Category: Reflection
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Media Roundup plus Bonus New Semester Playlist
We’re freshly into 2023 and the past year has been a big one for me on a personal level as my family welcomed our first child in June of this year. Amidst all of the activity I’ve been doing my best to maintain a steady media diet and devoured some interesting stuff in 2022. Below…
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Twttr
While I was not necessarily optimistic about the future of Twitter following its acquisition by Elon Musk in October of this year, the rapid onset of volatility and chaos across the platform has been surprising. As others have outlined in detail, current leadership of the company is trying to rapidly raise revenue from existing users…
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The term that was
Seeing as it is January 15, I don’t think that I am too late to share a recap of my first semester at Simmons. I taught two classes: LIS438 “Introduction to Archival Methods and Services”, and LIS448 “Digital Stewardship.” Both courses were very interesting and I felt more comfortable as the semester progressed. Despite some…
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What Should We Make of Obama’s Library Plans?
Last week former President Barack Obama signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) which articulated plans to digitize and provide online access to all of the declassified records from his administration. I’ll get to that MOU in a minute once we recap how we got here. In 2017, Obama…
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Kazakhstan
Earlier this month I visited Kazakhstan to give a series of lectures at the Presidential Archives as part of the Second Annual Summer School for Young Archivists, as well as in Shymkent at the Regional Archives. I had an amazing trip and really enjoyed meeting new colleagues, sharing my experiences working here in the US,…
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Web Archiving #Brexit
Like many of us around the world, I’ve been following the news out of the United Kingdom after the country voted to leave the EU late last month. In the aftermath of the vote, many Britons were shocked to discover that some of the “Leave” campaign’s promises related to the money paid to the E.U.…
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Rosa Parks, Historical Memory and Public Space
Yesterday, as I boarded a bus in front of the University of Maryland Student Stamp Student Union (itself named after an influential figure in on campus who served as the “Dean of Women” and increased the presence of women in College Park), I noticed something on the front seat of the bus. At first I thought it…
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Hierarchy of Google Products
With all of the recent talk about Google’s updated logo, I thought I’d share an observation I had this week while using two Google products: image search and Google Scholar. Here’s a screenshot, taken today, of images.google.com: And here’s a screenshot, taken today, of scholar.google.com: As you can see, the Scholar landing page still displays…
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Linux in the Wild
One of my first posts on this site was about Linux, and I always love seeing examples of how Open Source software powers so many computing devices which we interact with everyday. On a recent plane trip back from Seattle (where I attended ASIS&T. It was awesome!) I settled into my seat and prepared to…