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Swimming in salt water is wonderful; drinking it is not. Four hundred years ago, the first American settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, ran into troubles during their first five years because the fresh water they depended upon for drinking turned brackish in the summer. Suddenly, besides the plagues, angry Indians, and crop difficulties, they had to [...]
In 1993, Yale computer science professor David Gelertner opened a package he thought was a dissertation in progress. Instead, it was a bomb from the Unabomber, who had written in his manifesto that “Technological society is incompatible with individual freedom and must therefore be destroyed and replaced by primitive society so that people will be [...]
It seems that everything’s available online, except the ability to search for particular video scenes. Recently, I was searching for an actress I’d last seen in a film 15 years ago and imdb.com was no help. I eventually found Lena Olin by watching the credits, but the experience made me wonder if video standards could [...]
Not for the first time, the glut of incoming information threatens to push out useful knowledge into merely a cloud of data. And there’s no doubt that activity streams and linked data are two of the more interesting things to aid research in this onrushing surge of information. In this screen-mediated age, the advantages of [...]
What goes up must come down. This simple law of gravity can been seen in baseball, and these days, the stock market.
As I attended the Web 2.0 conference in New York recently, I had occasion to ask Tim O’Reilly what he thought about libraries. “Well, OCLC’s doing some good things,” he said. I encouraged him [...]
Sometimes, a short story sticks with you until you find it with pleasure living in a larger collection. In 1991, I read a short story by Tobias Wolff standing up in a Chicago bookstore that I looked for until it was included in The Night in Question.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book of short stories, Unaccustomed [...]
In David Lodge’s 1984 novel, Small World, a character remarks that literary analysis of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot “would just lend itself nicely to computerization….All you’d have to do would be to put the texts on to tape and you could get the computer to list every word, phrase and syntactical construction that the two [...]
As the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting has become a central component of digital library projects, increased attention has been paid to the ways metadata can be reused. As every computer project since the beginning of time has had occasion to understand, the data available for harvesting is only as good as the [...]
Good faith has powered collaboration between libraries and publishers for over 100 years. When books are ordered and purchased from publishers, libraries enter a long-term relationship with the object. In the world of bits, it is understood that the publisher’s relationship with the object stops with the check clearing from the library. In the world [...]
About
Jay Datema has an MBA from Binghamton University (2007), a Masters in Library and Information Science from Dominican University (1999), and a BA in Literature from Wheaton College (1995).
Reading
Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2006.
Quotables
“Since there is no lack of mechanisms for restricting access to content in exchange for new business models, isn't now the time to start setting terms before they are set for both libraries and publishers by larger interests?”
– What SERU Solves
4 March 2008
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