Reading Time: 4 minutes
A long time ago, I worked at a software company that developed a law practice management system. I was about to head off for law school and had my first PC. It was pretty great. The internet existed but it was still something that I only connected to when I needed it. Most of what I…
Continue Reading The Weak Links

Reading Time: 6 minutes
One thing that I attempt with this blog is to share what I know. It may not be much and it may not be exactly what someone is looking for, but I always think that knowledge is accretive. Like a puzzle, a bit gets added here and there until the picture comes into being. I don’t…
Continue Reading In With the In Crowd

Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was adamant that the artificial intelligence was wrong. My family had given me a bird feeder that came with a camera. As the birds appeared, the camera would take pictures and make an assessment of the bird’s species. It gathered a location for the camera, so it could geo-locate its selections, which made sense. It…
Continue Reading Correct Twice A Day

Reading Time: 5 minutes
My student evaluations came back from my first semester back teaching. I had sort of forgotten that they might exist, since the prompt for them had hit the students before the end of term. Then there had been the final grading, and commencement and, frankly, this was all in my rearview mirror. I admit a bit…
Continue Reading Feedback In Its Fullness

Reading Time: 5 minutes
Mozilla has brought Pocket to an end, an acquisition it made in 2017. Although it was an award-winning read later app, Mozilla felt “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved”, whatever that means. The outcome appears to be that people who use Firefox can see Mozilla’s “algo-torial”-selected content within the Firefox…
Continue Reading An Archive of My Ohhh Noooo…

Reading Time: 7 minutes
The last eight months or so has seen a lot of upheaval for me. It came at a time when a big project came to an end, which was fortunate. But I moved states and moved my lodging twice. I started to live with my wife again after a few years living in different locations because…
Continue Reading Out of Habit

Reading Time: 6 minutes
The grades for this semester are in. I am not a fan of grading although I was glad of the opportunity of potentially having an impact on students. I thought the final exams were better than the early work they were doing, for the most part. I feel confident of their success on the bar exam…
Continue Reading Assessing the Possibilities

Reading Time: 7 minutes
The semester has come to an end. I’d picked up a course to teach at the last minute and so that is also now complete. The pacing in an academic law library is quite different from what I’ve experienced in other organizations. Far more ups and downs but also coupled with the expectation of wearing multiple…
Continue Reading Finding My Pace

Reading Time: 6 minutes
One recurring thought relating to artificial intelligence is its impact on new staff. The promise of AI is that it will routinize the lower value work, the repetitive tasks, and allow knowledge workers to focus on higher value projects and outputs. This is great, but it begs the question of how someone new to a field…
Continue Reading The Unlearning Machine

Reading Time: 7 minutes
I’m still in my first year at my new role and it’s budget season. This is one of those perennial experiences that you would think would become routine. If you move libraries, though, you find that each organization does it differently, even if they use the same words. At the same time, I’ve been able to…
Continue Reading Building the Budget

Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the things I’ve learned both from self-hosting a server inside my home and from using commercial hosting is that I want bad actors as far from my server as possible. When I migrated my hosting company recently, it was primarily for cost reasons. I was delighted, though, to find that they had substantially better…
Continue Reading Push Spam Further Away

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Librarians are knowledge workers. We work on things that require attention to detail and investigation, whether we’re cataloging books or answering obscure reference questions. I am always interested in new research on interruptions and thinking around how to improve the work environment so that librarians can be as effective as possible.

Microsoft recently surveyed 31,000 people…
Continue Reading Stop Bothering Me

Reading Time: 6 minutes
My recent travel to Canada couldn’t have been more normal. I drove up to the Ambassador Bridge border control with very few other cars from Canada. The person in front of me was in hijab and showed an ID as they entered the gate. They were waved through quickly and I took that as a good…
Continue Reading Prepare for Uncertainty