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Choose your quarantine character
Choose your quarantine character: I have decided that the character that I am going to embody for this quarantine is an advocate of games. You may notice that I did not use the word gamer to describe this role. The reason why I do not call myself a gamer is because to do so would…
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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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Considering dark deposit
I have a slight feeling of dread. In the inbox of the email address associated with MPOW’s institutional repository are more than a dozen notifications that a faculty member has deposited their research work for inclusion. I should be happy about this. I should be delighted that a liaison librarian spoke highly enough of the…
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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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If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost
That which computation sets out to map and model it eventually takes over. Google sets out to index all human knowledge and becomes the source and the arbiter of that knowledge: it became what people think. Facebook set out to map the connections between people – the social graph – and became the platform for…
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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…
Librarian of Things
Mita Williams. Her blog.