Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

Journal liberation: A community enterprise

Posted on October 15, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The fourth annual Open Access Week begins on Monday.  If you follow the official OAW website, you’ll be seeing a lot of information about the benefits of free access to scholarly research.  The amount of open-access material grows every day, … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, discovery, open access, publishing, serials, sharing | Comments Off on Journal liberation: A community enterprise

The concept of a work in the catalog web

Posted on September 17, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

My previous post showed four examples of web-based catalogs that describe books and other library resources in a FRBR-like manner. They’re oriented around “works” (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that are embodied in multiple editions (like the hundreds or thousands of publications … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, data, discovery, formats, metadata, online books, sharing | 1 Comment

“What do you read, my lord?” “Works, works, works”

Posted on September 8, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the library world about the coming age of FRBR-ized library catalogs (prompted in part by development of RDA, a cataloging standard that uses FRBR).  Exactly what such catalogs will look like, and … Continue reading →

Posted in discovery, libraries, metadata, online books | 6 Comments

As living arrows sent forth

Posted on August 31, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

It’s that time of year when offspring start to leave home and strike out on their own.  Young children may be starting kindergarten.  Older ones may be heading off to university.  And in between, children slowly gain a little more … Continue reading →

Posted in discovery, sharing | Comments Off on As living arrows sent forth

Keeping subjects up to date with open data

Posted on July 31, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In an earlier post, I discussed how I was using the open data from the Library of Congress’ Authorities and Vocabularies service to enhance subject browsing on The Online Books Page.  More recently, I’ve used the same data to make … Continue reading →

Posted in data, discovery, online books, open access, sharing, subjects | 4 Comments

How we talk about the president: A quick exploration in Google Books

Posted on June 20, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

On The Online Books Page, I’ve been indexing a collection of memorial sermons on President Abraham Lincoln, all published shortly after his assassination, and digitized by Emory University.  Looking through them, I was struck by how often Lincoln was referred … Continue reading →

Posted in data, online books, sharing | Comments Off on How we talk about the president: A quick exploration in Google Books

Journal liberation: A primer

Posted on June 11, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As Dorothea Salo recently noted, the problem of limited access to high-priced scholarly journals may be reaching a crisis point.  Researchers that are not at a university, or are at a not-so-wealthy one, have long been frustrated by journals that … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, libraries, open access, publishing, sharing | 5 Comments

Making discovery smarter with open data

Posted on May 6, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve just made a significant data enhancement to subject browsing on The Online Books Page.  It improves the concept-oriented browsing of my catalog of online books via subject maps, where users explore a subject along multiple dimensions from a starting … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, discovery, online books, open access, sharing, subjects | 3 Comments

Copyright information is busting out all over

Posted on April 7, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Like the crocuses and daffodils now coming up all over our front garden, new copyright registration information has been popping up all over the net lately.  As I’ve described in various previous posts, this information can be extremely useful for … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, sharing | Comments Off on Copyright information is busting out all over

Erin McKean and inclusive entrepreneurship

Posted on March 24, 2010 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day celebrating the achievements of women in science and technology.  There are all kinds of ways to be a scientist or a technologist, and just in the fields of computing and information technology I … Continue reading →

Posted in people | Comments Off on Erin McKean and inclusive entrepreneurship