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 […]
The Thing About Bitcoin: It’s Not the Coin, It’s the Chain
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 […]
Tennant’s Technology Tenets
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 […]
When the Astonishing Becomes Commonplace
The Great Plateau
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 […]
Next Generation Tech Solutions Could Help Readers and Librarians
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.