In January 2024, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced "sweeping changes to Alberta's student gender identity, sports and surgery policies" aimed at the province's transgender community. According to news reports, "Alberta’s premier says she’s had many conversations with members of the trans community before and since drafting a suite of policy proposals dealing with transgender rights." I could find no mentions from members of the transgender community of such consultations, so I submitted a FOIP request to the government. My first request was, apparently, too narrow, so upon advice from s ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the online conference, AI and Libraries: Applications, Implications, and Possibilities. It was a quick talk, but mine was initially titled, A Framework for AI Literacy in Libraries. In the middle of the talk I changed the title to the more accurate, Competencies for Generative AI in Libraries :-) There are recordings of each of the sessions at that URL, but if you want to see my slides, which include some solid links, IMHO, they can be accessed at https://piv.al/AI_Framework. Do take a look at all the recordings - I'm sure there's something of interes ..read more

I recently put in a FOIP request to the Alberta Executive Council and got a pretty quick response that no records exist (EC000-2024-G-10 closure letter). I asked for clarification, and received, "Based on your very specific request for a list, a thorough search was undertaken to locate the records, and it was discovered that no such list (record) exists with Executive Council. FOIP is unable to interpret results of a search other than convey the results." That wording makes me think something does exist, but I have to re-word, or ask a different department. Anyone have any advice? My origina ..read more

It seems a rarity, but I have two really interesting sites open in my browser talking about qualitative data in the relatively current environment. The first, Pandemic Journaling Project Archive Opens for Research, is notable because it fills a big gap. As the article notes, “There are several large quantitative surveys in the social sciences that are broadly used,” says Karcher, “but qualitative datasets that are large enough to be analyzed from so many different angles are very, very rare. The PJP data are going to be a treasure for social scientists for years to come, and we at QDR couldn ..read more

There's not (yet?) a link to each recording in the original schedule, but the recordings from the 2023 Access Library Conference, held in Halifax on October 23-25, 2023, are now live on YouTube. Definitely some good stuff worth checking out ..read more

Not quite as intimate as Brian's, but according to the sites with whom I share my info, I read 37 books with 13,262 pages last year, and I cycled and ran 5,689 kms (3,535 miles), not including my e-bike commutes. I plan for 2024 to be significantly bigger on the cycling front, so stay tuned. I know you don't care, but I still use this site as an auxiliary brain :-) You should be able to click to embiggen either of these infographics.   ..read more

I lifted the title directly from Simon Willison's post: llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer, even though I don't have the expertise to know if it's the BEST way. I can tell you it's a damn easy way, even on Windows! Simon's explanation works on a mac, but you can also run this on Windows with the following miniscule changes. Download the 4.26GB llamafile-server-0.1-llava-v1.5-7b-q4 file from Justine’s repository on Hugging Face. Open Command Prompt and navigate to the location of your downloaded file. Simply type the filename and wait for your default browser to di ..read more

I just came out of a webinar that generated a slew of good-looking links, and was off on Friday, so have a handful of newsletters, also with tasty-looking links. The rest of the day is full, and I fear I may not get to these for some time, so here, maybe you have time: In no particular order: Reflections on Information Literacy in the ChatGPT Era Looking towards a brighter future: A new research report examines the potential and the practicalities of using AI in library spaces. AI Observatory (a collection of policies and guidelines around AI) Gen AI Annotated bibliography https://theresanaif ..read more

Quite some time ago, I used a browser extension called TLDRify that allowed me to highlight some text on a web page, and it would create a link I could share that would jump a person directly to the text I had highlighted. It was a way to both create an anchor link when one didn't exist, but with the added benefit of highlighting the block of text you wanted someone to see. At some point I stopped using it because several browsers threw up scary warnings to the clickee that they were being redirected to a different site, which is true, in that TLDRify actually shows your desired content on a d ..read more

Last week some colleagues and I were discussing the use of AI in library services, and someone wondered if there was a tool that would automatically and correctly check a list of citations to see if any were, in fact, hallucinations. I'm pretty sure the more robust bibliographic management tools can tell you whether your collected citations are correctly-formatted, but what if you're starting with a list that has been delivered by ChatGPT or similar? I did a quick search and came across Trinka, which claims to have a tool to check citations, Trinka Citation Checker performs automated citation ..read more