Category: notes
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The Librarian as DJ
On Saturday night I had a Zoom call with a friend of mine from high school. My friend prefaced our chat with a warning that she was going to keep the conversation short because video calls are exhausting. I heartily agreed. During this call, my daughter and her son would grace our screens and through…
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The Library of the Living and the Library of the Dead
I am in the process of re-organizing my Google Drive and in doing so, I stumbled upon a bit of writing from 2013 that would have been a perfect addition to the post Haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance which I wrote earlier this year: When I was a…
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Making blog posts count as part of a not-so-secret feminist agenda
Introduction: Secret Feminist Agenda & Masters of Text I am an academic librarian who has earned permanence – which is the word we use at the University of Windsor to describe the librarian-version of tenure. When I was hired, there was no explicit requirement for librarians to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Nowadays, newly hired librarians…
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Open Refine for Librarians
On October 24th, 2018, I gave a half-hour online presentation as part of a virtual conference from NISO called That Cutting Edge: Technology’s Impact on Scholarly Research Processes in the Library. My presentation was called: And here is the script and the slides that I presented: Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to introduce…
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Back to the Future of Libraries
I am in the process of reading Clive Thompson’s Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World and I have to say that I am, so far, disappointed with the book. I am a fan of Thompson’s technology journalism and I really enjoyed his earlier work, Smarter than you think:…
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Haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance
This post was inspired by the article Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor by Liz Settoducato which was published earlier this month on In the library with the lead pipe. The article, in brief: Libraries are haunted houses. As our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we…
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Digitization is a multiplier and metadata is a fractal
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (sorry), Helga Hufflepuff’s goblet is stored in a vault at Gringotts that’s been cursed so that every time you touch one of the objects in it, dozens of copies are created. On the cover of the original U.K. edition of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione are pictured…
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Blogging again and Never again
It appears that I haven’t written a single post on this blog since July of 2018. Perhaps it is all the talk of resolutions around me but I sincerely would like to write more in this space in 2019. And the best way to do that is to just start. In December of last year…
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What ruined the web was the lack of good library software
In some libraries, there are sometimes particular collections in which the objects are organized by the order in which they were acquired (at my place of work, our relatively small collection of movies on DVD are ordered this way). This practice makes it easy for a person to quickly see what has been most recently…
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OK ScholComm – time for some game theory
I have approximate knowledge of when I was first introduced to game theory. It was the late 1980s and I was in a classroom and we were shown a documentary featured The Prisoner’s Dilemma (which is best understood through Nicky Case’s The Evolution of Trust). Some idle googling on my part makes me think that…