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In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?

The Spectator Project is an interactive hypermedia environment for the study of The Tatler (1709-1711), The Spectator (1711-14), and the eighteenth-century periodical in general.

Creating a digital library might seem like a task best left to a large research collection with a vast staff and generous budget. However, tools for successfully creating digital libraries are getting easier to use all the time.

This think piece tells why the online library catalog fell from grace and why new directions pertaining to cataloging simplification and primary sources will not attract people back to the online catalog. It proposes an alternative direction that has greater likelihood of regaining the online catalog's lofty status and longtime users. Such a direction will require paradigm shifts in library cataloging and in the design and development of online library catalogs that heed catalog users' longtime demands for improvements to the searching experience. Our failure to respond accordingly may permanently exile scholarly and scientific information to a netherworld where no one searches while less reliable, accurate, and objective sources of information thrive in a paradise where people prefer to search for information.

Casey Bisson, with the help of Jessamyn West and Ryan Eby, reports on open-source software (OSS) and its use and importance in libraries in the third issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007.

This is a forthright exchange between two brilliant, deeply penetrating scholars, and it well encapsulates some of the most significant conundrums raised by the Google Book Search project.

The blogosphere has grown more than 100 times the size it was 2003, with Technorati tracking its 50 millionth blog, according to David Sifry's latest "State of the Blogosphere" report. However, Sifry, CEO of Technorati, said in his report that he thinks it's unlikely the number of blogs will continue to double every six months, as they have for about two years.

We've engineered a radical new search technology that allows users to experience improved search results with features like categorization of search results, highlighting best sentences, and complete text snippets. This new approach is based on our proprietary knowledge-gathering system, called QDEX, and a ranking algorithm, called SemanticRank.

This is just a small slice of life on the Wikipedia campaign trail, where the little things can get big fast, and where the edit wars may sometimes say more about Wikipedia and the people who use it than the candidates themselves. Breaking news or living history, Wikipedia evolves with the candidates, the moment, and its enormous editorial cast

For those of you unfamiliar with current on-line LIS education, most classes have a section devoted to on-line "discussion." The theory is that you are supposed to discuss, via posts, topics pertinent to the material covered in class. In reality, the boards just turn into a mass of people trying to say the smartest sounding, most cleaver thing they can possibly think of. I've rarely seen any "discussion" taking place on these boards