So this was about three years of my life, and the lawyers have finally finished with it. Hugely grateful to co-lead Lisa Levesque and all the librarians who generously pitched in to help!
Academic Platforms and Your Privacy: Briefing Documents
https://sparcopen.org/our-work/privacy-briefing-documents/
Library Privacy Glossary
https://sparcopen.org/our-work/privacy-briefing-documents/glossary
RE: https://fediscience.org/@nyhan/117485462705582801
This reminds me of a thing at MPOW. They're doing listening sessions/focus groups about AI, and faculty recommended they talk to library staff, so they're going to do that next week. [Would they not have done so if it wasn't suggested by faculty??]
Who from the library is invited? The folks involved in various AI-related workgroups, including those who drafted the report I was commenting on a few weeks ago... but only them. :lolsob:
PSA: Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts https://www.androidauthority.com/google-auto-phone-number-verification-android-3723117/
Anyone surprised by this? Every AI and tech company wakes up each day asking the same question. How can we build an even bigger surveillance network, squeeze more profit out of it and turn George Orwell’s 1984 into reality? At this point, they are not predicting the dystopian future. They’re building it and charging its users for it. Truly evil stuff.
Clarivate/Ex Libris postponed the retirement of the current documentation portal from Nov... to Feb. "Additional time to update bookmarks and links" is great, yes, but we lose like a month of that to year-end holidays, so... thanks? :lolsob:
They provided an AI prompt to help us update links from old to new b/c they "cannot reliably redirect existing URLs". :trashfire: They didn't bother to update the (PDF!!) FAQ before emailing the Primo list, and still no info when Primo docs will be moved.
While I wait for the sandbox/my browser/etc. to load things, I'm poking at my (work) computer's Recycle Bin. Evidently I still have stuff in there that I deleted in December 2023. I think it's safe to make that go away permanently. :lolsob:
Ah, yes, there is never a greater reminder about how "the cloud is other people's computers" than when the cloud service that governs your users' abilities to sign into your computers goes down. The machines themselves are fine, but the cloud-based sign-in isn't.
And people wonder why what I really want for every library is enough server space to self-host everything and competent sysadmins to keep it running and up to date. Because if we all had that, libraries could do wondrous things.
an article title beginning 'elf-Determination'
new-to-me misspelling: relashionship (this has a surprising number of results when searched by itself!)
call numbers
legal citations
someone who adjusted their query by converting uppercase letters to lowercase
advanced search in Any field across four boxes, with * at the very end of each term (e.g. reports* --hon, what do you think that will do??)
The strangest by far: odd alphanumeric strings like 'PrdtuToz3cw' or 'SME5GyLFvs8'.
It's Zero Results Searches report day again! At least six languages are present across the ~2700 search queries.
Lots of URLs pasted into the search box (trying to get around a paywall? I'm still unclear on the thought process here)
Harvard Business Review case studies and website articles (HBR, why are you so obnoxious, ugh)
What seems to be a paragraph from someone's essay about AI (tone: skeptical :sickos: )
Copy-paste gone awry ("save cover preview..."), also from syllabi ([name] pg. x-y)
This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever
"Oh, but AI will become less socially, politically, psychologically and environmentally destructive as the tech becomes better."
Great. When that happens, the range of acceptable uses will expand accordingly. But using it as though it were not costing us dearly now is building up debts that we may never be able to pay.
RE: https://wandering.shop/@jaclarke/117362315951447699
omg I didn't know these were a thing and they are so adorable
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
I decided to answer "Hire more staff to maintain it."
Everything else I thought about putting is going in the 'general comments or feedback' box instead.
How to flummox me on a survey: ask "What is the single most important change Clarivate should make to improve its documentation?"
. . . but there are SO MANY THINGS. :coolcrying:
Today's philosophical question: Would a known issue with the Known Issues Portal have an entry in the Known Issues Portal?
How many "key priorities" can an institution have before they're all just, y'know, regular priorities?
AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems:
“Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”
The ACToRS in AI Framework
I've been using this framework over the past year as I've been increasingly brought into classrooms and conference rooms to help people make decisions about usage of the very hyped tools presented to us.
http://hedgehoglibrarian.com/2026/09/22/the-actors-in-ai-framework/
This was originally intended to be a statement of values around library technology, but it ended up becoming a bit more personal (and angry):
"Library technology in the age of generative AI" https://garbage.world/library-technology-and-generative-ai/