Reading Time: 6 minutes
A password is such a simple thing. People do not need much help to make a password. The difficulty comes when you want them to make a strong password. It increases when you ask them to make multiple unique passwords. As the difficulty increases, you create reluctance because each new, unique, strong password slows down people
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David Whelan Blogs
Latest from David Whelan
Own Your Own Stuff
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I don’t write for money. Some of what I write, here or in publications, may eventually mean I can take a particular job or have a particular experience. This flexibility means that I sometimes say no to opportunities. I’m especially likely to say no if a publisher wants to own what I write. Here’s a recent
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Speaking in Crisis
Reading Time: 14 minutes
As some of you may know, our family’s personal tragedy returned to the media recently. It was a stressful time for me as the family spokesperson. For reasons that I’ll get into below, it was vastly more difficult than it has been before. As I was coming out the other side of the storm, it occurred
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Circles of Misconceptions
Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the challenges of a courthouse law library is to serve a broad audience of researchers. Perhaps more than any other law library, we serve people across a lifecycle. I was talking with one of the people who used our law library at the start of their career and even, as they are closing in
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Fit or Purpose
Reading Time: 7 minutes
We have been going through a large amount of staff change since I arrived in San Diego 9 months ago. Perhaps its the result of leaving the fog of the pandemic and sailing out into the sunshine again. People are seeing new horizons. We’ve had some retirements and resignations to go to new work contexts. And
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Information Shifts
Reading Time: 7 minutes
One of the many reasons I blog is because of the technology. Ever since I first learned html back in the late ’90s, I’ve been fascinated with web publishing. For many years I ran my own web server. Then, four or five years ago, I finally committed to having someone else host it. It takes care
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I’ve Seen the Mastodon
I am now on Mastodon, the open source social media software. It’s not a platform like Twitter or Facebook. It’s just software and I am on an instance of it called Mastodon.world. I have not left Twitter nor do I plan to. But, like LinkedIn or Google+ or other platforms I’ve looked into, I’m curious about whether there
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The Law Underfoot
The last mile of legal information is where law libraries can have the most impact. We can patch the gap between free-to-access information and actually helping people find and stitch together the information they need. Our ability to help people navigate the information – to understand it, rather than just browse and search it – is our strength. And local
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A Return to Public Speaking
I gave a speech the other night. It’s the second public speaking event I’ve had in the last few months. Well, last few years, really. The pandemic meant that, even when I did a presentation, it was virtual and, somehow, simpler. It has been interesting to do something again after having fallen out of practice.
The first opportunity I had
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The Modest Voice
Our law library received a financial donation. It was larger than normal but not so large as to involve naming rights or anything. The donating law firm asked that I write a letter recognizing the gift, to the lawyer who asked that it be made. They are retiring after decades and they valued the law library’s role in their professional
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Batch Metadata and Images
I like taking photographs and post the better ones out in the open. In most cases, you can expose images on the web to search engines and they’ll be indexed. A search on Google or Bing will return them under the Images tab. I was interested in seeing how to get my indexed images to respond to the License
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The Tyranny of the Hour
The latest management challenge is “I can’t see you work, therefore you must not be working.” It’s unfair and reflects weak management, weak leadership, and a failure of trust. Law libraries that are going to successfully adapt to hybrid work are going to need leaders to adapt to ambiguity of oversight. So are law libraries that are not going hybrid.
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Measured Marketing
I don’t trust marketing. I use ad blockers and I rarely interact with media (like video) that incorporates a lot of marketing. It’s … woolly. One of the biggest trust issues I have with marketing is whether it actually does anything. At some level, I realize it does impact people’s choices. But I’d prefer a verifiable way to see
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Call a Professional
Law librarians want their seat at the table. And, when we’re overlooked, we raise the issue. We are professionals with a specific expertise. That expertise comes from experience and exposure, some of which overlaps with other professionals. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how to deal with the edges of our expertise and being as mindful
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Law Library Continuity
Our Chief Financial Officer died. It’s a trauma on so many levels. There has been a lot to process. One thing it has highlighted is that there is a lot of our law library’s operation that doesn’t require a library degree. Also, that not a lot of that operation is transparent. Law library directors and those aspiring to lead law
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