Congratulations to the Open Knowledge Foundation on the launch of BibSoup, a site where anyone can upload and share a bibliography. It’s a great idea, and an awesome addition to the developing knowledge ecosystem.

Read more of "BibSoup Beta!"

While cleaning out my phones SD card I found these two photos.

Read more of "A couple photos"

Karen Coyle visited us today to talk with us about why it is time for libraries to move to a more modern idea of data, one that focuses more on the data and less on the records, and probably one that makes use of the linked data format that consists of links pointing at public sources. Here’s a 17-minute podcast with her.

Read more of "[podcast] Karen Coyle on modern data for modern libraries"

In this 23min podcast [ogg here], Sebastian Hammer, president of IndexData, explains the srengths and limitations of federated search, which runs queries on a distributed set of sources, as opposed to using a big honking centralized index.

Read more of "[podcast] Sebastian Hammer on federated search"

We just concluded class #2 of the Library Test Kitchen, our experimental seminar in the Graduate School of Design. The course is a collaboration between Jeffrey Schnapp (Professor of Romance Languages & Literature, Director of metaLab) Ann Whiteside (Director, Frances Loeb Library), Ben Brady (GSD) and me (Jeff Goldenson). It is the continuation of a seminar this past Fall entitled Bibliotheca, the Library Past/Present/Future. There are many other folks involved in the Test Kitchen—people from the Innovation Lab, the greater Harvard Library and metaLab, who are taking part, and we’re just at the beginning.

Read more of "Library Test Kitchen"

Listen: 23:07

(Also in ogg)

“Your average citizen is not technologically savvy,” says Marilyn Johnson, the author of This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

Read more of "Library Lab/The Podcast 011: A Technological Graveyard?"

A recent webinar hosted by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) featured our ShelfLife and Stackview applications. Also featured in the webinar was a stack browsing application developed by the North Carolina State University Libraries.

Read more of "ASERL Webinar - ShelfLife and Stackview"

I posted an idea the other day. It’s called Library License. It’s a way to make works digitally available through libraries, after a specified amount of time has elapsed since publication date. It is a currently a sketch of an idea, to be evolved openly. It’s more a movement, perhaps in the form of a “drag n drop” clause that content creators may add to their licensing agreements with publishers.

Read more of "Library License"

The Digital Public Library of America today announced that initial (and interim) development work on the DPLA platform will be done by the LibraryCloud team here at the Library Innovation Lab—Paul Deschner, Matthew Phillips, and David Weinberger—plus our Berkman friends, Daniel Collis-Puro and Sebastian Diaz. We’ll do this as openly as possible, relying upon the community to help at every phase, but this will be our core work during the first phase of the platform’s development, leading up to an April 26 DPLA Steering Committee meeting.

Read more of "LibraryCloud team to work on DPLA platform"

The CBC show Spark a couple of days ago ran an 8 minute piece about the two biggest projects coming out of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. It does a great job cutting together an interview of me with an illuminating narrative from Nora Young.

Read more of "LibraryCloud and ShelfLife on CBC"