At the LODLAM conference, Roy Tennant said that OCLC will be releasing the bibliographic info about the top million most popular books. It will be released in a linked data format, under an Open Database license. This is a very useful move, although we need to know what the license is. We can hope that it does not require attribution, and does not come with any further license restrictions. But Roy was talking in the course of a timed two-minute talk, so he didn’t have a lot of time for details.

Read more of "OCLC to release 1 million bib records"

Listen: 23:59

Also in ogg

Scholarly journals were once enormously expensive. Because they were pricey to produce — it took a lot of money to coordinate the peer review, and to edit, print, bind, and distribute all those volumes — access was pricey as well.

But digital publishing and collaboration has reduced many of the financial barriers to sharing research. And advocates of the “Open Access” model of scholarly publishing argue that when research journals are freely and openly accessible scholarly work flourishes.

Read more of "Library Lab/The Podcast 002: Free Knowledge"

A couple of weeks ago while reading Jerome Lettvin’s obituary I noticed this gem:

“At MIT, his office in Building 20 was crammed with books, most overdue from the college library. Dr. Lettvin claimed he did not return them because the library would send him the students who wanted those books, and he would interview them as potential assistants.”

Read more of "Gaming the library"

Discovery, the metadata ecology for UK education and research, invites stakeholders to join us in adopting a set of principles to enhance the impact of our knowledge resources for the furtherance of scholarship and innovation…

Read more of "A declaration of metadata openness"

The Digital Public Library of America has announced a “beta sprint” for envisioning in software (or a sketch of software) what the DPLA could be.

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Here are some more short interviews with folks who attended the Digital Public Library of America meeting in Amsterdam.

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Here are two podcasts from the DPLA meeting in Amsterdam this week. Jonathan Rothman of the HathiTrust and Paola Mazzucchi of Arrow talk about their projects for identifying the copyright holders of “orphaned works,” i.e., works that are in copyright whose copyright holders are not known and/or findable.

Read more of "Live from the DPLA: Orphaned works"

A good to read piece that must surely be making the rounds in library circles:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library.html

Also happy because it rose to my attention (#20 right now) on Hacker News—seems “hackers” are interested in library’s too ; )