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bittscanada · 4 years ago

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OFFICE ADMINISTRATION PROGRAM- Bitts International Career College

Office Administration Diploma Course

College Diploma (2 years)

START IN AUGUST 2020

Batch Begins: November2020

Offered at: Mississauga /Brampton

Program code: 1241

Credential Awarded: Diploma

Method of Instruction:In-class/Online

Prerequisites: Ontario Secondary School Diploma or Equivalent

ADMISSION COORDINATOR

Rajbir Sandhu

+1-905-790-3940

[email protected]

Start a career as An Office Administrator, in-various offices / Organizations industries.

Program Highlights:

With our Office Administration Program, Students develop skills:

•One of the high demanded Job streams. Offering Average wage rate of $20-$30/ hour(depending upon the company)

•Course provides technical and transferable skills necessary for success within the industry like negotiating and approving contracts/agreements.

•Trained by Industry experiences instructor in a conducive environment which meets international standards and managing all general office activities.

•Job Opportunities-Office Administrator, Receptionist, Office Manager, Human Resource Assistant, Marketing Assistant, Accounts and payroll Administrator, Executive office assistant.

•Innovating ideas by applying new technologies in the workplace

•Directing and overseeing a company’s financial services.If you want to enter the small-and large-scale business world,this is one of the programs to get you there.

The field of Office Administration is large and constantly expanding stream, making it easy for graduated students to pursue advancing career opportunities. As there is a high demand for this profession in Canada, so there are relatively good chances of students to get a job in this diverse industry. After pursuing administration diploma course at Bitts College, it will give students a first hand experience into ethics, international relationships, and information technology and leadership styles. Once you start working as an office administrator, there is a lot of opportunity to work your way up the ladder. The main duties of an office administrator are to perform day to day operations to keep an office/business running smoothly. A candidate having office administrator diploma is considered to be the entrepreneurs in the office field with their fresh ideas and they can also find employment in the sales industry, project assistants in the technology industry or work in public and non-profit organizations.With this Bitts Office administration program, you can get your foot in the door in the respectable desk jobs and work your way up to make a lasting contribution.There are no limits to the scope after completing in Office Administration program. All Competitive global businesses today, need office professionals to be responsible, to manage the things that support their fast-faced, dynamic office environments. The program enables you to learn those exceptional computer skills, customer service and the expertise to run an office smoothly.The program best suits you, if you seek a challenging study and profession with advanced business technical skills. The application of advanced administrative professional skills and management of professional business applications to achieve a highly skilled office careers will be learnt. As per the key-performer survey, held in 2019, 94% pass-outs were satisfied with the knowledge and skills.

As per the key-performer survey, held in 2019, 94% pass-outs were satisfied with the knowledge and skills they attained with Office Administration, were benignant for their career.Students must complete the following embedded course’s modules with a minimum of C (to-60%) grade in each module to gain complete understanding of Office administrative and related areas.

Modules:

Keyboarding Skills

Introduction to Computing Fundamentals

MS Word (Advance)

MS Access

MS Excel (Advance)

Human Resource Administration

Professional Skills

Administrative Procedures

Student Success Strategies

Workplace values and Ethics

College English

Accounting

Business Communication

MS Power point (Advance)

MS Outlook (Advance)

Customer Service

Source Link: https://www.bitts.ca/course/business_office-administrative-course/

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athbharat · 9 months ago

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wydmariana · 6 years ago

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well hellooooo beautiful people !! my name’s dani, i’m one of the admins on the main! i’m 20, i’m from toronto & i also play the hailey fc alanna !! i’m so fkn excited to have wealthy back up & running and to bring my baby mariana back ! she’s the same old girl and if you don’t know anything about her...everything u need is under the read more ! i rly need all the connections rn so like this & i’ll hit you up for plots !!!!

❛ new york’s very own mariana cavello was spotted on broadway street in christian louboutin’s. your resemblance to selena gomez is unreal. according to tmz, you just had your twenty-third birthday bash. while living in new york, you’ve been labeled as being reticent, but also quixotic. i guess being a gemini explains that. three things that would paint a better picture of you would be fishnets, tequila shots, notebooks filled with lyrics. & ( cisfemale & she/her ) + ( dani, 20, she/her, est )

☇ ❪ ˚･ﾟ ❛ STATISTICS :

full name: mariana marisol cavello

nickname(s): mari

age: twenty three

date of birth: june 4th

hometown: new york city

current location: upper east side, new york city

ethnicity: half mexican

nationality: american

gender: cisfemale

pronouns: she/her

parents names: tanner hastings, liliana cavello

orientation: pansexual but she doesn’t like labels

religion: grew up catholic, undecided

political affiliation: democrat

occupation: singer/songwriter

living arrangements: lives in her own mansion in the upper east side

language(s) spoken: english, spanish

accent: american

face claim: selena gomez

hair colour: x (most basic/accurate/but it changes)

eye colour: brown

height: 5″5

weight: 120lbs

build: petite

tattoos: mostly selena’s canon, but x instead of the music note

piercings: x (both ears)

drugs/alcohol/sex: yes/yes/yes

pets: one cat, 5 years old, named sergio - x

astrological chart: gemini sun, cancer moon, scorpio rising

☇ ❪ ˚･ﾟ ❛ BACKSTORY/CURRENT :

mariana was born to tanner cavello (famous hotel owner, entrepreneur, multimillionaire, been on forbes, think bart bass) & lilliana cavello (hispanic model/socialite)

her parents marriage was very much settling, the two of them cared about each other & were excited to start their life together in effort to please their parents and keep their images pristine

they were quick to fall out of love though, if you could say they were even ever in it

once mariana and her brother became teenagers, their dad started having affairs with his employes, the hot, young ones of course. & their mom found out, but confided in a 16 year old mariana about her father’s actions

( sexual abuse tw ) this infuriated mariana, especially considering the hours she would spend waiting outside her father’s office doing homework while his business partners molested her in the empty conference room starting at the age of 14

she never told anyone about it, although she knew her father had known the whole time, remembering how many times he’d interrupt it by summoning his partners for work or a meeting

mariana began absolutely hating her father, while still yearning for his approval, & this went on for 4 years until she turned 18 and got revenge by sleeping with one of her dad’s business partners & allowing his wife to find out

so his wife threatened to tell the media about this little scandal, unless mari’s dad paid them off, which is exactly what he did but not before taking his anger out on mariana & blaming her for the whole mess

she has barely talked to her dad since & moved out right as that whole situation went down. she does her best to avoid family gatherings, doesn’t visit the house to see her parents too often. she does have weekly phone calls with her mom & tries to see her as often as she can, no matter how much she resents her

she got into the party scene around 17/18 as well, and became new york’s resident “wild child rich kid/socialite” in her teen years, so she has that reputation in the media still to this day

her parents have been rich as fuck since the day she was born, so she’s definitely a spoiled brat, never worked a day in her life, had daddy’s credit card whenever she needed it

music had always been a passion of hers though, being her favorite class in school(on days when she would actually attend)

so when she was 20, she started getting back into writing, sold a couple of her songs to artists like zendaya, the weeknd, etc

when she turned 21 she released her first single & album within the same year, began touring, and got to the top of the charts almost right away & gained a huge fanbase, whom she loves

she’s now 23 and has two studio albums out !! she’s v successful and happy w her music <3 she releases things very sporadically & im probs gonna release random selena songs along with other voice claims maybe IDKDKKD hope yall dont mind my messy ass kskffsk

she works hard though, & loves writing and releasing music now and never wants to stop. it’s truly the thing that makes her most happy in the entire world and keeps her sane

☇ ❪ ˚･ﾟ ❛ PERSONALITY :

mariana can be a brat, to put it simply. she thinks she’s always right about everything & it’s rare you’re ever gonna get an apology from her when she’s done something wrong (unless she really cares about you which….)

she’s lowkey a softie, bc of her cancer moon tbh. she tends to get herself into relationships and then mess them up for the sake of it or because she stops trusting herself to be in the relationship at all

but when she loves someone, she LOVES them, like w every fibre in her body u know?

and she cares fiercely about people, it ends up being a problem for her a lot of the time

she hasn’t worked through her trauma & probably never will, she bottles that shit up tight & doesn’t let anybody know it’s there. the only way she’s ever opening up is if she’s writing, cause she wants that shit to be real

but she’s still gonna hoe it up, catch her in the club trying to get some dick for the night, u know what i mean?

super depressed if we’re being real here. she’s sad, and she has abandonment issues because of her dad. so her mindset is- there’s no forming attachments, because everyone leaves me anyway

( drugs tw ) she loves cocaine, is most definitely an addict (but who isn’t in this city), tequila is her alcohol of choice, but she’ll drink anything you give her & weed is her creative saving grace

she started popping pain pills on her 21st birthday, opioids occasionally & mostly xanax, stuff like that, is most definitely also addicted to those

we love a bitch who doesn’t care about her health!

her management team frowns upon it, but she does smoke cigarettes pretty often, but mostly only when she’s stressed

mariana’s the type of bitch to call the paparazzi on herself, she loves attention. but with her music career now it’s been 10x harder for her to keep her life private, not that she cares. but at least she doesn’t have to call the paps on herself anymore lol

she thinks it’s important to treat people w kindness and respect, but no doubt she’ll be ready to fight a b*tch if she has to…

catch her at any protest that involves saying “fuck you trump”

her instagram is a big mix of stories of her cat, dumb selfies, ig model posts, her friends, career stuff & political posts. she’s very active on the gram & snapchat lol

honestly thank U for reading this trash if u didnt…i understand. catch her pinterest board for more here & i have a wanted connections page here ! ok bye i love u, plot w me <3

#wealthyhq:intro

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fahrni · 2 years ago

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Saturday Morning Coffee

It’s grey outside this morning, low fog, and we expect rain later in the morning that should go until midnight tonight. My what a difference a week makes. Last week at this time is was 8 Fahrenheit outside, this week 49 Fahrenheit at 8AM. Weird.

My first cup is steaming on the table next to me. It’s delicious. ☕️

NBC News

WASHINGTON — A federal judge indicated Wednesday that then-President Donald Trump’s remarks on Jan. 6 telling a crowd to “fight like hell” before the Capitol attack could have signaled to his supporters that he wanted them “to do something more” than just protest.

It seems obvious to all of us TFG riled up his supporters and sent them marching to the Capitol to overthrow the will of the people. Of course he’s likely to get away with it, run for President, win again, and never leave office. Thus destroying our democracy.

I hate being so negative but I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe justice will eventually come home to roost for TFG.

Ashur Cabrera

Thanks to my instance admins, though, seeing the red no alt badge is a simple way for me to know not to boost that post. Conversely, an alt badge gives me the green light to boost, knowing the author has taken the time to describe the image.

My friend, Ashur, on why it’s important to add alt text to images in your Mastodon posts. It’s all about accessibility.

Mac Rumors

Historically, Apple released at least one new Mac model every year in the fourth quarter that runs between October and December, starting in 2001 with the launch of the iBook G3. This means that there has been a new Mac toward the end of the year for the entire lifespan of product lines including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

While I still love me some Apple devices I don’t really pay much attention to what’s happening with Apple releases. Most of the end of the year Apple enthusiast angst is around their promise to convert the entire Mac line to use Apple Silicon. They didn’t make it.

Meanwhile I’m plugging along on my 2019 MacBook Pro and it’s a perfectly great computer. Yes, even for writing code.

Rob Napier

We spend so much time drilling algorithmic complexity. Big-O and all that. But performance is so often about contention and memory, especially when working in parallel.

I see Rob Napier’s name all over Stack Overflow when I have a question about iOS or Mac Programming. This little piece walks through his process to optimize some code. I love these types of posts.

Not Just Bikes

I tried the “Full Self-Driving (Beta)” on a Model Y in Toronto. It was terrifying.

I don’t want a full self driving car and I have zero confidence in Tesla ever creating a good one, much less a perfect one. Musk is delusional and rapidly slipping into insanity after his purchase of Twitter. More on that later.

Don’t waste your money on a Tesla, there are lots of really great EV’s on the market now.

Mobile Syrup

After a heavy winter storm hit southern Ontario and parts of Quebec around December 25th, one lucky home could keep the lights on via the power from a Ford Lightning.

Speaking a a great EV! How cool is it to have the ability to power your home when the power goes out? I’d like to have that ability. I mean prices start at less than $40,000.00! 😳 Who can afford these things? I can’t. 😕

The North Shore Leader

Controversial US congressional candidate George Santos has finally filed his Personal Financial Disclosure Report on September 6th - 20 months late - and he is claiming an inexplicable rise in his alleged net worth to $11 million..

This Santos guy is a real piece of work, just like TFG. He’s nothing more than a grifter and he’s going to be a Representative for New York’s 3rd congressional district. Hogwash, I say. He should be expelled for lying and we need a better systems in place to vet any candidate before they’re allowed to run for office.

Seat 31B

A lot of people have been asking for an explainer on what is going on with Southwest Airlines and the massive meltdown that has occurred.

This whole Southwest thing is a real mess. It sounds like they need to invest heavily in their digital infrastructure. I know a company full of great folks who could help fix it.

David Penfold

Eating too much cake is the sin of gluttony. However, eating too much pie is okay because the sin of pi is always zero.

Lovely, geeky, dad joke. I had to share it.

Denny Henke

Building the tiny house, setting up the garden and food forest during the first summer. Then, of course, learning about living in the tiny house during winter and what that means for keeping warm and keeping things working.

This is a really great series of posts! Our youngest daughter is taken with the idea of living in a tiny home. Guess I should pass this series of articles on to her? 🤔

Dave Rogers

But, like anyone I suppose, I have darker moods from time to time; and I often find that I’m reluctant to post those thoughts at the marmot. They’re not strictly political, though politics has a role in why they exist.

I love reading Dave’s work. He’s a very thoughtful man and shares wonderful stories about life, tech, and photography. This post is out of the norm for him but I understand exactly where he’s coming from. I have these thoughts myself and I often wonder how many folks share them with me.

You’re not alone, my friend. ❤️

Dave Winer

One of the reasons I chose Twitter for identity for my apps, a decision made in 2014, is that I hoped that a developer community would grow up around Twitter. I hoped that Twitter would take a chance on co-promoting products. It could still happen, but it seems unlikely now.

With Twitter imploding there’s a decent chance Dave will have to swap out his identity system. As nice as it would be to not have to do it, it seems somewhat inevitable unless Musk can turn things around at Twitter.

Time for my third and final cup of coffee. See y’all next week. ☕️

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youtubetonki · 2 years ago

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The charges for the Moneris payment processing are worked out by adding the Interchange/wholesale discount percentage rate, plus the Network Assessment fee and the PAYD Pro charges 2.65% for swiped, chip card, and contactless transactions you pay nothing for Interac debit transactions. Before installing Lightspeed OnSite, it's important to meet the following prerequisites to ensure compatibility: Network requirements. Contact Lightspeed sales to set up an account and to get a payment terminal. The default model selected will be Moneris Core. Angled display, tactile keypad, new user TouchBistro Best for restaurants and food service.

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allanamayer · 7 years ago

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More Product, Less Pollution

Earlier this week the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice (sounds a bit more pleasant than “Against Climate Change” I suppose?) posted a great meditation on air travel and its contribution to pollution (which I saw thanks to the great Eira Tansey). It’s inspired a long and meandering rumination of my own about the environment and our work.

Here in Canada our GLAM work covers a huge geographic area, and at ridiculous cost (“cheap flights from Iqaluit to Toronto start at $1,732,” proclaims the Expedia headline). Our national library and archives frequently hosts “national” symposia and other in-person events in places like Ottawa and Toronto, but has yet to livestream or provide other ways to access and participate in the events remotely.

Compare to the recent Ontario Digital Inclusion Summit, that livestreamed using Youtube (making rewinding and replay immediately available) and offered digital Q&A participation through a tool called Slido. Thanks to this, the Summit was able to include both far-flung participants from all ends of the earth, but also people who couldn’t attend the event due to mobility, cost, or scheduling.

Similarly forward-thinking, the aptly-named Access Conference for library technology livestreams its events, keeps up a steady stream of Twitter participation, and shares edited individual sessions and slides on Youtube and its website after the fact. It’s the smarter way to overcome Canada’s geographic divide, and to be inclusive to all types of stakeholders. And it’s vastly cheaper and less damaging per capita than flying around the country.

A certain quality of internet access is required to livestream events and to keep up with Twitter hashtag use on the fly, I know. Canada still struggles to provide basic internet connectivity to the vast majority of its northern and rural communities, especially in Indigenous communities - 18 percent of the population has no access to better-than-dialup internet. The nation declared in December 2016 that broadband internet is an essential utility “for quality of life” but won’t hit its target of 100% delivery until somewhere between 2026 and 2031.

This lack of residential service, of course, doesn’t mean that Library and Archives Canada can’t start offering livestreaming of its events well in advance of full market saturation - and I hope I never hear them argue this.

I’m sure there are, instead, a bunch of mitigating factors I can’t possibly understand or have explained to me because I’m sooooo far outside the world of LAC and its millions of restrictions. I’m sure federal government livestreaming has to, by law, provide simultaneous transcription and audio in both official languages, or something else totally prohibitive, and a million signed waivers from both presenters and audience members, and some sort of deposit requirement, and on and on and on. I’m sure it can’t cost just a few thousand to do properly with existing in-house expertise and existing in-house equipment. I’m sure LAC’s internet connection is so bad it can’t even provide wifi to conference delegates, let alone reliably stream audio, let alone video.

The last email exchange I had with a LAC staff on this topic was for the “Foundational Meeting” of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy - a new standard that sets digitization goals for every heritage organization across the country regardless of capacity. That was October 2016, and I was advised that “If there is sufficient demand, LAC will do its utmost to provide this service.” I asked the national archives listserv to weigh in and make “sufficient demand” known at the time, but apparently no action has been taken since. Which is funny, because I hear complaints about LAC’s initiatives being inaccessible to smaller, rural, and northern organizations basically all the time.

For an industry consistently denied opportunities by cost barriers, an industry with a consistent critique of being too top-down, large-organization-focused, and ignorant of the issues facing non-academic institutions, livestreaming events of national interest seems a no-brainer. National professional conferences, symposia, and committee meetings should all be included in this. (Someone with enough clout to sit on the latter will have to fill me in on how easy it is to Skype in to such meetings as a member, let alone an observer.)

We could, eventually, settle on one of many different models, from fully-virtual conferences and a mix of on-site and remote presentations, or local-hub conferences (satellite events for watching livestreams in groups, and having breakout sessions or collaborating digitally with other hubs) - such as what the Canadian Archives Summit did in 2014, which I would link to, if the links weren’t all broken already. Flying Less has a great FAQ (in a Google Doc) to help you think about ways to decrease air travel and increase remote participation.

Canada is the perfect country to pioneer such forward-thinking policies as nation-wide virtual events and reducing barriers to participation. Alongside broadband as a utility, can’t we conceive of virtual professional development as a nationwide right? Especially in heritage, where we already believe digital heritage is the way of the future - else why would we have an NHDS at all?

For now, let me end this section with a plea: tell your conference organizers to spend less time deciding where to host a conference to maximize attendance, and more time working out ways to attend remotely. I’d happily throw in a tenner for live access to my national conferences, especially the wonderful ACA Annual. For events around ideas with national reverberations, such as the NHDS, it seems like an obvious priority for federal funds.

It’s easy to use sticker-shock as a reason to cut down on needless expenses, and it’s an exciting bonus that reducing those expenses is also environmentally superior. But to me it’s equally compelling to talk about what changes we, in our little profession, can do to mitigate climate change.

Eira Tansey is at the forefront of this, leading Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change) and sharing useful resources wherever she shows up on the internet (and also walking the walk on other ethical issues by recently leaving Twitter, the hotbed of hate). I have been thinking of how to contribute to this discussion for a long time.

There’s as much reading about how climate change affects archives (emergency preparedness and disaster relief for heritage collections; institutions in high-risk regions; preservation environments in the time of climate instability) and how archives can affect climate change (utility consumption and sustainable operations; sustainable materials and buildings; efficient digital consumption and offerings; dealing with volatile storage media and disposal; renewable conservation) as well as how to archive and promote data and information related to climate change, which is especially relevant in an era of government censorship and cuts to environmental protection services and science.

One thing I hope to write in the future is a non-exhaustive list of ways archives and other heritage organizations can divest from corporations and vendors that contribute to climate change (such as banks that invest in oil pipelines, suppliers that aren’t using recycled materials where possible, etc.).

For now, I’m not in a position to do building or space planning, order LEED-certified HVAC and recycled-material acid-free boxes, or work with local scientists to do data-rescue initiatives. I am, however, in a position to research and write about two things relevant to my work and the profession at large: digital labour and digital consumption.

***

It’s indeed modest and necessary to claim that air travel for work and professional development is a brutal abuse of our environment and our budgets. By very minimal extension, we can see that car travel for work and professional development is the same. A car commute produces more than ten times the carbon-dioxide emissions of an equivalent public-transit trip.

In the archival industry, which is so very material-focused and place-based, it’s hard to imagine a career that doesn’t involve heading in to the office, sitting among the collections, supervising the reading room, setting up the computer terminals and microformat readers, giving tours and organizing exhibits, lecturing in classrooms, processing in the workroom, digitizing in the lab, and meetings, meetings, endless meetings. I realize that, but I also realize that as the profession transitions slowly but surely to more digital tools, digital work, and digital communication, opportunities are popping up all the time to think about ways to make our work more energy-efficient and less environmentally damaging.

Of course, I know plenty of library and archives workers who are able to take days at home - whether this is because part of their job includes professional-development and research time, because they work primarily on tech they can access remotely, or because they’ve organized their schedule to optimize a day for writing, editing, and emails. I can rattle off a quick list of tasks that can be done at least partially at home:

Virtual and phone reference, especially on institution procedures or web resources

Administration and coordination through email and phone

Lecture, tour, and exhibit planning

Research and policy-writing, such as on legislation or involving environmental scans

Writing and editing documentation

Marketing, social media, web copy

Web/systems admin, digital collections admin

Metadata, copy cataloguing, finding-aid writing and editing

Post-processing of digitization

Lots of meetings! So many meetings!

The obvious financial expense of using your home technology and utilities to do your job’s work will have to be reckoned with in your contract. And none of that will cut down on pollution - but saving yourself a gas-guzzling commute certainly will.

Desk shifts and tours aside, lots of people work better without social interruptions and casual chats around the watercooler, and when occasionally saved from the stress of deciding what to wear, at least a day or two a week (or month, or whatever works in your shop). The flipside is yes yes yes I know your IT department would never give you remote access, ever ever, I know.

I hope dearly that heritage institutions of all kinds will look clearly at such factors as their regional roads and bike lanes, walkability and public transit, housing costs relative to proximity, and relevant compensation (and office perks - including employee parking! Space on your land! That you could use to hold stuff!) in order to find ways to offer increased remote work for GLAM staff.

Then it’ll be up to GLAM staff to figure out if they can work productively from home - something that isn’t easy for everyone.

I’m relatively lucky in that I’ve captured for myself one of the few remote-work jobs in the heritage industry: a nonprofit software provider with a team entirely decentralized across the province. We work together with Skype, Google Hangout, shared documents, and plenty of emails. We get together once a year on the occasion of the Ontario Library Association SuperConference, as many of us as can be gathered; there are team members I still haven’t met in the flesh.

We’re able to support ourselves in this by working on digital solutions for a number of public libraries, archives, museums, galleries, historical societies, and other interest groups. Many of these organizations are simply too small to have the capacity for internal IT staff and stacks, so our process often involves shipping USB sticks and HDDs across the province for ingest, and arranging for the shipping of materials to digitization vendors elsewhere. Our process also often involves talking to municipal IT workers who are managing the unfamiliar world of digital heritage collections - a point of contact rife with opportunity and conflict, and one I’d love to be able to explore more in the future.

I believe strongly in a consortial approach for small organizations and want desperately to see our nonprofit grow in capacity and stature. I want this not just for my own prosperity (and because I have a job with a five-second commute and no dress code) but because it’s the answer to our problems both financial and geographical.

At one point I thought of having Iona’s job: the Archives Advisor for the province, driving from one border to the other to assist in training, project management, and emergency relief. I imagined driving a mobile digitization studio around in a suspicious white van to do processing right there in the parking lots of archives and libraries. It would take some math to discover whether one vehicle delivering digitization to a variety of organizations would be less energy-consuming than the equivalent in shipping costs and remote digitization. And hey, what if I put solar panels on the roof of the van? What if I converted it to biodiesel and ran it on food-frying oil from the many A&Ws on the road between institutions?

Working in digital means the actual energy consumption of what we do and what we offer is quite obscured, compared to the monthly electricity bill of a library branch. Unfortunately, this means obscuring the intense cost of web servers with 99.9% uptime and multiple redundancies.

A recent (and very impressive) look at the climate-change contributions of Amazon Web Services brings this into stark relief: AWS was predicted (in 2015) to use almost as much energy in 2016 as the entire residential sector of Seattle - 7.2 million megawatt-hours serving up data, producing 3.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. Converting land - to produce solar and wind power in server-heavy places like Virginia - is only going to offset one fifth of this pollution. By now, cloud hosting and services take up 2% of the USA’s total energy consumption.

These numbers scare me, but I lack the immediate capacity to translate them into meaningful comparisons. I don’t know how much energy my employer’s digital collections consume, and I don’t know what nationwide numbers might look like. I do think that sooner or later we’ll need a benchmark that measures financial cost, energy consumption, and pollution effects compared to access and download rates to decide whether or not to put stuff online, and whether or not to restrict access. I absolutely envision a future where digital collections are unavailable overnight and on weekends because the traffic doesn’t justify the cost of keeping the server on. Maybe the energy usage is negligible - but we don’t have the numbers to be sure, and at some point the carbon emissions will outweigh those pennies of actual consumption.

I have been thinking about digital consumption in heritage since I started hearing the dreaded phrase “blockchain in libraries.” A library school recently got a tidy grant to research the possible uses of consensus algorithms for libraries - decentralized linked metadata is an obvious one, provenance information for digital assets is another. Past that, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any kind of “distributed authority” system that would benefit from power-chugging servers meaninglessly generating blocks to hold our not-all-that-often-used data or to arbiter our not-all-that-sensitive transactions. (We literally have TDRs for that.)

Most importantly, blockchain mining (or, the most popular algorithm anyways) is a huge energy sink, inspiring assholes everywhere to set up giant server farms in the Arctic just to keep their systems cooled, and hacking networked devices to utilize unoccupied memory. Bitcoin alone is a network of such consumptive scale that it out-emissions Ireland. Already. Renewable energy is an absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite to using blockchain technology for anything at all, let alone for anything as superfluous as library checkouts. Sorry, blockchain-in-libraries enthusiasts, but this is just another digital evangelism without ethical grounding. Moving fast and breaking stuff shouldn’t mean actually destroying the planet.

Digital Consumption For Archives is going to be a much larger and more exhaustive research project, perhaps not up to me to complete. A nice first step would be for things like the National Heritage Digitization Strategy to conceive of what total storage and bandwidth would be required were Canadian heritage organizations actually to get all these materials online. Or for organizations to start doing environmental audits, to make transparent their power consumption and where that power comes from, and to ask their contractors and vendors to be transparent as well. To always choose the sustainable option when it presents itself, to include sustainability in RFPs, and to provide the aforementioned flexibility to get your employees’ cars off the road one day a week.

However we do it, what we talk about when we talk about digital heritage needs to include the costs to our power grid and to our planet, and the costs if we can be smart enough to offset or reduce those emissions to zero.

#libraries #archives #galleries #museums #digital archives #digital labour #labour #climate change #environment #sustainability #project arcc #digital heritage

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