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Please note: This series of posts outlines my opinions and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of my OCLC colleagues or of OCLC as an organization. Also, these opinions are held regardless of any impact the paths I suggest may have on my employer. You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will […]
As processors of a low volume of small transactions, libraries are unlikely to count credit and debit card processing issues among their most pressing concerns. Yet many libraries may be unaware of their state of compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Enforced by the credit card industry, the standard helps ensure that payment data is protected from theft and fraud.
Credo Reference is integrating text-to-speech technology from ReadSpeaker into its Literati full-text reference line of offerings. The text-to-speech functionality is already available for Literati Public and will soon be added to Literati Academic, Literati School, and Literati Student Athlete. The latter two products were launched earlier this year. The move comes as several library organizations are embarking on more focused efforts to address the need for accessibility with digital content.
It pains me a great deal to write this post, since at one point I advocated that librarians learn HTML, and not just as a lark. I was quite serious, and I even wrote a book to help librarians learn how to do it. The sales figures for that book should have been a clue. You […]
If we build it well, a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) can help school libraries meet the information needs of students even as local budgets shrink. The DPLA can provide important resources to the partnership between library-based and classroom-based teachers, especially during this period of rapid change in education, in libraries, in technology, and in the world of information generally.
As anyone likely knows, the first step to making sure you don’t lose documents or data you want to keep is to back them up. But as you also likely know, hardly any of us do that — at least on any regular basis. This is potentially where ArchiveBox comes in. This isn’t to say […]
David Weinberger reminded me that today is the 25th anniversary of HyperCard, the hypermedia technology launched by Apple before the Web existed. I was an enthusiastic user of HyperCard. At UC Berkeley I pulled together a group that created a library orientation guide for the very large and distributed library system on that campus. I […]
OCLC is recommending that member institutions that would like to release their catalog data on the Web do so with the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY). The license allows users to share, copy, distribute, modify, transform and build upon a database, provided that users “attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database, in the manner specified in the license,” according to ODC’s simple language summary. OCLC has requested that participants making use of WorldCat-derived data conform to the norms defined in the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities. The ODC-BY license will also be used by OCLC, as it releases additional sets of WorldCat data, including future linked data projects.
