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This three-part article series is intended to make it easier for non-experts to perform a basic accessibility check. I hope it will be helpful enough to make at least a few websites more accessible.

Evaluating Website Accessibility Part 1, Background and Preparation | 456 Berea Street
Evaluating Website Accessibility Part 2, Basic Checkpoints | 456 Berea Street
Evaluating [...]

Boing Boing: Right-wing think-tank hates DRM
The role of government is not to ensure that a private business’s pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers, who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD cartel’s segmentation scheme, are under no obligation to respect it.

I’m considering going to the SLA Conference and I’d love to find a roomate. Anyone else interested? (Planning early to submit FOL proposal.)

If you’re giving a talk and you aren’t sure if there will be Internet access, powerpoint slides are a popular alternative/backup plan. However, I don’t like powerpoint because I tend to show a lot of websites and the transition from powerpoint to browser is distracting and usually an uncomfortable break in the talk. Screenshots [...]

Boing Boing: MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!)
The BSA, MPAA and RIAA have officially objected to a proposal to let the public break DRM that “threatens critical infrastructure and endangers lives.” They argue that if it becomes legal to break DRM that could kill you that it might harm their [...]

Boing Boing: Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business
The Canadian Record Industry Association (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has released a study in which they conclude that P2P downloaders buy lots of music, and that P2P doesn’t particularly harm their industry:

Open Access News
Does the OA movement need a central organization?
Absolutely. Look at Firefox. It has taken both the concentrated efforts of a the Mozilla Foundation and the enthusiastic preaching of it’s users to get it into the public eye (not that it still doesn’t have a long way to go). OA has the [...]

Pop Goes the Library: Good News on Gaming
Very interesting links.

Nothing lasts forever, particularly my site designs.
If you’re using a feed reader, you might want click through to see the new look. As always, I would love feedback.

LibraryCareers.org is a new ALA site for people interested in becoming librarians.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice is OA and looks really interesting but having the articles in PDF only is going to cut into their readership. Who has time (or patience) to wait for a download of an article you’re not sure you really want?

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Make a New Plan, Stan: More Ways to lose Your Techie Folks
You must read all of these. Many of them are going to be familiar to everyone, techie or not. And if I might add my own …

Support your techies’ ideas for bringing the library forward, but not [...]

blyberg.net » Library 2.0 websites: Where to begin?
Let me suggest five directives that may help get your creative minds turning. I want to talk about these not only because they represent common sense, good design, and patron convenience, but also because by using these directives as a kernel in your new project, you are [...]

Open Access News

Frank McCown and three co-authors, Search Engine Coverage of the OAI-PMH Corpus, IEEE Internet Computing, March/April 2006.
Abstract: The major search engines are competing to index as much of the Web as possible. Having indexed much of the surface Web, search engines are now using a variety of approaches to index the deep [...]

Newfound Press: University of Tennessee Libraries
The University of Tennessee Libraries is developing a framework to make scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Newfound Press, the University Libraries digital imprint, advances the community of learning by experimenting with effective and open systems of scholarly communication. Drawing on the resources that the university has [...]

Open Access News
Digesting biomedical blogs
Postgenomic tracks the biomedical papers being discussed by bloggers, identifies the most-discussed papers and journals, and shows what kinds of researchers are discussing what kinds of papers.

What I find interesting is that there is an impact tracker with 3 OA journals in the top 20.

The citation rankings from Science Citation Index are practically a requirement for university tenure these days. But the datqabase is so expensive that most libraries have to search on a for-fee basis. I did one recently that was $30 for 6 citations to one article.
Google Scholar service matches Thomson ISI citation index

The free [...]

metaProjects » Blog Archive » Don’t need no stinkin’ proposal

My profession in general (hereinafter MPIG) hasn’t quite figured out what to do with its young professionals. It wants to harness our creativity, expertise, and energy, but isn’t quite ready to entrust us with actual decisions. Thus, lower-middle managers in MPIG who would like [...]

Boing Boing: Free/open source blogosphere
ibiblio.org has taken open-source blogging software (Wordpress) and altered it for massive blog management so you can offer them to all your students. Oh, if only we had php and mysql.