Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

Started the day with an awesome bike ride on some trails that looped around a lake. It's pretty hot here so after breakfast I was hiding out in a dark room to cool down. Felt strangely low energy and ended up doing almost nothing but dozing for many hours.

Then around 16:00 realized I forgot to take my meds this morning. OMG!

While much of this year has been crap, our rhubarb seems to have used it as fertilizer. Crumble coming up.

Here's my draft workload as a librarian for the coming year:

Liaison, School of Architecture only
Liaison, Faculty of Arts (English programs)
Liaison, Faculty of Health and Education (English programs)
Interlibrary loans
Accessibility
Data & Statistics (English)
GIS
Research Data Management
Scholarly communication & publishing
Technical services
Systems

If it isn't obvious, this is *ridiculous*. The equivalent of at least 4 separate positions.

Even better, when I enter "2430", it says "The information supplied does not appear to be a valid time. Please use the HHMM format."

🙄

No no no!!! That's not how time works. There is no "2459"--especially if you're making me choose between AM and PM!

That made my reviewing job significantly easier.

I was asked to review an article in my research area. Okay, cool, I'll do my academic duty.

By the time I finished setting up my reviewer account and downloading the paper to start reading it, I received a *ping* from a vanity service telling me one of my own papers had received another notification.

Curious and grateful for the opportunity to procrastinate, I checked it out, and it was *the exact same paper that I had on my screen* but published in a different journal!

Hey Sudbury Ontario friends, Cambrian College is hiring a full-time Professor of Game Design!

Salary $67K - $115K. @victoria

https://gjobs.neogov.ca/careers/cambriancollege

Every time I change something in our Ex Libris Alma system and then go to create a report based on it, I am reminded that the report database uses an ETL process that runs once a day.

So of course things are out of sync.

"""
Data available as of: 2021-05-04 24:31:51
Data updated as of: 2021-05-03 20:00:00
"""

ARGH.

https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/080Analytics/010Introduction

Just completed point-and-clicking to apply a minor config change to 212 collections in Ex Libris Alma because they decided not to provide an "update batch job" (unlike most of the other entity types) and instead offer an "E-collection quick edit cloud app"... which failed to update 18/20 and 41/50 of the collections in my first two test runs.

Guess I should have used the API. I just can't believe how hostile this program is.

So if you're wondering why I've been quiet for a while, it's because of this awful situation that has been playing out.

Apparently the layoff notices are being sent on Monday.

How was Senate forced to approve this odious package?

By being told that if they said no, the university would close entirely. Duress and conflict of interest should have had the while thing ruled out of order, but apparently not.

I urged faculty Senators to resign from Senate rather than be complicit in this travesty, but AFAICT none resigned. I suspect many abstained.

Yesterday our university Senate was forced to approve an academic restructuring package they didn't see until the meeting started, that cuts programs and will result in mass layoffs of tenured faculty and staff and leave students with no way of competing their original program.

And it was all in-camera, so none of the discussions or arguments will be part of the publicly available minutes.

The administration made a mockery of collegial governance and the bicameral model.

We're running social media advocacy campaigns to support the faculty and staff at Laurentian University (MPOW, which declared financial insolvency one month ago).

Someone wanted to reach out to all those who tweeted one of our hashtags and was going to get a group to manually slog through the job.

Instead, half an hour later, via the power of twarc and jq, they now have a nice clean list. Thank you free & open source software!

This has returned nothing for hours:

twarc filter 'laurentian -"Laurentian elites" -"Laurentian Elite" -"Laurentian consensus" -from:@LaurentianNews'

This works nicely and shows results within the past few minutes that should have been caught by filter:

twarc search 'laurentian -"Laurentian elites" -"Laurentian Elite" -"Laurentian consensus" -from:@LaurentianNews'

Am I doing something wrong?

November: report a console error due to an SVG file with an SVG element multiple ID attributes.

February: support says "We have replicated the error but have you noticed any functional effects?"

Me: "No, it prevents rendering ~100 SVG images, I can't tell if any functions have been affected.

Please, just fix it. I've diagnosed the problem for you, your devs should be able to resolve the problem with a single commit of a single line of code."