Weeknote 26

§1 I’m back, nerds!

I’m back from my 12 month sabbatical. As of July 1st, I am the Acting Department Head of the Leddy Library Systems Department for a 12 month appointment.

Just a reminder: each section heading has an anchor tag that corresponds to the number that precedes the heading. So if, for example, you want to share the section about library borrowing in Google results, you could use the URL, https://librarian.aedileworks.com/weeknote-26#3

§2 A Cybersecurity Event

Since June 20, 2022, my place of work has been suffering from a ‘cybersecurity event’. At the time of this writing, this is all I know of what has happened and as such, I have no idea how relevant the following two videos may be:

Civic Tech Toronto: Secure Smart Cities

screencapture of title screen

TVO The Agenda: Ontario Municipalities Under Cyber Threat

§3 Your closest Borrow

Last week I was searching for Tactical Tech‘s The Glass Room project, when I noticed that Google guessed incorrectly that I was searching for the book of the same name and returned links to where I could buy the book and also the closest libraries where I could borrow said book.

There’s nothing like living on an international border to remind you that the closest location isn’t always the most appropriate.

The location data provided is done so through WorldCat. Neither my local public library or the academic library where I work have their holdings available through this OCLC service.

What OCLC’s centralized database has that peer-to-peer lacks (at least to date) is consolidated library holdings information. As Kyle Banerjee said on Twitter, the real value in WorldCat is the holdings. This is used by interlibrary loan systems, and it is what appears on the screen when you do a WorldCat search. Cleverly, OCLC has recorded the geographical location of all of its holding libraries and can give you a list of libraries relative to your location. In the past this type of service was only available through a central database, but we may have arrived at point where peer-to-peer could provide this as well.

Karen Colye, Coyle’s InFormation: The OCLC v Clarivate Dilemma, Monday, June 27, 2022

§4 OneNote for Work PKM

At my place of work, the year begins on July 1st. To celebrate, I’ve decided to use OneNote for my workplace note-taking because it allows for integration with Outlook and Microsoft To Do. Next week, I intend to start with the organizational scaffolding of my own version of the Johnny Decimal System and PARA.