Dan Scott @dbs@mastodon.social

So, you know, they clearly heard me and piled on.

Weirdly, while we've been going down, the provincial and national averages have been going up (4.9% and 4.2% respectively as of 2015-2016).

I'm having a very hard time with this.

Got the draft final budget for the university less than 24 hours before Senate discussion. Library & Archives budget (staff + acquisitions) will be 3.0% of total university expenditure. It was 3.2% last year, when I stated: "The Library and Archives is being systematically hollowed out. The roles of that it should fulfill in its mission such as information literacy, preservation and access, scholarly communication, are severely limited by these fiscal constraints."

So the party with a leader that parachuted in at the last moment, and states that it will fund its billions of $$ of populist promises ("a buck a beer", "putting money back in the pocket of the little guys") with only vague statements about finding "efficiencies" (but no layoffs!), is 86.5% likely to form a majority government.

Versus two parties that have carefully costed platforms. Who just happen to be led by women.

*sigh*

So I'm officially on vacation, but still have a "state of the department" annual report to wrangle in my final month as Chair, and have a bunch of hand-off discussions and docs to update for my systems responsibilities, and all I want to do is... a whole lot of nothing.

Just for a little bit, you know?

I upgraded our library system from Evergreen 2.12 to 3.1 (two major releases) over the weekend. This is the first time in probably ten upgrades where the first day hasn't been a panic of slowdowns and crashes.

Instead, not a single email or phone call voicing a complaint or concern. Maybe I'm getting better at this?

Late night system upgrades, yeehaw...

Think I've got most of the bits of this set of spinning plates going on a shiny new version (Evergreen 2.12.3 -> 3.1.2, so two major versions).

Time to crash out for a few hours and find out if it's all still running in the morning :)

Every time I run across a slow (open access journal|library|archive) web site with plain HTTP that is 99% static content, I just want to drop everything and wrap it up in nginx caching & expires headers & run certbot and make it all shiny.

Just used https://goaccess.io to parse a year's worth of web logs and extract some stats. It's fast, and does its best to present the data in friendly ways (ncurses, HTML).

But parsing web logs still sucks. Sooo many bots scanning for vulnerabilities, it's hard to determine real human traffic. Guess I should look at Matomo (used to be Piwik) to get a bit of the GA usability without the data compromises.

Email from central IT touts launch of secure file sharing w/ external users service based on OwnCloud that "is a far more secure means of communication than using the Internet".

Huh? I'm pretty sure that https link I use to access it means it's on the internet...

Also, the BCC field is fully visible in the email they sent, which doesn't reassure me about their security expertise.

Realizing that I am being consistently negative despite the many positive things around me. Might need to modify that outlook.

No, dear colleague, I don't have time to refine the notification system for this Google Sheets based request tracker. It has had only 8 requests in two years. Set your notification rules to daily digest and you would have received 24 notifications maximum. Let's maybe focus on getting the 6-month-old requests you're responsible for handled?

While writing my annual report, I stumbled across a few emails on a consortial chat reference mailing list that were sent while we were on strike (I didn't receive them at the time because admin had cut off our email access, grr). Several colleagues from other institutions stated they would not answer questions from our uni's users in solidarity. Service got shut down.

I wrote each of them a "thank you". It was a big morale boost at the time, on the lines and in Strike HQ.

OMG so much effort summarizing all the effort I've put into this year. History strongly suggests that it will result in a "satisfactory" assessment. Ah well... some day I'll look back on these reports and laugh, right?

Last year our UL thought it was a great idea to not renew 4 staff positions who left (packages etc) and instead roll their salaries into the collection budget. (I was pissed because people > mostly rented resources)

This year he's surprised that the exec team proposes cutting the collection budget by exactly that amount.

I'm not surprised. I'm just sad. We'll never get those salaries back to do the things our uni needs.

Every once in a while, I feel like a librarian. Like "Hey can you find me a resource on how to cite a video game in Chicago style?" and the usual online sources don't help, so you grab the OFFICIAL 2017 edition of the Chicago reference manual from the quick ref collection and there's a real example there. BOOM

Ahh, uni website redesign == next round of "Where does the 'Library' link go?" Last time, based on web traffic that showed that our landing page had the highest usage across the entire site, we were parallel to "Academics", "About Us", and "Research" in the big-font header menu links.

In the new design, we're currently in the smaller-font links after "Students", "Faculty & Staff", "Alumni", and before "Applicants". Seems weird.

"Your password will expire in 30 days."

I hate receiving those notifications from my work account for so many reasons.

Okay, at least two:

1. "Frequent Password Changes Is a Bad Security Idea" https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/frequent_passwo.html
2. I reported a "credentials passed via plaintext" vulnerability ~6 months ago that affects every student and staff member. It is still not fixed. Changing my password isn't going to help with that.

Wrote a bit about the Linked Data For Production (in Libraries) workshop last week, focusing on Wikidata. Was able to include a link to our article on Wikidata and libraries that was just published in Code4Lib Journal (thanks in no small part to the labour of @platypus https://coffeecode.net/linked-data-for-production-2018-workshop.html