself is based on Lucene), and even specifically about VuFind (pronounced "view-find"). But now there are at least two production installations of it, one of which powers the National Library of Australia catalog, released at the end of May. In an article on the project, Stephen Lacey and Julie Whiting note:

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with many comments praising the clean, simple search interface, the display of narrowing options to drill down and refine the search results, and the

...Read More

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My fellow LJ writers Michael Casey and Michael Stephens (known around here as "The Michaels") have a good "Transparent Library" column this week called "Let's All Lighten Up." As a perennial jokester (to which my long-suffering family and co-workers can attest), I say "Hear! Hear!".

"Libraries—all libraries" quoth the Michaels, "should be fun." Yep. Sure thing. Righto. Digital libraries included. So I decided to dig around for evidence, and luckily it didn't take long to pile up a number of examples of humor and other bizarre, crazy, or just plain fun stuff hanging out in our digital collections. Below are a few of my picks, why not take a few minutes sometime and find some of your own? They're out there, believe me....Read More

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Librarians and archivists: get ready for your worst nightmare. Oh, wait, too late! It's here. There are a growing cadre of web sites that are ushering in with great rapidity the "age of microcontent". This is content so tiny or short that it virtually defies description or collection. And yet let's not make the mistake of equating those qualities with unworthiness. But first allow me to explain what I mean.

I suppose you could say that Twitter.com is an early microcontent site, where people are limited to 140 characters to answer the question "what are you doing?" You must surely think, as I have, that what on earth could possibly be good about hearing what someone is eating for breakfast or that they just put the laundry on? And you'd be right. But we would both be mistaken to think that's all there is. My fellow LJ b...Read More

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Somehow I doubt when the founding fathers of the Internet (and as much as it pains me to say it, it was mostly men) thought much about the dilemma in which we currently find ourselves regarding domain names. Most people probably don't realize that almost every English language word or phrase has already been registered by someone, despite any lack of content to got with said word or phrase.

Why do you think we're now stuck with such useful names as 23andMe, 37Signals, Fon, and Spock (all named in the list of "Top Ten Startups Worth Watching in 2008" by Wired.com). It's because if you're starting something up now, you don't name the endeavor until you verify you can get the domain.

I mean, this has become completely ridiculous. Yo...Read More

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Sometimes I think we get too wrapped up in our digital library activities that we lose site of what really matters. As the father of two fifteen-year-olds (monozygotic twins), I can tell you what really matters. Reading to your children -- early and often.

I read to my girls every night from six months old until they wanted to do it themselves. But by then it was too late. They had learned that reading is the window into an infinite number of alternative worlds. They had learned that it is the window to knowledge. They had learned that it is both fun and fulfilling. They were completely and utterly hooked.

Something that...Read More

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I've been having a blast this summer expanding my treehouse. I'm going up (of course) and over a bit to create another floor about seven feet above the highest existing floor. Since I live in California, where it doesn't rain in the summer, I don't need to bother with such things as a roof and walls (just a railing and wire to keep the little ones in).

But the reason I bring this up is that the joyous part of this project is the creativity. You can't simply build a platform of whatever dimension and orientation you want, you must work with the tree. You need to figure out how to engineer the platform placement, attachments to the tree, ...Read More

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I should have posted my "top tech trends" from the LITA program at ALA last month, but hey, better late than never I say. These are the slightly embellished notes from which I spoke, so if you were there in person you would have heard a more ad-libbed version of this.

Perhaps as a sign that I should leave this panel (and let an up-and-comer such as Cindi Trainor take my spot) I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with identifying specific trends. Partly this is because I’ve been here long enough to see the wisdom I’ve attempted to impart be revealed as being inconsequential, misguided, or downright wrong. At times it feels more like chasing our collective tail to come up with these trends each year that may or may not turn out to be things worth noticing in the end.

So at the risk o

...Read More

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A project proposed by Duke University librarians to write design a next-generation open source alternative to traditional integrated library systems received a huge boost from the Andew W. Mellon Foundation to the tune of nearly half-a-million dollars. Now dubbed the Open Library Environment, the project has also just launched a new web site. An email announcement sent to those who responded in January 2008 to an initial message about the project states:

A $475,700 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Duke
University Libraries will lead to the design of a next-generation,
open-sour

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For some reason (don't ask) I ran across a very old presentation of mine from 1997. Called "Digital Library Dirty Little Secrets," it listed such, then threw in "Tips for the Foolhardy" for good measure. I can't even remember the venue where I gave this presentation, but in looking over it again I was amazed to see how well it weathered the last decade. To set the stage, however, remember that back in 1997 it was mostly the NSF-funded digital library projects and projects at large research libraries that ruled the day so partly what I was trying to do was to refute the opinion that only the big dogs could play and that we knew what we were doing.

The "dirty little secrets" were:

• Anyone, anywhere can do it
• We're making it u

...Read More

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This is just too good not to share. So there I was, doing a vanity search on Google's blog search, when I saw it. 'Roy Tennant called this "The Edge touching a Revolutionary Glacial epoch."' Sure, it was from one of these fake blogs that grabs random text strings from around the web and agglomerates them into a psuedo-blog-entry for a purpose for which I'm all too happy to remain ignorant, but hey, it was like too good to be true.

Did I say such a thing? No. Could I say such a thing? Maybe. Does it sound profound? Sorta. But what is the "Revolutionary Glacial epoch"? Could it be MARC/AACR2? But what would that make "The Edge"? RDA? MODS? What? Or is the Revolution...Read More

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I just put the July 2008 issue of Current Cites to bed, and realized that the Current Cites team has been doing this for 18 years. Yes, every single month for the last eighteen years a team of volunteers creates this publication for not a dime of monetary compensation. It is, I believe, one of the longest continuously-operating electronic newsletters -- not just in library literature, but in any field.

We began in print, as part of a project I started at the University of California, Berkeley Library called the Library Technology Watch Program. I believed then, as I do now, that there is too much information for any single person to filter, so I thought it would make sense to try to do it collaboratively. So I put to...Read More

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