I learned this morning that Anne Lipow left us. What a loss for our side, I thought. When people like Anne die, you can't help but wonder where they are now. Are they reaping the rewards of a life well lived? Is Anne's heaven a beautiful space filled with good food and curious, intelligent, and generous souls all passionately debating important issues of the ...day...er eternity maybe!?

Anne was once my neighbor. She lived across the street from us in Berkeley. She was one of the first librarians I ever really knew. And what a great example she was!

Just bumped into a new calendar program called Calendar Script 3.2. I came across it on a library website.

I made a point of checking it out because of its nice clean look. Features include multiple views, multi-user support, repeating events, custom event type, templates, optional approval process, search. Read about more features...

I recently took advantage of a term paper assignment for one of my classes (you did know I was in library school, right?) to study RFID very thoroughly. The result was a whopping 60 pager on the topic. That got whittled down to something a bit more accessible with the help of Beth Rosenberg, the managing editor of the upcoming book Wireless Privacy: RFID, Bluetooth, 802.11 to be published in early 2005 by Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall. Simson Garfinkel is Rosenberg's co-editor.

I've been struggling with the fact that I spend so much time commenting on things other than library technology on this weblog. The problem is the name of the blog, not that I really wish to change the balance of topics being addressed.

Therefore, I've decided to change the name of the weblog to "Mentat."

There's a lot of talk about RFID tags and whether or not libraries should be using them given the possible privacy abuses inherent in the technology. Rather than point to another big long list of articles to read on the topic (although I can do that too....contact me offline), I'm going to refer you to this one, very technical, article:

Privacy and Security in Library RFID Issues, Practices, and Architectures Ed: broken link removed 2011 by David Molnar and David Wagner.

The Supreme Court has struck down Ed: broken link removed 2011 the Child Online Protection Act . Says Kennedy "For now, the law, known as the Child Online Protection Act, would sweep with too broad a brush."

See also the Legal Challenge to the Child Online Protection Act.

Yippeee!

Via WEB4LIB, courtesy of Don Wood, ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee.

Of course, I've got to say I told you so because I did....

"The release of filter modules by the integrated library systems (ILS) is another likely development in the filter market..." [from Chapter 5: What's Next For Library Filtering?, Library Technology Reports, March-April 2004 by moi Ed: broken link removed 2011].

So Dynix has "chosen ContentWatch as filtering provider" per the listing in New Product News, Public Libraries March/April 2004.