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:
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.
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 …
It's coming up on four months this week since I left Twitter, and I started wondering about the impact of that.
On the whole, I'm still quite fine with the decision.
(If you need an itemized list of how Twitter is falling short of its history and its idealized self …
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive action.
(See Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?, Thursday Threads issue 89.)
A year later now, that discussion has …
On March 16, 2023, I gave a presentation with this title to the code4lib conference in Princeton, New Jersey.
The suggested links from the end of the presentation are listed below followed by a rough transcript of the talk.
As I noted in the talk, the judge in the Hachette …
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023
This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law.
Cecil Mae was a wonderful person.
I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy.
She enjoyed playing …
If you have been following social media news, you know that Twitter is having its issues.
Although there is still a bit to go before it goes away (or, more likely, puts up a paywall to view tweets), it seems prudent to save Twitter content so it can be viewed …
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267. Translation of the Latin original from circa 397 CE.
This week we look at time from a few points of view:
The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence.
(This specific field of artificial intelligence is "large language models" or LLM).
There were two LLM threads in DLTJ Thursday Threadsissue 95 and a whole issue six weeks ago (issue 93).
I want to promise that …
Metadata is at the core of what libraries do.
("metadata" is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.)
We gather information about the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …
E-books are a prominent theme looking back at a couple of year-end issues of DLTJ Thursday Threads.
In 2010, a writer in Boston Review wondered about "books after Amazon."
In 2011, an author for O'Reilly Media's Radar blog wrote that "readers sure to like ebooks" and "DRM is full of …
My relationship with Twitter crossed a new line yesterday. As I posted on Mastodon (one, two):
Have just deleted the Twitter app on mobile. Felt the need to ramp down stress this week, and the current owner’s meltdown is unnecessary drama. There are still a few people there that …
This week we jump into the world of chat-bots driven by new artificial intelligence language models.
The pace of announcements about general-purpose tools driven by large training sets of texts or images has quickened, and the barrier to experimenting with these tools has dropped.
There are now fully-functional websites where …
