Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022, I started my own list of things I learned in 2023. I got well into 2024 before I realized I hadn't published it! So, in no particular order:

1. In the summer of 2011, a lab technician at Los Alamos National …

One of the hidden gems of the Library of Congress is the Congressional Research Service (CRS). With a staff of about 600 researchers, analysts, and writers, the CRS provides "policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation." It is kind …

What a strange article title to type: Sanctioning Governments on the Internet. What does that even mean? Who would decide? Who would implement the decision? To say nothing of the consequences of trying to impose an Internet Sanction on a government or a country.

The internet as we know it …

The invoice is in. This reengineered blog and the reinvigorated Thursday Threads newsletter cost just US$2.51 last month. All of that cost is in the blog construction and delivery. The cost of delivering the newsletter alone falls well below AWS' always-free tiers of service. Not bad! And as …

Success! Four parts plus a half (or a "re-do"" of part 2):

1. Ramp up automation for adding reading sources to Obsidian
2. Refactor the process of building this static website on AWS
   • Fix the webmentions cache, an unanticipated diversion
3. Recreate the ability for readers to get updates by email
4. Turn the …

Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) editor here. Becky Yoose's Twitter thread has stirred up a great deal of attention to an article published yesterday. This post has my own thoughts on the issue...published on Twitter to match Becky's medium and here on my blog for posterity.

So yeah that Code4Lib Journal …

It 'tis the season for graduations, and this year my nephew is graduating from high school. My sister-in-law created a memory book—"a surprise Book of Advice as he moves to the next phase of his life." What an interesting opportunity to reflect! This is what I came up with …

So I'm paying more attention to the DLTJ blog now, and one of the things I quickly noticed is that the Atom syndication feed was broken. Or, at least modern web clients would refuse to retrieve the feed. The problem turned out to be not with the feed file, but …

Well, we have reached the end of another arbitrary orbit around our small unregarded yellow sun¹, and this primitive ape-descended life form² is looking back on this blog's past twelve months. Not much to show for it -- this'll be just the third blog post this year.

And yet …

I came across Jen Simmon's call for a #newwwyear by way of Eric Meyer:

Ok, here’s the deal. Tweet your personal website plan with the hashtag #newwwyear (thanks @jamiemchale!):
1) When will you start?
2) What will you try to accomplish?
3) When is your deadline?

Improve an existing …

I'm bringing this blog out of dormancy to add my voice to the chorus of people defending net neutrality. It isn't the first time; we've been here before when the rules were first adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015. New president, new people in charge, but the reasons …

Earlier this year the STM Association -- a trade association for academic and professional publishers -- started a project called RA21: Resource Access in the 21st Century. The project is a renewed approach to moving past network address recognition and proxy agents as a way of authenticating access to licensed content. I …

Today I was privileged to present to the 6th International Congress of Technological Innovation, Innovatics 2016, organized by Duoc UC Libraries, Library of Santiago, and University of Chile Libraries. The conference was simultaneously translated in English and Spanish. To aid the translators, I wrote out the text of my presentation …

Edited after initial publication to add: My thoughts are with the people in and around Charleston, South Carolina, this evening. What is making it out of the media fog to me tonight is your compassion for each other. Please be well as you absorb, internalize, and recover from this shocking …

This article has been translated into Polish.

Over the next couple months, NISO is managing a project to "develop a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems." ((From NISO's March 11, 2015, press release about the project.)) I'm honored and excited to be on the …

On Saturday, at six years, eleven and a half hours old, Rebecca Meyer -- a spark of joy to her parents, siblings, friends, and people she never met -- died as a tumor in her brain snuffed out her spark. I learned from Jeffrey Zeldman of Matt Robin's idea to honor her …

Issue #20 of the Code4Lib Journal was just published, and I had the honor of being the coordinating editor for the issue. Being on the editorial committee of the Journal has been a heck of an experience, and I think I've had just a taste of what journal editors and …

Earlier this month I found myself apologizing for some errant tweets that ended up in my Twitter stream ((The problem turned out to be a forgotten automatic posting of blog posts into Delicious. When I was cleaning up links in posts using, these post changes were being added as new …

Do public libraries host birthday parties for children as part of their programming? I was with my son at a party for one of his friends a local bouncy inflatables place and happened to be thinking about library stuff while waiting for him to finish bouncing around. Suddenly (for me …

You could say "this is a service to watch" but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the 'Unglue.It' service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license. [caption id="p3675-tweet" align="alignright" width …