Registration open for DPLA West!
DPLA Dev Team releases first build.
“First, about the tech spec, or more exactly, the scope document: We’re working with Nick Caramello and Pod Consulting on building a useful set of docs that lay out a proposed path at multiple levels, from descriptions of the strategies for each area to detailed specs. As a start, a couple of weeks ago we posted a plain English overview on the wiki, which is both exceedingly general and hugely provisional. We will continue to iterate — with you, we very much hope — on far more detailed and technical documents over the next couple of months, primarily on the wiki. The scoping docs will raise issues we will need to address together, and will provide a way for us to make decisions about what functionality to support and what the (loosely-coupled) infrastructure should include. We need your help and participation, because the questions are huge, our team is tiny, and the deadline of April 2013 is just around the corner. Are we including the right services? Architecting it appropriately? In a scaleable yet do-able way? Are there open source projects we should be using? What else?”
From the Dev team’s blog.
ALA-Publishers meeting proves fruitful; Random House maintains pro-library lending policies.
“Never has a price increase been such good news for libraries. At a meeting with ALA leaders this week in New York, Random House officials said the ‘terms of sale’ for Random House e-books to libraries will change, with a price increase coming. But the publisher reiterated its commitment to library e-book lending, saying they would continue to enable e-book lending of their entire list for both adult and children’s titles, backlist and frontlist, without restriction. ‘No change,’ Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum told PW in a briefing this morning, when asked about Random Houses’s current policy of not limiting lends (such as HarperCollins) or title availability (such as Penguin, Hachette) or not lending at all (Macmillan and Simon & Schuster).”
Via InfoDocket.
David Weinberger speaks with Marilyn Johnson about librarians as tech-literacy teachers.
“Even as technology takes over more and more of our lives many of us are living in a technology cemetery, filled with old gadgets we have no idea how to revive, computers we don’t know how to program, and ebooks we have no idea how to download to.
Johnson argues that this is a huge opportunity for libraries to revive their place as centers of the community, for librarians to exist not just as oracles of the reference book, but as guides to the technical world.”
Listen to the podcast here.
Harvard library thinkers lead experimental seminar in library design.
“As described on www.librarytestkitchen.org, this is a seminar about making. A prototyping lab for libraries. Our goal is to create products, services & experiences, broadly defined, for the Harvard Library community. Generous funding to realize these projects is provided by Prof. Robert Darnton and the Harvard Library Lab. Projects will be deployed in «Test Kitchens» — partner libraries, such as the Loeb and Widener Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to these experiments.”
From the Harvard Library Lab blog, “Library Test Kitchen”