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 […]
What Pace Progress?
SobekCM for Your Content Management Needs
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, For One, Welcome Our Internet Overlords
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 […]
LC Reviews its File Formats for Preservation Recommendations
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 […]
The Canadian Library Association Votes to Dissolve
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 […]
Wikipedia: 1 Librarian, 1 Reference
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 […]