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The internet's greatest strength--access to vast amounts of information--is also its greatest challenge. With so much information available, searching and finding the best resources takes a lot of effort for [...]

The ebook is a new medium, but it follows many other breakthrough products with histories of disruption, adoption, market acceptance, and the forging of new business relationships. Perennials such as [...]

Digital Libraries are a valuable way to provide access to already accumulated knowledge using Internet browsers. These libraries can be posted on the World Wide Web; an Intranet; or an Extranet, accessible from remote locations. Information management techniques can be used to develop local information resources and provide them to a select group or the general population. A glossary of the library's key elements is included.

Although it is pretty easy to find colleagues who will express fatigue or frustration about the constant need for libraries to prove their value proposition, there is also an upside [...]

It is hard to dispute the idea that the most popular social media services, such as Facebook and Twitter, got their start providing a 'fun' experience for their users. Fun [...]

Digital migrations have been going on for quite a while. Lately, the rate of evolution seems to be accelerating once again; with so many ventures and concepts in play, it [...]

The winter and early spring of 2012 have seen a whole new level of excitement on the topic of Big Data. The idea of Big Data--certainly the meme du jour [...]

Last year, I wrote about the ascendance of HathiTrust as a banner initiative for broad-level collaboration. Lately, as I have watched the trust grow, I have been thinking about how [...]

For my column this month I want to address a perennial challenge we all face: namely, how to keep up with successive waves of new technology, the new workflows they [...]

Digital librarians staked their first claim in mobile services by making online catalogs and aggregated journal collections accessible. 'Mobilizing' these two core services has been an excellent strategy on a [...]

Library incursions into the web-scale world as well as into cloud-based services are among the most exciting trends to write about. Because web-scale projects are nascent and growing fast, the [...]

Recently I attended a fundraising event that featured Richard L. Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, and California governor Jerry Brown. Over the course of the evening, I talked to several [...]

Even as the 21st century library becomes increasingly digital, with 'right-sized' (which is to say lean) staffing, none of us is surprised when our mission writ large is called into [...]

Google's ambitious digitization initiative has been followed both with fascination and concern ever since it was launched. Much of the controversy surrounded issues of ownership, copyright, and the risks of [...]

Working as I do in a community of senior faculty and doctoral-level students, I've had many opportunities to watch and participate in projects that try to bring social media to [...]

In late fall 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. updated its report on the state of social networking at the industry level. In order to read the full report, you must be [...]

By now even modestly funded libraries and their staff have been thinking about--and participating in--the Web 2.0 revolution. We often think of 2.0 life as a two-way conversation, which it [...]

Focusing the Library Web Rosters of tools, services, platforms, collections, and social media links that now populate library websites have been growing for years. Many of these functionalities are essential [...]

Taking the lead in digital library development demonstrates that the profession is breaking new ground in the online era. Our many successes in rolling out useful and historically rich collections [...]

Wired magazine has ebbed and flowed as a trendsetter over the years, and every now and then its writers and editors come up with a useful moniker for the times [...]

Usually when I write about digitization, I am drawn to the strategic and political benefits of using new digital collections to create excitement. Newly digitized resources have been valuable marketing [...]

Libraries have been gifted with the opportunity to play a key role in evolving digital learning environments in higher education and in communities of practice in industry. Yet even as [...]

It's been interesting to note that even as the most popular social media tools have become household names, those very same tools are now finding themselves criticized or even trivialized [...]

Those of us who have parents or grandparents who grew up during the Great Depression often have humorous stories to share about the 'radical frugality' that the folks practiced then [...]

Information professionals are often in a position to take a bird's-eye view of largescale trends in society and the workplace--and the role of technology in both. Of the many trends [...]

Innovations in search and retrieval have provided us with some of our most exciting challenges as a profession. Yet even as new tools flood the academic library commons, direct, person-to-person [...]

Most information professionals date the start of the 'online era' with the rollout of Dialog, Lockheed's foray into the world of pay for-use online searching. Many other systems quickly appeared, [...]

Our rapidly evolving digital world inspires much use of nautical terminology: navigation, discovery, the voyage, the new terrain at the end of the journey. Considering how quickly new technologies are [...]

The future of the publishing industry and the profession of journalism are hot topics these days. Those of us with intact long-term memory faculties will recall equally heated and ongoing [...]

When CIL's editorial leaders crafted Vol. 29's themes, they were challenged to think about what might be happening in library technology some 12 months into the future. That's a constructive [...]

Networked information as we have come to know it ought to be a dream come true for researchers who rely on large data sets. Yet all too often, access barriers [...]

I ran a business as a first career, and I have brought several beliefs along with me into the information profession. Perhaps having a board of directors, a monthly profit/loss [...]

In understanding how current technologies are impacting digital library development and services, it can be very useful to stay familiar with the literature of the whole of the internet era, [...]

Having had the privilege to make presentations in London at Internet Librarian International, I've gained a keen appreciation for the value of tossing a pun here and there or twisting [...]

As anyone who follows my column knows, I work at a very large and famous university. And I like to comment on what happens here. Although the library I manage [...]

Although this issue of CIL is devoted to open source solutions, I'm taking a look at a slightly different yet related topic. In its Sept. 20, 2008, issue, The Economist [...]

Change has been the one constant of the Web 2.0 era. New interactive technologies and whole new ideas of community are emerging on the web--these are the kinds of innovations [...]

A lot of the study about how we use technology focuses on the youngest and swiftest: teens and college students. The revolution of sharing music files confirmed just how powerful [...]

The pace of online 'content creation' has never been faster. The explosive growth in blogs and their growing influence, not to mention the money they create for entrepreneurs, is just [...]

My 'charge' in writing this column is to comment on how we interact with digital libraries--not how we write the programs that run digital libraries but instead how we transform [...]

Library websites play an interesting role in the universe of digital resources we now take for granted. We rely upon them daily, yet we seem to have much to complain [...]

So much is written about search, and the quality of analysis is high and getting higher all the time. The experience of search and usability study are themselves academic subjects, [...]

Looking back to library school, I recall that I loved children's literature and storytelling class, even though I knew I was heading toward the corporate sector at the time. Storytelling [...]

Checkout, circulation, collection management: We can automate it all, right? And the internet makes it easy, just 'put it all online' as one of my faculty members likes to tell [...]

Much is written about the never-ending need for info pros to survey, analyze, collate, and assess user behavior and product effectiveness. I'm as guilty as anybody; I'm forever enjoining my [...]

When it comes to building digital libraries, most commentators think first of the hardware and software that bind us together. This is a worthy approach, particularly since smart devices that [...]

I've mentioned more than once to CIL editor Kathy Dempsey that writing about 'hip hightech' is one of my faves as a columnist. I think the main reason I like […]

We've put a great deal of thought into how to pipe digital resources to all of the places they're needed. And we've seen some important successes. In particular, government information […]

I've had the recent good fortune to renovate a 1960s-era library space into a 21st-century library commons. That's pretty cool in itself, but in addition I recently served on a […]