On Libraries and New Media, powered by Library Journal and School Library Journal
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 […]
I feel like I didn’t really reach adulthood until I became a commercial river guide. There are a few reasons for this opinion. One is that you probably don’t really become an adult until you are responsible for the health and well-being of someone else. As a guide and more importantly as a trip leader, that […]
Slinging across my Twitter feed came this: “HTTP is obsolete.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, […]
Those who have been paying attention to the cutting edge of digital libraries no doubt know about the Hydra project headed up by Stanford. Hydra is a digital repository system that is built using Ruby and is designed to accept the full range of digital object types that a large research library must manage. Built on […]
I’ve been involved with open source software projects since at least the 1990s. I even saved a Unix application from certain death that I still use today. But that doesn’t mean I’m all rosy-eyed about all open source software projects. They are not all created equal. To be clear, there are “open source” projects that […]
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 […]
Duolingo has released Duolingo for Schools for grades 6 and up, based on its popular free site for foreign language learners. Melissa Techman covers the teacher dashboard and the application’s potential use in the classroom.
One Format to rule them all, One Format to find them; One Format to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. – with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien It is now over 12 years since I wrote “MARC Must Die” in Library Journal. At the time that I wrote it, I think that I imagined […]
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 […]
