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Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. 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. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.
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 […]
Given the ubiquity of infographics on the web today (according to one account they have increased 1200% in three years), you can be forgiven for thinking that they are a new phenomenon. They aren’t. Infographics have actually been around for quite some time, as Edward Tufte pointed out with his popularization of one of the […]
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 […]
There are of course as many different ways to use social media (or not) as there are people. But I was thinking the other day that probably most of us who use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook probably fall into one of three camps: Promiscuous — These are the people who share […]
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 […]
As reported in the Economist, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is trying to go global. That is, it is attempting to shed any remaining ties to an individual country (*cough* the US) and become truly independent. I heartily welcome this, as no country should be able to control something that has […]
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 […]
As reported in this tweet, if not elsewhere, the Canadian Library Association has voted to dissolve. As astonishing as it is to write that sentence, this has actually been a long time coming. As long as a year ago a process was put in place that led to this moment. The document “Toward a Federation […]
The Wikipedia Library is a project that aims to marshall library-licensed resources for Wikipedia editors so that they can add authoritative citations to Wikipedia articles. There are a number of things that they do, but an essential one is that they have arranged to make a number of article databases behind paywalls available to Wikipedia […]
