On Libraries and New Media, powered by Library Journal and School Library Journal
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 […]
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 […]
Slinging across my Twitter feed came this: “HTTP is obsolete.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 […]
I will admit to owning just over one bitcoin, largely as an experiment. It’s no more than I’m willing to lose outright, so you can say that I sleep soundly at night. But a while back I came across this piece at O’Reilly Radar and it changed my perspective on bitcoin entirely. The author argues (persuasively […]
Those who have labored in the database orchard know about CRUD. It isn’t the stuff you scraped off your shoe, but a set of operations that must be supported for typical database maintenance: C = Create a record. R = Read a record. U = Update a record. D = Delete a record. Then Linked Data […]
tenet — a principle or belief Having worked in libraries my entire adult life (I began by volunteering at 17), I’ve seen a lot of technology come and go. I like to say that I’ve forgotten more library technology than most young librarians know. And mostly I’m happy about that. If an acoustic coupler modem never […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about the recent past and the not-too-distant future. Mostly in terms of what we have been able to achieve in imaging our world. For example, do you remember what the world was like before you could see a map and a photograph of any spot on the planet? It wasn’t all […]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of BIBFRAME, it was the season of RDA, it was the spring of hope, it […]
I had what you might call an unusual early adulthood. Whereas most young adults march off to college and garner the degree that will define their life, I dropped out of high school at the 8th grade, attended an alternative high school (read dope-smoking, although I passed at the time) for two years, then dropped […]
It wasn’t too long ago that people thought reading books on a computer could never replace the real, ink-and-paper feel of a good old-fashioned book. And while people continue to appreciate books in their traditional form, sales of Amazon’s Kindles topped $4.5 billion last year, according to research by Morgan Stanley. More telling, though, is how normal it seems to read a book on an electronic device. But scientists and developers haven’t stopped there. New technology continues to challenge our notions of what we read, how we read, and who has access to reading.
