In this week's Thursday Threads, I'll point to articles on the contentious subject of facial recognition technology. This tech, currently used by law enforcement and various businesses around the world, raises critical ethical and privacy questions. Beyond the instances where facial recognition use has resulted in wrongful apprehensions by law …

This week's Thursday Threads looks at digital storage from the past and the future. There are articles about the mechanics of massive data storage systems in tech giants like Google and Amazon, the still existing use of floppy disks in certain industries, and the herculean efforts of digital archivists to …

This week, I'm going to tug on time. This follows the last item in last week's issue of Thursday Threads: The Clock that Made Power Grids Possible. Two years ago, I also published an issue about time, pointing to articles about eliminating the leap second, time standards on the moon …

I'm about halfway through Saul Griffith's 2021 Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, and I find the author makes a compelling point about bringing nearly everything—energy creation, transmission, and use—to a common factor of "electricity" and then optimizing that system. There are many interesting problems …

One of the very first issues of Thursday Threads was on data centers (2011). That issue had articles on a major Amazon Web Services outage, remote data centers powered by renewable energy, and videos about Google's and Meta's data centers. Unfortunately, I've found that the videos are lost to time …

Inspired by Tom Whitwell's 52 things I learned in 2022, I started my own list of things I learned in 2023. Reaching the end of another year, it is time for Things I Learned In 2024:

1. Some jurisdictions use "day fines"—or fining an offender based on that person's daily …

Four years ago I posted my reflections here on the 2020 presidential election. This year, I worked the election again as a precinct election official ("PEO"—a poll worker) for Franklin County, Ohio. Much like four years ago, it was a record-setting voter turn-out year, and unlike four years ago …

This was going to be only a post about how I got the Ghost newsletter software to use Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) instead of the built-in Mailgun support, but it turned into that plus why I can't use Ghost for the DLTJ Newsletter.

Ghost's bulk email delivery problem …

One thing that would dramatically clarify the controlled digital lending concept in general and the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit in particular is having distinct terms for types of ebooks. I propose that we refer to them as digital and digitized. A digital book is one that is born digital …

In my prior two posts, I outlined a strategy to minimize personally identifiable information in library automation systems (idea overview, impact on FOLIO). This approach uses a unique single-service identifier (the "pairwise-id") recognized exclusively by the identity provider (IdP) and the library's service provider (SP), effectively preventing any cross-system correlation …

In the previous blog post, I outlined the concept of a library system with no personally identifiable information as a way to safeguard a patron's right to privacy. Library systems commonly retain traces of a patron's library activity, and the librarian ethos protects a patron's privacy as they conduct their …

Library systems hold significant information about patrons, including their search and reading histories. For librarians, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of this data is an essential component of professional ethics. In the United States, for example, the third point in the American Library Association Code of Ethics is "We protect …

The British Library suffered a major cyber attack in October 2023 that encrypted and destroyed servers, exfiltrated 600GB of data, and has had an ongoing disruption of library services after four months. Yesterday, the Library published an 18-page report on the lessons they are learning. (There are also some community …

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 …

While on vacation, I was catching up on some personal knowledge management maintenance I had been putting off. At one task—adding a page for a new employee at the company I work for—I noticed that the page for my company was gone. Odd, that page has been in …

WOLFcon—the World Open Library Foundation Conference—was held last month, and all of the meetings were recorded using Zoom. Almost all of the sessions were presentations and knowledge-sharing, so giving the recordings a wider audience on YouTube make sense. With nearly 50 sessions, though, manually processing the recordings would …

In May 2023 I was asked to join the opening session at Georgia's GIL User Group Meeting. Along with Chris Sharp and Emily Gore, we reflected on the conference theme: The Future is Open. GALILEO has an exciting time ahed of it...their libraries are adopting FOLIO and a new …

The Congressional Research Service has posted four reports about verifying users' ages for various services online in the past few months. This is a tricky area because there are open questions around compliance and potential free speech impacts. Figuring out how to protect minors while not infringing on lawful communication …

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 …

According to reputable sources, this blog contains 0.00006% of the world's knowledge.

1. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie tools like ChatGPT and Bing-AI are being used as question-answering tools. If you listen to the hype surrounding what LLMs can do, you can hardly be faulted for thinking that …