I’ll be on a short trip on Monday to give a talk to the Hudson Valley chapter of the Special Libraries Association about low cost technology. Looks like they’re just breaking in to the blog world and I love their slogan “Making Edgier Easier. We’re IT!” (actually the IT division’s tagline (who has their own blog), thanks for the update folks!)
rfid library tags unlocked, vulnerable
RFID hacking in, among other places, libraries. More on RFID.
As he waves the reader over a book’s spine, ID numbers pop up on his monitor. “I can definitely overwrite these tags,” Molnar says. He finds an empty page in the RFID’s memory and types “AB.” When he scans the book again, we see the barcode with the letters “AB” next to it. (Molnar hastily erases the “AB,” saying that he despises library vandalism.) He fumes at the Oakland library’s failure to lock the writable area. “I could erase the barcodes and then lock the tags. The library would have to replace them all.”
Position: Web Developer For LibraryThing.com
Please, someone awesome take this job.
truer words have rarely been spoken
Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.
Please, stand with me now and repeat:
“When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.”
Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.
Related story: State of our ILS
“It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.“
the black box of computer trouble paired with the bright light of radical trust
It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.