There will be quite a few talks at FOSDEM 2021 which may be of interest to academics. The program is huge, so I will post links to some of the relevant talks below. #FOSDEM #academia #openscience #opensource #digital #education https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/
@fosdem
Library notices & reading
People are so stressed out by receiving a library notice, they apparently don't notice that the due date is 2021-04-21 and just hit reply promising to return the item tomorrow.
I guess we've taught them to associate any communication from the library as bad news, so now that we're sending out weekly "Hey, just to let you know, here's what you currently have out" notices, it's freaking them out.
Wikipedia deletionism
Saw a lengthy article had been proposed for deletion if no action was taken within 7 days. Then noticed it had been deleted after 4 days.
I reverted the deletion and then checked the proposing user's very active contributions--it looks like most of what they do is propose articles for deletion and then delete them.
Sure, sometimes we need to prune, but my instincts lean towards pitching in and improving deficient articles. So this felt shocking to me.
Just finished WikiPedia's WikiEdu training modules, and while they're fantastic, I find it ironic that the modules are not themselves editable.
I'd like to correct simple mistakes I've found, e.g. changing "Assigned trainings" into a heading on https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/instructors/new-instructor-orientation/dashboard-resources-tab or typos like "possibile" elsewhere.
But there isn't a feedback / report problem link on each page. Luckily, it does request feedback once you've finished the training. So I'm using that :)
I love @pluralistic but I also love Mastodon's ability to filter phrases. Just added 5 filters to drop the repetitive posts that he tacks onto every one of his threads.
If it was a single, long post that had the links to his books & newsletter at the end, that would be fine. But my feed fills up a little too quickly; filters help tame the beast a bit.
Also that document is 5 years old and shows a completely different UI for the Admin Tool. And nothing analogous in the new UI. Good job Elsevier.
Another day, another Drupal 7 hack. We don't want to publish author names & pictures for our content-type "news" so after trying to re-immerse myself in templates, trying various hooks to unset the corresponding vars, and finding no difference I finally just added
.node-news .user-picture { display: none }
to my theme's style.css and it's good enough for me.
Sorry for the unnecessary bloat, Internet.
Here's my slow, simple script for comparing the titles of the bibs our holdings were attached to in Ex Libris Alma against the bibs in our legacy Evergreen library system.
Necessary because of missing accents in many of the Alma bibs (thanks anglophone partners!) and outright mismatches based on OCLC numbers (often data quality issues in our bibs).
https://gitlab.com/denials/compare-bibs-alma-to-evergreen
SRU and a simple REST API #FTW although it's taken all week to process 600K records.
Library insecurity, vendors
This was after I had given our contact staff person the required stunnel cert and the link to the Ex Libris docs on how to set up stunnel.
So I guess I get to go in and set it up myself. Glad we're paying all these professionals to do their professional stuff.
Library insecurity, vendors
Ex Libris did the right thing and requires stunnel to encrypt the otherwise plaintext SIP communications for self-checks, RFID pads, etc.
BiblioTheca support person trying to configure their hardware fails to get stunnel working and tells the library staff person "there is no personal information passed between your PC and the server, just item IDs and titles".
And user IDs and names and emails, not to mention transactions that could be performed.
Argh.
Accessibility rant
For more than a decade now, the Mac's screen reader has been able to use the trackpad for navigation. It's not the fastest method, but for those who are blind and have low dexterity, it's much faster than sticky keys and trying to use the keyboard. Meanwhile, Linux *still* doesn't have this, and it's always "well GTK has to do this," "Well ATSPI has to do this." "Well Orca needs this." Funny how a closed system is less ableist than Linux, the "free" system.
Academic privacy, surveillance, EFF event
The event "At Home (and On Campus) with EFF" that was supposed to happen today has been rescheduled for January 14th at 12:00 PM PST
Join us for a fireside chat with @flexlibris, ED of @LibraryFreedom, on January 7th as we discuss the growing risk of academic surveillance. https://www.eff.org/event/home-and-campus-eff
Hello everyone, I’m a librarian from South America. Hope to learn and contribute about privacy, wellbeing and good use of technology in life.
#introductions