Open Libraries "… are signs of life and hope: They are the cornerstone of democracy"

Repurposing Metadata

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 [...]

IDPF: Google and Harvard

Libraries And Publishers
At the 2007 International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in New York May 9th, publishers and vendors discussed the future of ebooks in an age increasingly dominated by large-scale digitization projects funded by the deep pockets of Google and Microsoft.
In a departure from the other panels, which discussed digital warehouses and repositories, both planned [...]

Open source metasearch

Now there’s a new kid on the (meta)search block. LibraryFind, an open-source project funded by the State Library of Oregon, is currently live at Oregon State University. The library has just packaged up a release for anyone to download and install.
Jeremy Frumkin, Gray chair for Innovative Library Services at OSU, said the goals were to [...]

Using Drupal to put Endnote online

There is still no easy way to manage a library of references on a personal or institutional site. Librarians who want to put up a list of institutional publications, or researchers who want to share references are limited by existing software limitations, privacy concerns, or technical road blocks. This problem has been mitigated by a [...]

Open World Cat

In typical OCLC style, a quiet revolution is brewing. Formerly a subscription-only database, WorldCat has begun to progagate into search engines–Google, Yahoo, and Ask in particular–and with the merger of RLG, it looks like a truly spectacular interface could be created to the union catalog.
In the meantime, it’s curious that OCLC chose to use an [...]

Open URL

Open URL solves the appropriate copy issue, but many other questions have sprung up for library discussion.
You can learn more in Roy Tennant and Carol Tenopir’s forthcoming July columns.

Should Google have a list of resolvers? What about Microsoft?
Is it useful for OCLC to be developing a registry?
Why is the usability so poor? Pop window after [...]