Group items tagged

There is quite a bit of alarming data in what the project has gathered, and one of those pieces of information is that more than 148,000 of the sites surveyed are vulnerable to the BEAST attack, which was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and disclosed last year. Their attack uses what's known as a chosen-plaintext attack against the AES implementation in the TLS 1.0 protocol and enables them to use a custom tool they wrote to steal and decrypt supposedly secure HTTPS cookies. The attacker can then hijack the victim's secure SSL session with a site such as an e-commerce site or online banking site.

I'm very heartened by this development, and by the implication that libraries are taking control of their own metadata in order to make the items within their collections more findable, and more easy to integrate with other mediums.

Even though it's not going to be free and open source, it's cool to see that new blazingly fast databases are being developed. 

Very interesting concept. I don't know if I really want people calling me at 2 am to chat about Webpacs. By Felicia A. Smith on I recently read an interesting article titled Make Room for Daddy...And Mommy: Helicopter Parents Are Here, which states, "Helicopter Parents hover over their children interceding as soon as the child faces an unpleasant situation or uncertainty. The parents are 'over-involved' in their child's life."

This seems like a really cool concept (almost makes me want to go back to school . . .almost). The only problems I saw with this article was that the textbooks can be accessed through Blackboard, which is a great tool if professors know how to use it or it can be a nightmare for students if they have a professor who doesn't know how. Also I think its really funny that they stated "periodically" a revised edition of a textbooks come out, but I think most of my undergrad professors only assigned newest editions just so you couldn't buy used textbooks! But I digress. Anyways really neat concept and I'm anxious to see how it all works out.

DeKALB - With the help of a $575,000 grant, a group of university librarians and curators hope to have an answer to a growing problem. Lynne Thomas, curator of rare books and special collections at Northern Illinois University's Founders Memorial Library, learned in October that NIU, along with four other universities, secured a grant to study the best practices for storing digital data.

FREE Virtual Conference! October 18-19, 2013 One of the speakers is our teacher from the MOOC (David Lankes). I'll be attending! The dates are set for the Library 2.013 Worldwide Virtual Conference. The third annual global conversation about the future of libraries is scheduled for To be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please Altogether, there will be eight conference strands covering a wide variety of timely topics, such as, MOOCs, e-books, maker spaces, mobile services, embedded librarians, green libraries, and more!

The two PDF files linked on the pages are reports from the House of Commons about the state and future of libraries in the United Kingdom. One thing I found concerning was how the operation of many libraries has been turned over from Councils to community volunteers.

An update on the state of libraries in the Northeast after hurricane Sandy. 85 out of 90 branches of the New York Public Library have reopened. New York has three systems; the NYPL, Queens, and Brooklyn. The Brooklyn system closed 9 out of 60 branches--but some may be long term closings, and Queens closed 7 out of 62. The New Jersey libraries, however, are facing a more chaotic situation and are still assessing their damage.

Harvard librarians learned that lesson when they set up Twitter feeds broadcasting titles of books being checked out from campus libraries. It seemed harmless enough-a typical tweet read, "Reconstructing American Law by Bruce A. Ackerman," with a link to the book's library catalog entry-but the social-media experiment turned out to be more provocative than library staffers imagined.

Ok. I am seriously tired of the popular fiction/non-fiction side of ebooks. Basically Penguin is saying that they will grant libraries access to their ebooks in the way that will tick off your patrons the most, so that they will never want to use your service. Why does 3M say ok to this? Because Penguin dropped OverDrive earlier this year and this is a new way to entice people to their 3M Cloud Library product. Does MOBIUS really want to work with a company that will accept less?

One of those titles that forces you to read the blog.

This article was an interesting I didn't agree with a lot of it, but some of it was pretty accurate. Here's a hipster test : "Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd? Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style? The most important question: How would it feel to change yourself quietly, offline, without public display, from within?"

This teen space was too cool not to share! They have a green screen and a recording space!

Great way to combat voter ID laws.

I've posted a few articles about the Little Free Libraries, it's good to see that they are starting to catch on as a trend.

A general overview about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and how libraries have responded to it, and about disaster planning in general. While not treading too much new ground, it does show how some ideas and strategies work in practice.

An idea that came from the "Risks and Rewards" conference to give away skateboards branded with the libraries logo. While it would serve for good advertising and word of mouth, I question how much additional patronage it would bring.

Kind of like a Facebook poke for education-except nudging sounds useful and not annoying.

Not really breaking new ground but an interest piece about the St. Louis County Library after county residents improved a tax increase for the system and some details about Vartan Gregorian, the current president of the Carnegie Corporation and the past president of the New York Public Library.