Articles and Columns for January 2022 A bit about PURLs – Ed Summers, librarian, metadata expert, teacher, and computational expert, delivers an insightful lesson on the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. PURLs were developed to make URLs more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL …
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: How ID.me’s Face Recognition for IRS, Unemployment Works; A Former Hacker’s Guide to Boosting Your Online Security; White House clamps down on federal cybersecurity after big hacks; How to Download Everything Amazon Knows About You (It’s a Lot); and Teamwork, trust and threat sharing key to cybersecurity.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access; Ransomware and phishing: Google Drive will now warn you about suspicious files of bills and identity documents; How to avoid seeing yourself on video calls. Sometimes you can’t turn your camera off but you still want to stay out of view; and Bill to Ban Surveillance Advertising Introduced.
Ed Summers, librarian, metadata expert, teacher, and computational expert, delivers an insighful lesson on the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. PURLs were developed to make URLs more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL it pointed to needed to change you changed the redirect on the PURL server, and all the places that pointed to the PURL didn’t need to change. It was a beautifully simple idea, and has influenced other approaches like DOI and Handle. But this simplicity depends on a commitment to keeping the PURL up to date.
The U.S. Supreme Court on January 13, 2022, blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate, which applied to virtually all private companies with 100 of more employees. But it left in place a narrower mandate that requires health care workers at facilities receiving federal funds to get vaccinated. The ruling comes at a time when the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalization rates continues to soar throughout the United States as a result of the omicron variant. Debbie Kaminer, a professor of law at Baruch College, CUNY, explain the ruling’s impact.
Diane M. Rodriguez Assistant Director of the San Francisco Law Library in California, and 2021–22 president of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), where one of her many goals is to advocate for access to legal information that supports access to justice. She expertly articulates the work, and the role of law librarians, that comprise this mission.
Librarians, researchers, journalists, teachers and students are continually confronted with what can be described as a kind of information miasma when using online sites, databases, resources, images and social media. No sector or discipline is immune to misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, lack of data quality, and biased research. This guide by Marcus Zillman highlights actionable resources to evaluate and identify online malfeasance, as well as sources to verify information and data quality that is critical to our professions. These two efforts often intersect, and require vigilance and continuing education respective to effectively confronting the challenges they present.
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: You can actually make that old laptop last longer; Law Enforcement and Technology: Using Social Media; Google Drive accounted for the most malware downloads from cloud storage sites in 2021; and The Spine Collector: Man arrested for using fake email addresses to steal hundreds of unpublished manuscripts.
Ken Hughes is a researcher with the Presidential Recordings Program of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Hughes argues that erosion in American democracy depends on the conspiracy theory, destructive and demonstrably false, that the 2020 election was stolen. As the author of several books on Richard Nixon – who, before Trump, was the biggest conspiracy theorist to inhabit the White House that we know of – Hughes sees conspiracy theories less as failures of rationality and more as triumphs of rationalization.
Marshall Voizard is a law firm reference supervisor. He shares significant insights into the profession in the time of COVID. Voizard states that the past 18 months have accelerated positive changes, illustrating to all that the library is no longer primarily a physical place, but rather an entire ecosystem of electronic legal information resources. Our expert guidance is needed more than ever.