Author: Paul R. Pival
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Library Futures Funtime Book Talk w/Chokepoint Capitalism and Data Cartels
On November 17, I was able to attend most of an amazing book talk sponsored by Library Futures. It was with the authors of two timely books, Chokepoint Capitalism (Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow), and Data Cartels (Sarah Lamdan). You can, and should, watch the entire recording! In Chokepoint Capitalism, "by analyzing book publishing and…
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Clipchamp – a VERY cool screencasting option!
The other day, Lifehacker posted that Windows Has a New Tool for Simultaneously Recording Your Screen and Webcam. That tool is Clipchamp, and I am impressed! Oh, and it's free. MPOW has blocked the Microsoft Store, so I wasn't able to install the desktop version, but I was able to run the web version. I…
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At first glance: Misleading figures – How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries
When I first saw the article, How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries, of course I had to see how MPOW, the University of Calgary, stacked up. We've long been a proponent of open access; we had the first open access author's fund in Canada, established…
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Quick review: An AI toolkit for libraries
Even more on artificial intelligence. I'm going to create a new category for this blog! I just finished reading An AI toolkit for libraries, by Michael Upshall, in UKSG Insights. I found it to provide a really good background on what artificial intelligence is, and isn't, including some examples of some basic narrow AI currently…
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Intellectual and unreasonable – AI and male librarians
I've been poking a bit at the multitude of AI image-generation tools, and just ran across this tool that allows one to do a little exploring of the algorithmic bias that's pretty much baked-in, but otherwise not really visible. I learned about it via this article in Vice, and thanks to @ResearchBuzz. Here's what I…
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AI, Images, and Academic Titles
Yesterday, shortly after helping a student start a literature search, I found myself poking around at DALL-E, one of the crop of machine-learning tools that can generate images based on a text prompt. I had an article title saved on my clipboard, and wondered what would be generated from the title. I was not impressed.…
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Climate change books for kids
I'm nearly done listening to an episode of What On Earth, from the CBC, which talks about a couple of books on climate change that have been written for kids. I know my teenage daughter is anxious about the future of our planet, and can only imagine it's even more acute for younger kids. You…
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Wonder Tools – New ways to record conversations
Because of my role supporting qualitative data analysis at MPOW, I'm always on the lookout for new transcription tools (see my current list here). The latest issue of the Wonder Tools newsletter introduces several new-to-me automated tools to record conversations. As a bonus, Jeremy includes many links to StoryCorps resources on how to improve interviewing…