Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

Mmm, nothing like being handed a 7-year-old 1TB portable drive with the only known copy of the output of a summer-long digital preservation project. 😟

Time to get that shiz in our multi-node storage network! (https://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/ODLRC/About+the+OLRC)

Well that's why nobody was joining this conference call... it's next week.

#doh

Have seen a few different projects not supporting MySQL 5.7 because ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY being turned on by default is breaking things (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/group-by-handling.html).

That can happen when you start by deliberately ignoring standards and then slowly start implementing them as you realize why they were part of the standard (SQL-92 in this case) in the first place?

Previous behaviour: "the values chosen [were] nondeterministic, which is probably not what you want"

Our university librarian wrote that I "had the lightest workload" of our team.

I am:

* the only systems person for an ILS, IR, Drupal-based website, proxy, OpenURL resolver, & custom web apps
* liaison to Graduate Studies
* coordinator of reference services
* data & GIS & research data management person (interim)

He might add liaison to Engineering to that list.

If that's the lightest workload, how fucked are we?

And sending an email to a journal reporting that I was unable to find a policy on self-deposit in institutional repositories and suggesting that they add one (including wording of attribution statements and guidance on maximum embargo periods based on funder requirements...).

Because I'm going to change the OA world, dammit, one recalcitrant journal at a time

That's two OJS-based journals now that don't seem to be posting their ISSNs. Wonder if it's something to do with upgrading to OJS 3.x and the non-bleeding-eye templates?

On the path of tracking down the open access policies of a handful of journals for some teaching faculty colleagues, I have gone down the rat hole of suggesting updates & new journals to Sherpa/RoMEO and using curl against the ISSN portal to retrieve Turtle LD to verify an ISSN that is not posted on the journal's own website

A 48-line email signature.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I'm leading a Zotero workshop for humanities masters students next week. I was sure I had led a similar workshop in the past and started searching for my materials.

It was back in 2008! https://coffeecode.net/presentation-libx-and-zotero.html

Guess I've got a _lot_ of updating to do :)

Final sentence in our elementary school's newsletter: "Finally, don't forget to follow us on Facebook!"

ARGHGARHGHRHGAHRGH

Admin's goal seems to be to just eliminate us through attrition.

Given the divide-and-conquer zero-sum pressures on every department, I would be surprised if my teaching faculty colleagues were willing to fight for replacement hires for us.

Contract negotiations are next year. We'll see what happens.

Even though I theoretically have a job for life and am very grateful for that, it is very difficult to stay positive in this environment.

New admin's position for hiring tenure-track teaching faculty is that the departments must launch new programs. If they're profitable (as measured by enrolment) after three years, they can get a TT hire.

As we have no way to launch a program, let alone a profitable one by this definition, we're doomed.

MPOW established faculty status for librarians decades ago.

Our last tenure-track hire was 6 years ago, when we replaced 2 librarians who retired and converted one staff position into a librarian position (magic).

All 3 of those librarians have since left for greener fields. We've had sessional hires approved for 2 of them. No tenure-track.

I'm cautiously optimistic that the underlying network issue has been resolved... but I've also put together a procedure for checking our A-Z database links to determine where we can move from HTTP to HTTPS (with prioritization, based on those that don't automatically redirect).

Hey maybe we'll even find resources that no longer resolve in that list! (Welp, already did... so there's that)

So now I'm working through our entire list of databases, making special note of which ones either don't offer HTTPS at all (very bad), or which don't automatically redirect from HTTP to their HTTPS incarnation (not great).

Oh hey I wonder what happens if I click on this personalized "Unsubscribe me from this mailing list" link in the forwarded email?

😈😈😈😈😈😈

A week later and https://code4lib.social/@dbs/102701892851272801 is still an issue.

The dropped packets are limited to HTTP, so switching to HTTPS works around the problem. It's another symptom of technical deficit that we weren't on HTTPS where databases offer it and it's robust. (Anything I run directly has been on HTTPS for years, it's 3rd party services that have been the issue).

I've been tackling the problems one-by-one but IT really needs to fix the underlying problem.

Our university librarian forwards a newsletter to all of us with the comment "FYI" every week.

It's something we can (and I have) subscribe to ourselves. I've asked him to stop forwarding it to us because of that, and he refuses. And he also refuses to take me off his forwarding list.

Maybe if he commented on the contents, like "hey we should do this and I'm willing to fund it" there would be some value-add. But instead it just feels paternalistic/controlling/email overflow.

Colleague was processing a donation and asked if I wanted some old punch cards as bookmarks/nostalgia.

I took a look and realized they were grading cards that appear to have encoded student names, numbers, grades, etc.

So now the punch cards are headed off to the shredder. Never thought that I would flag a decades-old potential privacy violation cold case!

Marched in my city's Labour Day parade with my family. A good outing, despite some rain at the start. So many friendly people.