#canadian libraries

[intothestacks]

How much do you save by using public library services?

Use the Airdrie Public Library's Library Value Calculator to find out!

[archivlibrarianist]

From the article:

"People in Halifax were able to digitize their historical photographs on Sunday and share them publicly as part of an initiative by the Halifax municipal archives.

"The archives held a Scan-a-thon at the Halifax Central Library for members of the public to bring in treasured photographs, slides and negatives that showed local history.

"Municipal archivist Susan McClure said the archives are looking for any historical photos, including neighbourhoods, construction projects and pictures connected to the railway."

[libraryben]

The CFE-CFLA/FCAB Canadian Library Challenges Database provides access to challenges libraries have faced to items in their collection, and to displays, programs, room usage, and computer access. For each challenge, the database provides information about the challenge, including (1) the item, the nature of the objection, and the requested remedy; (2) (where available) the record of the review of the challenged item undertaken by the library; (3) the library's response. 

We encourage all libraries (public, school, academic, and government) in Canada to add their challenges to the database

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Indigo is closing a beloved Chapters bookstore in Scarborough in a move that has employees and regulars alike accusing them of union busting. The Chapters at Kennedy Commons is not only the largest bookstore in Scarborough and one of the best Indigo locations in the city, it's one of three unionized Chapters locations in Toronto. According to Indigo (which owns Chapters), the decision to shutter the business was merely a fiscal one. In a statement to CBC Toronto, they suggested that the location's profitability wasn't up to par. But employees of the location, as well as some locals, aren't buying it. For some, the company's decision to close this specific location doesn't add up, leading to accusations of union busting from the store's employees and supporters.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment?

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Barbra Streisand is famous for many things: her exciting performances on the big screen, the small screen, and the stage; her Grammy-winning career as a musician (she's a certified EGOT!); and for all the times she's had to correct people who've added an extra vowel to the spelling of her first name (I can relate!).

But a thousand years from now, her legacy is likely to be linguistic, rather than artistic. The "Streisand Effect" – coined by Mike Masnick – describes what happens when someone tries to suppress a piece of information, only to have that act of attempted suppression backfire by inciting vastly more interest in the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

The term dates to 2003, when Streisand sued the website Pictopia and its proprietors for $50m for reproducing an image from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project (which produces a timeseries of photos of the California coastline in order to track coastal erosion). The image ("Image 3850") incidentally captured the roofs of Streisand's rather amazing coastal compound, which upset Streisand.

But here's the thing: before Streisand's lawsuit, Image 3850 had only been viewed six times. After she filed the case, another 420,000 people downloaded that image. Not only did Streisand lose her suit (disastrously so – she was ordered to pay the defendants' lawyers $177,000 in fees), but she catastrophically failed in her goal of keeping this boring, obscure photo from being seen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Streisand has since called the suit "a mistake." On the one hand, that is very obviously true, but on the other hand, it's still admirable, given how many other failed litigants went to their graves insisting that their foolish and expensive legal gambit was, in fact, very smart and we are all very stupid for failing to understand that.

Which brings me to Ian Linkletter and the Canadian Privacy Library. Linkletter is the librarian and founder of the nonprofit Canadian Privacy Library, a newish online library that collects and organizes privacy-related documents from Canadian public institutions. Linkletter kicked off the project with the goal of collecting the Privacy Impact Assessments from every public university in Canada, starting in his home province of BC.

These PIAs are a legal requirement whenever a public university procures a piece of software, and they're no joke. Ed-tech vendors are pretty goddamned cavalier when it comes to student privacy, as Linkletter knows well. Back in 2020, Linkletter was an ed-tech specialist for the University of British Columbia, where he was called upon to assess Proctorio, a "remote invigilation" tool that monitored remote students while they sat exams.

This is a nightmare category of software, a mix of high-tech phrenology (vendors claim that they can tell when students are cheating by using "AI" to analyze their faces); arrogant techno-sadism (vendors requires students – including those sharing one-room apartments with "essential worker" parents on night shifts who sleep during the day – to pan their cameras around to prove that they are alone); digital racism (products are so bad at recognizing Black faces that some students have had to sit exams with multiple task-lights shining directly onto their faces); and bullshit (vendors routinely lie about their tools' capabilities and efficacy).

Worst: remote invigilation is grounded in the pedagogically bankrupt idea that learning is best (or even plausibly) assessed through high-stakes testing. The kind of person who wants to use these tools generally has no idea how learning works and thinks of students as presumptively guilty cheats. They monitor test-taking students in realtime, and have been known to jiggle test-takers' cursors impatiently when students think too long about their answers. Remote invigilation also captures the eye-movements of test-takers, flagging people who look away from the screen while thinking for potential cheating. No wonder that many students who sit exams under these conditions find themselves so anxious that they vomit or experience diarrhea, carefully staring directly into the camera as they shit themselves or vomit down their shirts, lest they be penalized for looking away or visiting the toilet.

Linkletter quickly realized that Proctorio is a worst-in-class example of a dreadful category. The public-facing materials the company provided about its products were flatly contradicted by the materials they provided to educators, where all the really nasty stuff was buried. The company – whose business exploded during the covid lockdowns – is helmed by CEO Mike Olsen, a nasty piece of work who once doxed a child who criticized him in an online forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

Proctorio's products are shrouded in secrecy. In 2020, for reasons never explained, all the (terrible, outraged) reviews of its browser plugin disappeared from the Chrome store:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Linkletter tweeted his alarming findings, publishing links to the unlisted, but publicly available Youtube videos where Proctorio explained how its products really worked. Proctorio then sued Linkletter, for copyright infringement.

Proctorio's argument is that by linking to materials that they published on Youtube with permissions that let anyone with the link see them, Linkletter infringed upon their copyright. When Linkletter discovered that these videos already had publicly available links, indexed by Google, in the documentation produced by other Proctorio customers for students and teachers, Proctorio doubled down and argued that by collecting these publicly available links to publicly available videos, Linkletter had still somehow infringed on their copyright.

Luckily for Linkletter, BC has an anti-SLAPP law that is supposed to protect whistleblowers facing legal retaliation for publishing protected speech related to matters of public interest (like whether BC's flagship university has bought a defective and harmful product that its students will be forced to use). Unluckily for Linkletter, the law is brand new, lacks jurisprudence, and the courts have decided that he can't use a SLAPP defense and his case must go to trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

Linkletter could have let that experience frighten him away from the kind of principled advocacy that riles up deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bullies. Instead, he doubled down, founding the Canadian Privacy Library, with the goal of using Freedom of Information requests to catalog all of Canada's post-secondary institutions' privacy assessments. Given how many bodies he found buried in Proctorio's back yard, this feels like the kind of thing that should be made more visible to Canadians.

There are 25 public universities in BC, and Linkletter FOI'ed them all. Eleven provided their PIAs. Eight sent him an estimate of what it would cost them (and thus what they would charge) to assemble these docs for him. Six requested extensions.

One of them threatened to sue.

Langara College is a 19,000-student spinout of Vancouver Community College whose motto is Eruditio Libertas Est ("Knowledge is Freedom"). Linkletter got their 2019 PIA for Microsoft's Office 365 when he FOI'ed the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (universities often recycle one another's privacy impact assessments, which is fine).

That's where the trouble started. In June, Langara sent Linkletter a letter demanding that he remove their Office 365 PIA; the letter CC'ed two partners in a law firm, and accused Linkletter of copyright infringement. But that's not how copyright – or public records – work. As Linkletter writes, the PIA is "a public record lawfully obtained through an FOI request" – it is neither exempted from disclosure, nor is it confidential:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/legal-threat/

Langara claims that in making their mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment for Office 365 available, Linkletter has exposed them to "heightened risks of data breaches and privacy incidents," they provided no evidence to support this assertion.

I think they're full of shit, but you don't have to take my word for it. After initially removing the PIA, Linkletter restored it, and you can read it for yourself:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/langara-college-privacy-impact-assessments/

I read it. It is pretty goddamned anodyne – about as exciting as looking at the roof of Barbra Streisand's mansion.

Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only Streisand – a person who has foolishly decided to use the law to bully a weaker stranger out of disclosing some innocuous and publicly available fact about themselves. But sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. A lot of people who read my work are much more familiar with ed-tech, privacy, and pedagogy than I am. If that's you, maybe you want to peruse the Langara PIA to see if they are hiding something because they're exposing their students to privacy risks and don't want that fact to get out.

There are plenty of potential privacy risks in Office 365! The cloud version of Microsoft Office contains a "bossware" mode that allows bosses to monitor their workers' keystrokes for spelling, content, and accuracy, and produce neat charts of which employees are least "productive." The joke's on the boss, though: Office 365 also has a tool that lets you compare your department's usage of Office 365 to your competitors, which is another way of saying that Microsoft is gathering your trade secrets and handing it out to your direct competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

So, yeah, there are lots of "features" in Office 365 that could give rise to privacy threats when it is used at a university. One hopes that Langara correctly assessed these risks and accounted for them in its PIA, which would mean that they are bullying Linkletter out of reflex, rather than to cover up wrongdoing. But there's only one way to find out: go through the doc that Linkletter has restored to public view.

Linkletter has excellent pro bono representation from Norton Rose Fulbright, a large and powerful law-firm that is handling his Proctorio case. Linkletter writes, "they have put this public college on notice that any proceeding is liable to be dismissed pursuant to the Protection of Public Participation Act, BC’s anti-SLAPP legislation."

Langara has now found themselves at the bottom of a hole, and if they're smart, they'll stop digging.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/01/eruditio-libertas-est/#streisand-v-linkletter

Image: Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Streisand_Estate.jpgbr>

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

--

Langara College (modified) https://langara.ca/

Fair use (parody) https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104

Fair dealing (parody) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1468015

[lionofchaeronea]

What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path! (frontispiece from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), Frederick Simpson Coburn, 1899

[2030kamenriders]

Did measurements to get a better grasp of how Doran compares in size to real buildings I know.

Let's just say: I have a gut feeling this castle could have a giant-enough greenhouse without using up an entire floor.

To review: Castle Doran is 41 meters long. I have a gut feeling this only accounts for building area, and not the dragon head and wings sticking out. However, considering that he's taller than he is wide, this measurement is probably from the side. I think we can safely assume that Doran is around 20-25 meters wide (measuring the front face of the building, where the door and his head are).

Anyway, from here, I think it would be understandable for the game to use a grid map where each square represents a square meter:

A meter seems like around enough for the width of a garden bed

It's probably also thick enough for a hallway (but if not, the hallways can just be made 2 squares, or 2 meters, thick)

It's a nice, round, intuitive measurement. (Sorry Americans, but it's like water freezing and boiling points. Metric system just wins this round).

The map will span the width of the castle (so from one side of Doran to the other side), but not the length (so not completely from front to back). Hence why knowing the width of Doran is so crucial.

[sparklecryptid]

ever time i mention i'm getting a library technician diploma i have people go 'oh you're going to be a librarian!' and im like

no

not at all

im going to be working under librarians while finish my BA and working to get my Masters to BE a librarian

but people don't know how libraries really work so i can let that slide with an easy explanation most of the time

what really grinds my gears though is people going

'oh aren't you worried about staying in poverty? i heard library people dont make much.'

my dear sugar cookies

my lovable patrons

my starting wage is 22 dollars an hour, the highest wage i have seen for a library tech was around 38 dollars an hour. MEANWHILE for a fucking librarian the highest wage i have seen is 175k a YEAR for a full time position.

to compare. minimum wage here is around 15 an hour.

I am not that worried about staying in poverty no.

[mafiatsunafish]

Little Prince

Welcome Home

(Hoàng tử bé ơi, mừng anh về nhà!)

[fatehbaz]

.

[pickledfingers]

Telling right wingers on social media "i would be ashamed to admit that I don't care about other people, and frankly I think it's weird that you say down to tell us this" and watching them get indignant is great, btw.

And I stand by this.

I would be ashamed to admit I opposed free school lunches for kids.

I'd be ashamed to admit that I want to ban health care options for a sizable portion of the population.

I would be ashamed to admit that I opposed social programs that allow people to get out of poverty and back on their feet.

I would be ashamed to admit that I supported arresting people who give food to homeless people.

It's frankly weird that you're not ashamed.

[intothestacks]

Libraries Around the World: Laval, Canada

Laval Public Library, Sylvain-Garneau Branch

[archivlibrarianist]

Canada's library associations saying what needs to be said: "Guided by our shared values and our resolve to articulate support of library programming that contributes to and bolsters reading, language, and literacy development in the communities we serve, Canada’s community of library associations proudly defend and celebrate educational initiatives, including drag storytime, as the valuable catalyst for public good that they are."

[allthecanadianpolitics]

All Calgary Public Library locations closed early on Friday after a cybersecurity breach compromised some systems, according to a spokesperson. All locations were shut down as of 5 p.m. The library says the closures are a proactive measure to mitigate the potential impact. All servers and computer access will also be shut off in addition to the closure of library locations. "Data security is a key priority for the library and our security team is working diligently to determine the scope of the breach," a library spokesperson said in a release. 

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @abpoli

[tonifrissells]

Personnel of the Canadian Women's Army Corps (C.W.A.C.) taking part in a firefighting exercise, London, England, 28 February 1943.

Credit: Capt. Frank Royal, Canadian Department of National Defence, Library and Archives Canada, PA-037479.

ID 3381922