Category: Service
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Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta
Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not…
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Initial Thoughts on Alberta’s FOIP Process
On December 8, I noticed the Govt. of Alberta had posted a new video to YouTube titled, FOIP Request Service Guided Tour. You know what? I've honestly always wanted to submit a FOIP request! Here are some initial thoughts on how it went, and I'll report back if/when I hear something. So we start at…
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3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere (Gizmodo)
AnyDesk is totally new to me, so I thought I'd make note of Gizmodo's post on 3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere. I use Chrome Remote Desktop at least weekly, and have used TeamViewer to good effect in the past, so can vouch for each of those. The commenters overwhelmingly…
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Factiva filters for Fake News Phenomenon
Thanks to a tip from my colleague Dani I learned that Factiva has recently added a filter for fake news. Like many things with Factiva (IMHO), it's not terribly intuitive to find, so here are the steps. You can either add this as a filter to a search you've already run, or just use it…
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Shape file and .KML for First People’s Language Map of British Columbia
I spent a couple hours today helping a student look for a shape file of the First People’s Language Map of B. C. (or anything even close to it). No luck, but feel free to chime in if you know of something we missed! Finally while Inspecting and Viewing Source, I tripped across an embedded (or…
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If You See Something, Save Something – 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine
Last month I railed on the new Wayback Machine plugin for Chrome. Well they've been busy, and the current version solves many of my nitpicks on the initial version. Archive.org has a post detailing 6 ways you can save pages to the Wayback Machine, and that Chrome plugin makes the list because it now allows…
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Mita makes the case: Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities
Mita Williams has an excellent blog post titled Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities. It's a long (for a blog post), but important read, and includes an excellent history of how Canadian government data has evolved, and how it compares (poorly) to US government data . I've been making the same…