Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

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About John Mark Ockerbloom

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

Promoting access to the best literature of the past

Posted on October 26, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Last week saw widespread observance of Open Access Week 2009 .  The week primarily focused on opening access to current research and scholarship (though there’s also been a growing community working on opening access to teaching and learning content).  You … Continue reading →

Posted in online books, open access | 2 Comments

Remember this

Posted on October 5, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I am eating a sandwich at the end of Pier 14 in San Francisco.  The sun has set behind the downtown skyscrapers, and the colors in the sky are slowly fading to grey.  I’m not the only diner out here.  … Continue reading →

Posted in people, preservation, sharing | 2 Comments

Google Book settlement: Alternatives and alterations

Posted on September 17, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

In my previous post, I worried that the Google Books settlement might fall apart in the face of opposition from influential parties like the Copyright Office, and that such a collapse might deprive the public of meaningful access to millions … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, online books, open access | 5 Comments

Google Books, and missing the opportunities you don’t see

Posted on September 15, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

The Google Books settlement fairness hearing is still a few weeks away, but in the last few weeks the deal has been talked and shouted about with ever-higher volume.  Still, it wasn’t until the other day, in a House Judiciary … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright, online books, open access | 2 Comments

Why should reuse be hard?

Posted on August 31, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

By far the most widely cited paper with my name on it is a 1995 paper on architectural mismatch.  The journal version of the paper was subtitled “Why reuse is so hard”.  It was a paper about failure, rather than … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, open access, publishing | Comments Off on Why should reuse be hard?

For those wanting more drama in their lives

Posted on July 14, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Thanks to the scanning services of Penn’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), and a loan of over a dozen volumes from Stanford University Libraries, we have now posted online records of copyright renewals for drama (and works … Continue reading →

Posted in copyright | Comments Off on For those wanting more drama in their lives

Learn more about ILS discovery interfaces

Posted on June 10, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’m presenting today at a NISO webinar on interoperability, giving an overview of the work I did with a Digital Library Federation task group to produce recommendations for standard APIs for ILS’s supporting information discovery applications. I’ll include a link … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, discovery, libraries | Comments Off on Learn more about ILS discovery interfaces

Getting bugs out of our systems

Posted on May 27, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Very soon after we start learning to program, we start learning to deal with bugs.   Folks who have programmed for a while might forget that effective bug handling, like effective programming, is a skill that doesn’t come entirely naturally. Many … Continue reading →

Posted in crimes and misdemeanors, people | 3 Comments

Free Decimal Correspondence: Now with more detail and CC0 goodness

Posted on May 16, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

I’ve just released a new version of the Free Decimal Correspondence (FDC).  FDC is a set of associations between numbers and subject terms that can be used as the basis for linear shelving or subject browsing of a simple library … Continue reading →

Posted in libraries, metadata, open access, repositories, sharing | Comments Off on Free Decimal Correspondence: Now with more detail and CC0 goodness

Will OCLC move to a service-oriented business model for bibliographic data?

Posted on May 15, 2009 by John Mark Ockerbloom

As you may recall, there’s been a fair bit of criticism (including some of my own) against OCLC’s proposed records use policy, which asserts OCLC’s rights over libraries’ cataloging in ways that would make it very difficult for libraries and … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, libraries, metadata, open access, sharing | 3 Comments