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 [...]
The Bibliographic Control Working Group held its third and final public meeting on the future of bibliographic control July 9 at the Library of Congress, focusing on “The Economics and Organization of Bibliographic Data.” The conclusion of the meetings will come in a report issued in November. No dramatic changes were issued from this meeting, [...]
At the ALA Top Tech Trends Panel, panelists including Marshall Breeding, Roy Tennant, Karen Coombs, and John Blyberg discussed RFID, open source adoption in libraries, and the importance of privacy.
Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University Libraries (TN), started the Top Tech Trends panel by referencing his LJ Automation Marketplace [...]
The Future of Information Retrieval
Ron Miller, Director of Product Management, HW Wilson, hosts a panel of industry leaders including:
Mike Buschman, Program Manager, Windows Live Academic, Microsoft.
R. David Lankes, PhD, Director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, and Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University.
Marydee Ojala, Editor, ONLINE, and contributing feature and news writer to [...]
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 [...]
The New York Public Library has reached a settlement with iBiblio, the public’s library and digital archive at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for harvesting records from its Research Libraries catalog, which it claims is copyrighted.
Heike Kordish, director of the NYPL Humanities Library, said a cease and desist letter was sent because a [...]
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 [...]
In yet another crowded ballroom, the men (and woman) of LITA prognosticated on the future of libraries and technology.
Walt Crawford moderated the panel and spoke in absentia for Sarah Houghton. Her trends were:
Returning power to content owners
An OCLC ILS with RedLightGreen as the front-end
Outreach online
Karen Schneider listed four:
Faceted Navigation, from Endeca and others
eBooks–the Sophie project [...]
This oversubscribed session (I sat on the floor, as did many others) featured Stephen Abram of Sirsi/Dynix/SLA president and Joe Janes of the University of Washington debating the future of search, moderated by LJ columnist Roy Tennant.
Abram asked a pointed question, which decided the debate early, “Were libraries ever about search? Search was rarely the [...]
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 [...]
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
Powazek, Derek. Design for community : the art of connecting real people in virtual places. Indianapolis Ind.: New Riders, 2002.
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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