[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
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alexseanchai asked a follow up from yesterday's entry.
There are two major targets involved on the unicorn wishlist, and they are differentiated between something the library uses for its own resources and something the library rents or gets access licenses to from another entity. Things the library (nominally) owns and things it does not.
( The explanation )
So, yeah, in a perfect, unicorns-and-rainbows world, content would be owned as a default, rather than leased or licensed, paying for content would mean that the vendor would be restricted only to the collection of aggregate, non-identifiable data, the ILS would not be a single monolithic object, but a set of programs that could be swapped and tailored and that all spoke the common standards so that they could all work together in harmony, and the public computers and equipment would run as much open source software as possible, with closed-source computers available on specific request. Plus, the library would have a robust and knowledgeable IT staff to run and update all of these things, as well as being a point for community infrastructure and private World Wide Web activity that kept as little data as they could manage and regularly deleted logs and other elements that contained personally-identifiable information that might be requested by law enforcement or seen as valuable to attackers. And we wouldn't have to filter kids' access as a condition of getting money, either. We'd still do diligence and try to prevent access to malicious sites and harmful places, as security measures, and there's a good chance that policies would be written that say, as a general rule, we wouldn't permit access to specific categories of things, so that we could, by policy, ban things like child porn or QAnon conspiracies or other such things that make sense to not allow in the library space because they're harmful to the community. Which would, yes, rely on the public trusting that the library is going to make good decisions about what's harmful, but they already do that, and we could use a kick in the backside to think better about what communities are being harmed by our current policies and their enforcement.
But the big thing, when I was saying that, was the vendors being locked out of collecting personal data and the library not keeping any more data than strictly necessary, to the point of even being able to remove the possibility of the field existing in a record if it's not being used. And to otherwise overthrow the shackles of our monolithic oppressors and do things in a more community way. Hopefully that was as clear as mud for all of you.
alexseanchai asked a follow up from yesterday's entry. Define "works" and "behaves sensibly" in this context [an application, product, or resource used in a library environment.] What things would this software need to do, and on the wishlist including rainbow unicorns, what would you want it to do?
There are two major targets involved on the unicorn wishlist, and they are differentiated between something the library uses for its own resources and something the library rents or gets access licenses to from another entity. Things the library (nominally) owns and things it does not.
( The explanation )
So, yeah, in a perfect, unicorns-and-rainbows world, content would be owned as a default, rather than leased or licensed, paying for content would mean that the vendor would be restricted only to the collection of aggregate, non-identifiable data, the ILS would not be a single monolithic object, but a set of programs that could be swapped and tailored and that all spoke the common standards so that they could all work together in harmony, and the public computers and equipment would run as much open source software as possible, with closed-source computers available on specific request. Plus, the library would have a robust and knowledgeable IT staff to run and update all of these things, as well as being a point for community infrastructure and private World Wide Web activity that kept as little data as they could manage and regularly deleted logs and other elements that contained personally-identifiable information that might be requested by law enforcement or seen as valuable to attackers. And we wouldn't have to filter kids' access as a condition of getting money, either. We'd still do diligence and try to prevent access to malicious sites and harmful places, as security measures, and there's a good chance that policies would be written that say, as a general rule, we wouldn't permit access to specific categories of things, so that we could, by policy, ban things like child porn or QAnon conspiracies or other such things that make sense to not allow in the library space because they're harmful to the community. Which would, yes, rely on the public trusting that the library is going to make good decisions about what's harmful, but they already do that, and we could use a kick in the backside to think better about what communities are being harmed by our current policies and their enforcement.
But the big thing, when I was saying that, was the vendors being locked out of collecting personal data and the library not keeping any more data than strictly necessary, to the point of even being able to remove the possibility of the field existing in a record if it's not being used. And to otherwise overthrow the shackles of our monolithic oppressors and do things in a more community way. Hopefully that was as clear as mud for all of you.
