Do you know a nice, stable, likely long-lived service that allows people to record audio online and then embed a player into another website?

HINT: Soundcloud may be the wrong answer. I want ANOTHER one…

Every tech lecturer’s nightmare.

That easy-to-use tech that helps students who may be a little unsure to make multimedia, that just requires mic input and the ability to press a big red button on a web interface, that reliable and well-funded tech, key tool for an assessment in your unit…

….you hear rumours that it laid off 40% of its staff (173 people) last week, that it can only guarantee funding for the next 50 days.  Of course, the founder of the service issues a denial of sorts (well, it actually only claims that it has funding for the next quarter…)…

Meanwhile, your unit outline, the contract with your students, needs to be published at midnight tonight.

I have looked for as stable, as large, as easy-to-use services as Soundcloud and really only come up with chirb.it and clyp.it , which I had not really heard of, do not seem to be used very widely and I am not sure are likely to be any more stable than Soundcloud.

I am settling on adding another step. A sensible step that students should be doing anyhow. Soundcloud allows users to download the audio file of something they create using the web interface rather than by file upload. I am just asking that they download their file when they create their piece and then (in the unlikely event of Soundcloud folding before marking has been returned) they upload a backup to the Internet Archive and add the URL to the place they submit on Blackboard …

All students should be well and truly able to do this, of course. BUT… part of what I try to do in my unit is offer the “lowest hanging fruit” where students who may be tech-nervous get to experience very easy interfaces to achieve things that they did not believe initially they were capable of. So, if they have to create multimedia in their job (which they probably will) they are confident that they will be able to work out any tool presented to them.

SO – If you know another service, or have a smarter way to solve the problem, less confronting for a tech novice, I would love to hear from you.

 

Watching from afar this week the VALA Tech Boot Camp in Melbourne and the Radical Librarians Collective meeting in Glasgow, it was interesting to see sessions at both about data privacy and security. Have a look at the Twitter feeds for the hashtags #valatechcamp  and RadLib17 to see participants’ live tweeting.

I try to teach students about data security in my tech unit, but it is very difficult to know how in-depth the material should be.

On one hand, some of this is quite technical and many of my students will go on to become managers, rather than hands-on tech practitioners.

On the other hand, we deal in information. For others. With an ethic to protect, preserve and maintain access to records and archives.

I am not going to pretend that decision of WHAT to protect and preserve is totally apolitical. I do think that knowing that “unfortunate” and “uncomfortable” documents will be preserved and accessible to citizens decreases authoritarianism; and gives future generations opportunity to not repeat mistakes of previous ones.

To carry out the day-to-day activities of protection and preservation, librarians, records managers and archivists need to be aware of, and vocal about, information policy.  They need to understand digital security to do this.

For example, we need sufficient technical understanding to know why Teresa May’s recently-expressed desire to weaken cryptography of private messages on third party sites to allow access for law enforcement agencies  is an idea likely to ultimately decrease freedoms and cause greater opportunity for illegal activity. And why the rest of the world is laughing at our Australian Prime Minister today.

One of the points coming from the Radical Librarians meeting is that anyone who claims that they have “nothing to hide, thus nothing to fear” from measures that erode digital privacy, is probably occupying a privileged position. People in minority groups tend to be affected more by surveillance. This is one of the reasons I have my students answer a question about whether there are some groups of people who would particularly benefit from being shown how to use the TOR browser in a public library.

(Check out the extraordinary responses to Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s post on her personal Facebook page “lamenting war in general, on a day predetermined to be about lamenting specific wars”  (very nicely encapsulated in the linked article). If I had posted the same as Yassmin, probably if Malcolm Turnbull had posted the same, I do not think my or his digital footprint would be scrutinised in quite the same way, and certainly the real-life personal repercussions would not be the same ).

So … what are some of the basics that information professionals should know about? I do not cover all of these in my classes ( I do many). Some of these points were compiled from watching the tweetstreams of the two events earlier in the week.

1. Search engines.

• Most are tracking your usage and manipulating the results shown in a non-partial way. Alternatives are Duck Duck Go & Qwant
• Google tracks your searches if you are logged in to any Google site (e.g. YouTube, Gmail) in the same browser, so consider deleting your search history from your Google account and turning it off for future searches .

2. Web-browsers.

• Also track your usage, and pass this on to third parties. Use TOR browser instead and have this installed on machines available for public access.
• At the very least, unless you have a good reason for your search history to be stored in your browser, use the Private mode for all web activity. (This does not stop the browser from sending information about who you are about other sites, or network administrators from knowing you are going there, but does stop the desktop software from creating a readable log that you have been there).

3. https:

• Make sure that all your organisation’s websites, and products that your users access through third-party vendors, are using using transport layer security (They will have  https , instead of “http:” at the start of the URL).
• I get students to look at Firesheep and advise what a library could do about to protect the privacy of users on their public wifi network if another user on the network is using something like this (A: Not much. Educate your users about going to http: sites on public networks)

4. Share knowledge with your community.

• Consider hosting a Cryptoparty to help your community understand how to stay secure online. If you don’t know enough know to do this, learn.

5. Passwords.

• If your product allows you to view passwords, unencrypted, in a field in your database, ask your vendors to alter this.
• If your vendor’s response to a “lost password” request is to email the plain text password to a user (hello Springshare), instead of sending a reset link to a verified email address, ask them to change this.

6. Passwords 2.

• Know how to create a secure password. Password management software (e.g. KeePassX ) can generate secure passwords and store passwords so you do not have to have “easy to remember” passwords, and can, crucially, have different passwords for each system you use.

7. Know system vulnerabilities and demand change.

• SIP2 is a commonly-used protocol that is used by self-check machines to communicate with Integrated Library Management System software. If your self-check is using this, then it is in all likelihood sending interceptable, unencrypted data in an insecure way… and one day, someone in a workshop like VALA Tech Camp could tweet out about your system something like Andrew’s tweet above Using only wireshark, we just sniffed a self check machine’s username/password and logged into an LMS as a staff member #VALATechCamp. (Have a look at the replies to this tweet, as they provide more background information).

8. Think first .

• Don’t do dumb things that compromise your own or your users’ data security. Chris Cormack made this point wonderfully in his VALATechCamp presentation. Have a look at his slides about Securing your Library Management System from his VALATechCamp session, especially the last one.

You may also be interested in following up the Library Privacy Toolkit at the Library Freedom Project ….

… and keep an eye on what is coming out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Australian-based Electronic Frontiers Australia .

 

 

When people suggested the weekly #glamblogweekly posts, I wrote a very long post as my first one, which I have ended up chopping into a few posts. So, here’s my question for this week…

What I would love to see from others who are #glamblogweekly-ing (if you need to get the “what will I blog about” juices flowing 🙂 ) is a post outlining the things that they think they actually DO blog about, or want to blog about. What kind of blog has yours turned out to be? Is that what you would like it to be about, or would you like to write about other things too?

The thing I loved about reading the blogs that have been playing #blogjune in the last few years is the absolute width of interests shown. From librarian-style, to knitting, to what it’s like NOT being in a library any more, lots of professional tips, disciplinary conversations, film talk, casual flim-flam.

When I first started blogging, it took me about 6 months before I settled on a byline for the blog because I really did not know what I blogged about. Over the years, however, several themes have (probably to my surprise) very clearly emerged. One of the recent series seems to be “hints for university students about how to do better”.. not where I would have predicted I would be 🙂 So ….

This blog has turned out to be about:

• Librarianship – what the discipline means, what we do, how we can do it better
• Technologies used by librarians – hardware and software, with a bit of a focus on picking up what is lying around the garden and using it, rather than about expensive, purpose-built disciplinary tools
• Initially about family life and managing work and family. Less now. My circumstances changed and my kids are older, so I am less comfortable sharing that aspect of my life.
• Posts aimed at people just starting in the profession, including their care and maintenance 🙂 What should we be teaching? How do we promote a vibrant, caring, ethical profession that is well-resourced and continues to be useful?
• Interesting projects and ideas from others in the profession
• Sometimes my cat, in the past. I now have two new ones, just as freaky and inclined to snuggle inside people’s jumpers, so maybe more about them?
• Events and activities I go to that are relevant to librarianship (conferences, courses, seminars … I seem to attend quite a few).
• A few – gosh, that’s INTERESTING! posts, that are rather eclectic. (Recipes, attending non-library events, information policy, current affairs)

I am pretty happy with this mix. There is a lot more to me than appears in this blog, but having this focus on librarianship allows me to be quite targeted when I post. Makes it easier to know what to write, and I am comfy that people who read regularly are interested in the topic too.

So – over to others. When you started blogging, was it with a purpose to write a particular kind of post? Did you end up doing that? Have you been surprised at all by the mix of topics you ended up with?

In my last post, I mentioned that I have used RSS feed readers to keep up with #blogjune in the past,  first Google Reader, then on its demise I used feedly . In the last couple of years, though, I just added a column to my Tweetdeck app and displayed any post for the #blogjune hashtag.

The “slurp ’em up via Twitter” method, of course, presumes that everyone who was blogging for #blogjune was tweeting out a link to the post, with the right hashtag.

For the Blogging each Monday activity, I think we are going with #glamblogweekly.

Most #blogjune people were auto-tweeting their post URL and the hashtag , but just in case you are unsure how to do this, here are a few ways:

1. If you are weird and retro old-skool like me, you use something really, really old. From day one I set up my RSS feed through Feedburner (back when it was its own company, not just a small outpost of Google). The logic was that if I want to change the platform for my blog then everyone would still be subscribed using the same RSS feed. Was very useful when I moved from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress .  Anyhow, Feedburner has an option to “publicise” and I have this set up to auto-post to Twitter and to add whatever category I have assigned the post. Interestingly, when I went in search of more information to provide links, it revealed that the service shutdown on 3 December 2012, so I seem to be using some beyond-the-grave functionality to connect to Twitter… Spooky
2. Self-hosted WordPress has an inbuilt “Share” function under the “Settings” menu (which I think is related to the Jetpack plugin being activated).
3. If using a hosted blog at WordPress.com there is a Publicize function to allow you to automatically share your posts and add a hashtag on Twitter.
4. Y0u could use dlvr.it 
5. You could use If This Then That 

The image used in this post shows the first few IFTTT applets for WordPress.com. There are hundreds and hundreds. My “to do” list for the last 3?? years has included “play more with IFTTT”, so I am hoping to do this in the next few months and maybe share what I find as a Monday post.