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A blog post that examines why some currently in fashion technologies such as 3D printers may not be suitable for libraries--namely because they look at creating a physical product rather information.

A brief video from the ALA about eBooks, mainly useful for information resources the ALA provides about eBooks.

I've got a free account on here. I'm looking at the various features and possible integrations with other things we use. I think we could really improve the customer experience and get better information about our tickets and have better performance metrics than we are getting out of RT.

"The nation's librarians will be recruited to help people get signed up for insurance under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Up to 17,000 U.S. libraries will be part of the effort to get information and crucial computer time to the millions of uninsured Americans who need to get coverage under the law."

There is quite a bit of alarming data in what the project has gathered, and one of those pieces of information is that more than 148,000 of the sites surveyed are vulnerable to the BEAST attack, which was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and disclosed last year. Their attack uses what's known as a chosen-plaintext attack against the AES implementation in the TLS 1.0 protocol and enables them to use a custom tool they wrote to steal and decrypt supposedly secure HTTPS cookies. The attacker can then hijack the victim's secure SSL session with a site such as an e-commerce site or online banking site.

The Handle System "A digital object may incorporate not only informational elements, i.e., a digitized version of a paper, movie or sound recording, but also the unique identifier of the digital object and other metadata about the digital object." It is the larger group that DOI belongs to and helps with providing electronic resources not only with a persistent link but metadata associated with that resource.

It is amazing what some libraries lend anymore. There is a library in Missouri that lends cake pans. I have seen some libraries lend power tools, guitars and more!

This is starting to sound like a science fiction story just waiting to be written.

I agree about curation. Since we're talking about science fiction now - which inevitably becomes science fact, in the not so distant future we will have desktop biological printers capable of "printing" a seed. Then libraries won't need to keep seed stores, they can just print any seed on demand if they have the DNA on file. Edit: Of course, that just means the e-resource vendors of the future will have another thing to try to license...

"The current model of digital content delivery for libraries places library users' privacy at risk. Authorizing the loan of an ebook or the use of a database can communicate unique identifiers or personally identifiable information that reveals a user's identity."

The Transparency Report is a report Google has recently made available that shows requests to remove copyrighted material from Google's search results but also requests from governments to remove information and inquiries from governments about Google's users. Unsurprisingly the U.S., is first in user data requests, but oddly followed by India and France.

[People who multitask] are not being more productive-they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work.

The Library of Congress has decided the start date for implementation of RDA will be March 31, 2013. More information is here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/news_rda_implementation_date.html

Normally I'd link to the article itself but the comments on the slashdot page are worth a read. "Will they ban 3D printers?" "Knowing our congress they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools... you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!" Sad but true. These are really the kinds of discussions that we will have to have as a society in the very near term. Libraries should be at the forefront of this discussion - they've always had to fight to protects peoples rights to access information. If they have public access 3D printers it's only a matter of time before the government comes knocking wanting to see the shape files that their patrons have been printing just like they do with circulation records and internet history.

A nice collection of information for those new to the concept of digital preservation, as well as some tools to get your institution started.

One of the quotes from this post that stands out is "Of course, sifting through vast quantities of information in order to show people the important stuff is what newspapers are supposed to do..." Substitute the word 'librarians' for 'newspapers' and we are talking the same language.

While not a particularly well written or informative article, it is relevant that that debates about eBooks and libraries have now reached journal like The Economist where libraries are rarely mentioned.

THOMAS is the website the Library of Congress uses for keeping an online record of bills. As the author notes it's not easy to get a picture of what Congress is working on by looking at one bill at a time. It's possible to get a more overall picture by downloading the data and number crunching it, but it looks like the site will not allow bulk downloads of data, only scraping information by way of scripts.

Paul Otlet was a Belgian inventor who had several visionary ideas, such as a "World City" which would be a gathering of all the leading institutions of the world that would radiate knowledge and the Universal Decimal Classification scheme which is still used in some libraries. He also had a concept in 1934 for a radiated library that was in some ways a precursor to the Internet. It was limited by the technology he knew at the time, and consisted of a center where users would call in to ask for research and information to be displayed, which would then be displayed on a television screen. Aside from the need to call in some of his concepts are similar to early community access cable television.

Supreme Librarians in Metaspace! Definitely take a look at this promotional comic by Emporia State University School of Library and Information Management. Click on the cover to go to the comic.

Surprise, surprise... Metaspace is populated with cats.

On the heels of our keynote speaker, whose presentation has been weighing on my mind, this makes me worry that what will cause things to be lost is not things simply not being updated, but also things not being findable-- if some information doesn't have any sort of access point, it may as well not exist.