I’m saddened to hear about the Texas legislature’s decision to bring to the floor bills on gay adoption and transgender bathroom restriction. I have spent a good amount of time in Texas, putting on the ER&L Conference and the Library IdeaDrop House and visiting family and friends. Even before California decided to prohibit their state employees from spending state money in Texas, I’ve been thinking about the impact of all of this on our ER&L community. We made sure to include gender neutral bathrooms during our conference in 2017. This was the first time this was done at the AT&T...
TA3M: Libraries, Digital Privacy, and Data Literacy
On Monday, June 15, 2015, I participated in a panel at Techno-Activism Third Mondays (TA3M) entitled, “Libraries, Digital Privacy, and Data Literacy” hosted at ThoughtWorks. The event was described as “a conversation for those concerned about the impact of surveillance and data collection on citizens, specifically on disadvantaged communities” and space to “learn more about the privacy and data issues that librarians face in their work and new efforts to empower them to address these issues.” RESOURCE: Description of TA3M: “Libraries, Digital Privacy, and Data Literacy.” RESOURCE: Audio from TA3M: “Libraries, Digital Privacy, and Data Literacy” courtesy of Joly MacFie from Internet Society....
MOBIUS Keynote: Not Just Digital: Redefining our roles across channels (and beyond)
Keynote Remarks for the MOBIUS 2015 Conference, “Not Just Digital: Redefining our roles across channels (and beyond)” Hello everyone. Thanks for the warm welcome and thanks to the staff at MOBIUS. This conference is so well organized and everyone at MOBIUS I’ve interacted with has been amazing. I just have to say that I am so excited to be here around some of my favorite types of people – librarians and Midwesterners. Thanks so much for the having me here this year. I was supposed to be up here a year ago. I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to...
Developing a consensus framework for patron privacy
It’s a common thing these days to hear about data breaches or to get a letter in the mail from your credit card company, your healthcare provide, or a retail store where you recently shopped informing you that your information may have gotten into the wrong hands. For the most part, this is a technical problem though it could just as well be a problem of a lack of strong internal policies and procedures by those who hold our valuable private information. Within the library community, we’ve seen the technical side of this problem most clearly during the Adobe Digital...
Libraries, librarians, and the future of the web, Closing keynote session full text from the 2014 #dlfforum
Libraries, librarians, and the future of the web Thank you. I’m so grateful and humbled to be here today in front of you. I attended my first and only DLF in CA in 2009 while I was at UCLA. Part of my job was working with faculty and students in supporting OA publications and our instance of the UC’s IR. So, I’ve really enjoyed catching up on what you all are working on. I am so impressed with your work and the maturation of the conversations over the years. It’s amazing for me to see the growth of this community...
Databites Talk with Chris Wiggins
Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist at NY Times and professor at Columbia and cofounder of hackny came to D&S to talk with us about two areas he’s been thinking about. Hard, unanswerable questions got us thinking and discussing the future of online communities and the ethics of data science. Chris cofounded hackny, an organization that supports student hackathons where young people come together to do play, build, and create with other like-minded people. We discussed how to broaden who attends, thus broadening the future of tech. It’s something we all agree is important, but how do you do it without insulting, demeaning,...
Databites Talk with UN Global Pulse
Several members of the UN Global Pulse spoke with us at Data & Society about big data and development. UN Global Pulse is an innovation initiative of the UN. They bring together the data, innovation and tools, and the problem statements come from UN partners. They see a lot of opportunities in the big data space, including enhancement of early warning (like predicting a financial meltdown), real-time awareness (by following a tool like Twitter), and real-time evaluation (such as getting as seeing the immediate effects of an intervention of program rather than just waiting for the evaluation or summary analysis). The...
Databites Talk with Claudia Perlich
Have you ever gone to the NYT homepage and saw an ad for a nice pair of shoes that seem to fit your style perfectly? Have you ever gotten an ad for pizza and thought, I don’t want pizza. Why does this website think I want pizza? Do you ever wonder what is happening in the background to make these ads perfectly fit you or show you something that seems way off base? Claudia Perlich, Chief Scientist at Dstillery simplified what happens when you go to a site like NYT. Essentially, someone browses with cookies enabled, information from those cookies...
Databites Talk with Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of MIT Center for Civic Media, spoke with D&S came to ask, what constitutes a civic act (voting, protesting, volunteering for a social cause, etc.)? This is such an interesting question in the digital world. There are many factors involved in why we decide to perform a civic act, such as the cost it will take for the individual, efficacy of the act, and the sense of duty one feels to perform the act. So, if we want more civic engagement, we need to ask how do we reduce cost and increase effectiveness of their engagement (this...
Welcome!
Working in libraries, I created a thought leadership effort in ER&L and increased our library presences by tapping into the SXSWi Community. Follow me as I sharpen my focus on the questions around our technology-rich lives, the effects on society, and privacy through the lens of the values librarians hold dear – access, privacy, democracy, diversity, and intellectual freedom.