Category Archives: Library

FTRW 2012 – Censoring Your Democratic Right to Vote

Censorship doesn’t just happen with books and videos, it happens in a variety of ways when people in positions of power and authority attempt to control, influence and manipulate your behaviour. Perhaps the most insidious way that they do this is when powerful people attempt to eliminate our fundamental democratic rights.  Right now, a major […]

FTRW 2012 – Music Monday – “Shut your fucking face, uncle fucker/You’re a cock-sucking, ass-biting uncle fucker!”

I’m a bit slow off the draw this year since it started yesterday but Happy Freedom to Read Week 2012!  And I’ll also never top my FTRW Music Monday post from 2010.  But I can try…

BYOD in the Workplace

No, not “Bring Your Own Doughnuts” (although that’s an idea I could support!)  Instead, this article talks about BYOD – “Bring Your Own Device” – and how IT departments are (or aren’t) dealing with staff who are increasingly bringing and using their own personal devices in the workplace. I don’t use my iPhone at work […]

Kids Say The Damndest Things (In the Library)

The idea behind this site is pretty good but I think it’d work better if it was opened up so anyone could contribute so the person running it would have lots of content. For example, you can check out the ThingsMyKidSaid sub-reddit for lots of great submissions. At this point, I should probably add something […]

Friday Fun Link – Bookstore After Dark

This was sent around by one of our branch heads (who said he suspects the same thing happens at his location after dark!) Pretty cool!

Quora Questions Qaptured

I’ve mentioned Quora a couple times before.  It’s a community-based Q&A site built by two ex-Facebook employees that some project will be bigger than Twitter and Wikipedia. The site lets you follow different topics as well as individual questions.  This approach gives you a pretty high degree of personalization and the weekly e-mail digest of […]

Ken Haycock: “Should We Reconsider the Paramilitary Library?”

Noted library leader, Ken Haycock, has a regular e-newsletter which contains columns on a wide variety of library and related topics.  I don’t always agree with these columns (I’m still percolating a response to one he sent out in recently about why public libraries should be open on Christmas Day) but do find them thought-provoking […]

A Cool Facebook Status Update

A friend just posted this (and I know we’ve all been there after an all-nighter with Mr. Potter or Ms. Everdeen or whoever)… I nearly called in book for work today: “I’m really sorry but I’m feeling really book today and I don’t think I can come in. I really don’t feel my work will […]

Top Tech Trends for 2012

I love this time of year for all the “Best of the Year”-type lists that come out.  And one of my absolute favourites of these type of lists are the “Top Tech Trends for the Coming Year” ones. For 2012, a writer for Mashable.com is predicting the following as the big trends: Touch Computing Social […]

The Rise & Fall of the Columbia House Record Club — and How We Learned to Steal Music

An article about the decline of mail-order record clubs claims that it was the “12 for a $0.01” record clubs that conditioned consumers to pay little to nothing for music (and though they don’t phrase it this way, the related joy of having a large “download” of music provide (relatively) instant gratification too.) There’s probably […]