On Libraries and New Media, powered by Library Journal and School Library Journal
Since 2008 the blog of Roy Tennant, a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. Among other things, he is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.
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 […]
Last night I dined at the bar of a run-of-the-mill chain restaurant. On the road for business this is my usual modus operandi, with the variant of dining in the hotel bar instead. You get the picture. So my bartender in this instance turns out to be flat out awesome. She’s there when I want her and not […]
Slinging across my Twitter feed came this: “HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web.” Intrigued, I went to take a look. It wasn’t long before my jaw dropped open. What the post was describing was a nascent technology and protocol that was like a combination of the best parts of BitTorrent and […]
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, […]
Twenty-five years ago I started a library current awareness service called Current Cites. The idea was to have a team of volunteers monitor library and information technology literature and cite only the best publications in a monthly publication (see the first page of the inaugural issue pictured). Here is the latest issue. TidBITS is, I […]
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 […]
Jake Orlowitz of the Wikipedia Library Project reports that Wikipedia will be having quite a presence at ALA Annual in San Francisco this week. Here are some details: #WikiLovesALA editathon The Wikipedia Library invites you to the #WikiLovesALA editathon on June 26 from 1pm to 4pm at the Wikimedia Foundation Office, in celebration of the […]
A guest column by Marc Record. I know that some people have been all too quick to call for my death, but we must look beyond such such short-sighted little people toward the greater good, as we have always done. In doing so, I must acknowledge that I am probably not long for this world. Not […]
While writing my last post about what I wish I had known upon graduating (from library school), I decided that I wanted to write a companion piece about what I was glad I didn’t know. Perhaps the reason for this will soon become clear. So here we go: You know nothing. No, seriously, you don’t. […]
One of my daughters graduated from college last week (see pic). Call me a proud Dad, as she graduated with top honors (Summa cum laude) from Tulane University in New Orleans. This, while holding down two jobs in her last semester. So like many people who have college, high school, middle school, or whatever graduations in […]
