Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Issue 101: Data Centers

    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 …

     Posted on  January 02, 2025
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • One Year of Learning 2024

    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 …
     Posted on  December 14, 2024
     and last updated December 31, 2024
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • As a Cog in the Election System Again: Reflections on Working the 2024 Presidential Election

    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 …

     Posted on  November 10, 2024
     and last updated November 11, 2024
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • Ghost Newsletter Software Findings: Got Past the Mailgun Problem, but Got Stuck On Ugly HTML

    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 …

     Posted on  July 14, 2024
     and last updated July 14, 2024
     ·  18 minutes reading time
  • Digital versus Digitized: On the Hachette v. Internet Archive Appeal Oral Argument

    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 …

     Posted on  July 06, 2024
     and last updated July 06, 2024
     ·  14 minutes reading time
  • The ILS without patron data: open questions

    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 …

     Posted on  June 23, 2024
     and last updated July 06, 2024
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment realized with FOLIO

    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 …

     Posted on  June 21, 2024
     and last updated July 06, 2024
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment

    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 …

     Posted on  June 20, 2024
     and last updated July 06, 2024
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • Learnings from the British Library Cybersecurity Report

    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 …

     Posted on  March 09, 2024
     and last updated March 20, 2024
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • One Year of Learning 2023

    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 …
     Posted on  January 18, 2024
     and last updated January 18, 2024
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Restoring Obsidian Knowledgebase from MacOS Time Machine at the Command Line

    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 …

     Posted on  December 31, 2023
     and last updated December 31, 2023
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Processing WOLFcon Conference Recordings with FFMPEG

    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 …

     Posted on  September 19, 2023
     and last updated September 19, 2023
     ·  12 minutes reading time
  • On Open Library Services: Reflections from the GIL User Group Meeting

    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 …

     Posted on  September 03, 2023
     and last updated September 02, 2023
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • Considerations for Online Age Verification (in the U.S.)

    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 …

     Posted on  September 02, 2023
     and last updated September 02, 2023
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Congressional Research Service Syndication Feed

    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 …

     Posted on  May 29, 2023
     and last updated May 29, 2023
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • This website contains 0.00006% of the world's knowledge

    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 …
     Posted on  April 30, 2023
     and last updated April 30, 2023
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Reflections on four-months-after-Twitter

    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 …

     Posted on  April 16, 2023
     and last updated April 16, 2023
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Issue 100: Internet Governance

    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 …

     Posted on  March 23, 2023
     and last updated March 22, 2023
     ·  8 minutes reading time
  • Controlled Digital Lending…What's the Fuss?

    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 …

     Posted on  March 16, 2023
     and last updated March 18, 2023
     ·  18 minutes reading time
  • Issue 99: Copyright for Generative Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2, and the like)

    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 …

     Posted on  March 02, 2023
     and last updated March 01, 2023
     ·  11 minutes reading time