LISNews.org | Are OPAC Vendors Days Numbered? … the combination of open source and the reluctance of vendors to keep their systems up to date will result result in the demise of significant number of commerical library vendors in the next five years. The poor performance and outdated products of commercial OPAC products is due [...]

Boing Boing: Universities put Hollywood ahead of students Pathetic but predicable.

The library where I work has been doing our best to move into the future. This summer with a redesigned website and not one, not two, but three new blogs! (The third one is internal.) We’ll also be trying IM reference shortly. What prompted this post is the latest way we’ve drawn attention to ourselves. [...]

Librarians at the Gates Courage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in an era of increasing controls on the gathering and dissemination of information, many Americans are unaware of the courageous stands librarians take every day. The day-to-day challenges librarians face are inherent in the job description: defending access to controversial [...]

Life as I Know It » Blog Archive » OPAC Blog Posts – A List is very comprehensive for anyone needing an overview or a more in-depth look at the discussion.

LibrarianInBlack: Bloggy-Bloggy OPAC Casey Bisson writes that the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University has decided to use the WordPress-based OPAC (WPopac) he built on nights and weekends as its primary OPAC from now on. Things like this just make me more frustrated with the IT department at my school. We can’t get them to [...]

Wired News: Judge Halts NSA Snooping The Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on Amercians’ telephone and internet communications is unconstitutional and must stop immediately, a federal judge ruled Thursday. The ruling is the first court order barring the National Security Agency’s ambitious domestic surveillance activities, which have spurred a string of lawsuits against the government and [...]

Boing Boing: Our faulty intuition about open systems Jamie Boyle’s latest Financial Times column points up a cognitive bias we seem to have against open systems — on their face, open networks, encyclopedias, and software projects seem unlikely, even doomed. Our intuition about closed-vs-open is often wrong:

FoxyProxy: etc: quick links to good stuff Can’t get to MySpace from school? Can’t use instant messenger at work? Shhhh, don’t tell. Now you can with FoxyProxy: take back your privacy FoxyProxy is a full featured proxy management extension for Firefox, to help get around proxies of all sorts. Turn it on and off as [...]

Subtraction: Feeding the Hand That Fed Me It took me a little while to get this all cleaned up and ready for release, but I’m finally making the expanded RSS buttons that we’ve started to use at NYTimes.com available to everyone. You can grab the PNG file here (right- or control-click on the image at [...]