Sadly, I have a conference budget of zero and I’ll be returning from a five day trip, otherwise I’d be all over this NEASIS&T panel next week: Buy, Hack, or Build: Optimizing your Systems for Your Users and Your Sanity with a bunch of smarties including Casey Bisson, OPAC hacker, whose libdev blog has been added to my sidebar. Free books to attendees. [thanks rich]
Author: jessamyn
National Security Letters, USAPA and you
The Washington Post has an article about the USA PATRIOT Act case from Connecticut, now with details and a long discussion about National Security Letters. Please note the software angle in this article.
[The FBI] gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow. [emphasis mine]
So you can configure a system to be as private as you can make it, but it may not be private enough.
Library 2.0
Sometimes when librarians talk like marketing people, the things they say work. Here’s a nifty little article that coalesces a lot of the smart talk I heard at Internet Librarian. Library 2.0 Movement Sees Benefits in Collaboration with Patrons.
hi – 06nov
Hi. I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s Homepage Usability book and have made some modifications to my sidebar to make some of my stuff a little more findable. Any of you rss readers who wants to remind themselves about the lovely orangeness of my home page, here’s a link: librarian.net. My to do list includes getting some solid archive links up, and getting my tag cloud visible. The current incarnation of the tag cloud just shows my top ten tags which, while interesting, doesn’t tell the whole story.
tame the web blogger survey
LIS bloggers of any stripe, please fill out Michael Stephens’ survey Who are “the Blog People?” A Survey of Librarians and their Motivations for Blogging.