Category: Ideas
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An experiment in privacy and disclosure
"On April 29, 2014 the Interim Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Chantal Bernier, revealed that Canadian telecommunications companies have disclosed enormous volumes of information to state agencies." This lead sentence comes from Citizen Lab's recent post, Responding to the Crisis in Canadian Telecommunications. I heard about that post after listening to the most recent episode (#31) of Jesse Brown's…
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How do they do that? (WordPress / Drupal)
From time to time I find myself wondering what module a given Drupal site uses to perform some nifty action or another. A while back I found a tool that helps with that spy work for WordPress called simply What WordPress Theme is that? And then I finally found Drupal X-Ray, which does the same…
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Educause Top-Ten IT Issues, 2013: Welcome to the Connected Age
Not a brand-new read, but *I* just finished reading the Educause annual paper, Top-Ten IT Issues, 2013: Welcome to the Connected Age (PDF). While libraries are only explicitly mentioned once or twice in the entire 19 pages, one of the panelists was a librarian, so there is that I guess. I only bother to mention that because…
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Knowledge Creation Platforms – what a wonderful start to a story
Yesterday a colleague passed on a link to a wonderfully thoughtful journal article: Knowledge Creation Platforms: The Next Step after Web-Scale Discovery, by Carl Grant, whom I am now following on Twitter. In this piece, Carl brings us up to speed with a brief history of how technology has gotten us (libraries) to our current…
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Some skills you might want for the 21st century
I just finished reading a report called Working together: evolving value for academic libraries, and found it a good read. Presenting the results of several surveys, the authors describe the areas in which academic libraries have traditionally attempted to demonstrate value (embedded teaching), and the areas in which they should probably start putting more focus…
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CFP: Workshop on Digital Surfaces in Libraries (DSL)
http://libraryworkshop.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk CALL FOR PAPERS Workshop on Digital Surfaces in Libraries (DSL) ======================================= We invite you to join DSL, a venue for collaboration and discussion on the successes and pitfalls encountered in working in with interactive surfaces in library spaces by bringing together researchers, designers, practitioners, and librarians. This full day workshop is held in conjunction…
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Postifier – yet another option for reporting available seats?
My quest continues. I didn't think it was all the way back in January that I last posted about this dream, but it was! Postifier is a little gizmo intended to be put inside a mailbox that will alert you when there's actually something placed inside: The device lives on the inner roof of your…