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 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.
• What Supreme Court’s block of vaccine mandate for large businesses will mean for public health: 4 questions answered – 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.
• Information Quality Resources 2022 – 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.
• How democracy gets eroded – lessons from a Nixon expert – 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.
• Remote Work Proves the Firm Library Is More Than a Physical Space – 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.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 29, 2022 – 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.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 22, 2022 – 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.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 16, 2022 – 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.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 9, 2022 – Four highlights from this week: The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire; To catch an insurrectionist: Facebook and Google are helping the FBI find January 6 rioters; China harvests masses of data on Western targets, documents show; and 6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 2, 2022 – Four highlights from this week: The dangers of dark data: How to manage it and mitigate the risks; US Still Lacks Federal Cyber Strategy After Decades of Attempts; The Worst Scams of 2021; and Tips for providing digital security benefits to employees.