This was going to be only a post about how I got the Ghost newsletter software to use Amazon Simple Email Service (AWS SES) instead of the built-in Mailgun support, but it turned into that plus why I can’t use Ghost for the DLTJ Newsletter. Ghost’s bulk email delivery problem One of Ghost’s downsides is that it only supports the Mailgun service for delivering newsletter issues. Ghost can use any email delivery agent for what it calls “transactional” email: email verification on new accounts, password resets, using email to log in, etc. Of course, the point of email newsletter software is to se ..read more

One thing that would dramatically clarify the controlled digital lending concept in general and the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit in particular is having distinct terms for types of ebooks. I propose that we refer to them as digital and digitized. A digital book is one that is born digital, where the publisher has the original “source code”. Alternatively, a digitized book originates as a physical copy, which is then converted into a sequence of printed page images. Given the differences in the way they are created by the publisher and the capabilities offered to the reader, distinguish ..read more

In my prior two posts, I outlined a strategy to minimize personally identifiable information in library automation systems (idea overview, impact on FOLIO). This approach uses a unique single-service identifier (the “pairwise-id”) recognized exclusively by the identity provider (IdP) and the library’s service provider (SP), effectively preventing any cross-system correlation of an individual’s activities. The only personal information the library system stores is the pairwise-id, meaning that there are no exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, or other demographic details in the event of a s ..read more

In the previous blog post, I outlined the concept of a library system with no personally identifiable information as a way to safeguard a patron’s right to privacy. Library systems commonly retain traces of a patron’s library activity, and the librarian ethos protects a patron’s privacy as they conduct their research and borrow items from the library. Suppose our library systems decoupled patrons’ personal information from their library activity. In that case, the risk of leaked information from the library systems is significantly reduced. In this blog post, I examine how a modern library ser ..read more

Library systems hold significant information about patrons, including their search and reading histories. For librarians, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of this data is an essential component of professional ethics. In the United States, for example, the third point in the American Library Association Code of Ethics is “We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.” To understand this better, consider how the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 arose in th ..read more

The British Library suffered a major cyber attack in October 2023 that encrypted and destroyed servers, exfiltrated 600GB of data, and has had an ongoing disruption of library services after four months. Yesterday, the Library published an 18-page report on the lessons they are learning. (There are also some community annotations on the report on Hypothes.is.) Their investigation found the attackers likely gained access through compromised credentials on a remote access server and had been monitoring the network for days prior. The attack was a typical ransomware job: get in, search for perso ..read more

Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2022, I started my own list of things I learned in 2023. I got well into 2024 before I realized I hadn’t published it! So, in no particular order: In the summer of 2011, a lab technician at Los Alamos National Laboratory carefully laid 8 rods of plutonium on a bench to take a picture. The rods were almost close enough to cause an uncontrolled fission event. AAAS Science Runways are named by their magnetic compass heading value divided by 10 (e.g. a runway heading due east—90°—is named “runway 9”). Variations in the Earth’s magnetic fields mean ..read more

While on vacation, I was catching up on some personal knowledge management maintenance I had been putting off. At one task—adding a page for a new employee at the company I work for—I noticed that the page for my company was gone. Odd, that page has been in my knowledgebase for years…let’s go look in the People, Places, and Organizations folder…6 pages?!? There should be at least 60! And look at that…all of my templates are gone, too. What else was missing?!? Here are my project notes for rebuilding my knowledgebase from backups. I’m using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management tool. Obs ..read more

WOLFcon—the World Open Library Foundation Conference—was held last month, and all of the meetings were recorded using Zoom. Almost all of the sessions were presentations and knowledge-sharing, so giving the recordings a wider audience on YouTube make sense. With nearly 50 sessions, though, manually processing the recordings would make the process quite challenging. I created a pipeline of ffmpeg commands that does most of the grunt work and learned a lot about ffmpeg command graphs along the way. Here are the steps: Clip the videos from the Zoom recordings. Rescale the recordings to 1920x1080 ..read more

In May 2023 I was asked to join the opening session at Georgia’s GIL User Group Meeting. Along with Chris Sharp and Emily Gore, we reflected on the conference theme: The Future is Open. GALILEO has an exciting time ahed of it…their libraries are adopting FOLIO and a new resource sharing system. Below is a lightly edited version of my remarks during the panel, and a recording of the keynote panel is available on YouTube. Tell us a little bit about your experience working with “open” library services. In my experience, “open” is built into the ethos of libraries. I mean…even if we look at just t ..read more