David Whelan

Website: https://ofaolain.com/
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David Whelan

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I’ve been curious for some time about the various methods for controlling content access based on country of origin. If you’ve browsed the European internet or tried to access US video from Canada, you’ve probably experienced a geo fence. It’s different from a paywall and serves a different purpose. I’m using it on this site now, which shows how it can operate without visitors being aware, if they’re not impacted. The biggest challenge is to…
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Our organizations have business continuity plans. I’ve been thinking recently about how that doesn’t always extend to our electronic subscriptions. If your courthouse law library is like ours, there is a physical requirement for some license access. Researchers must be in library or corporate space to use the license. That doesn’t work when we lose our space in a pandemic – or a fire, earthquake, hurricane, flood, locusts – and need access without restrictions. I’ve…
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There has long been a tension in the legal world in the web browser space. While most lawyers use Microsoft products – Windows, Windows Server, Office Suite – the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer, has been an also-ran against better browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. The broad release of the new Chromium-powered Microsoft Edge means that law firms – and law libraries – can rethink the need for Google’s browser. A default corporate software…
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This was a busy week. I was fortunate, because when there is media interest in your situation, it can often be a surprise. It made me realize how, over the past year and a half, I’ve learned a thing or two about dealing with media. As a law library director, this may not be a skill set you’ve developed. It wasn’t one I had. So I thought I’d share some ideas. Law libraries talk a…
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Our organization is reviewing its web content to ensure we comply with a statutory accessibility obligation. Our lack of information governance has meant that we are short on tools to manage the challenge. The fallback position, as it so often is, is to count pageviews and delete things that aren’t visited. It’s a short-sighted approach because it is using a measurement without considering the purpose of information. As it has been said before, “not …
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Work from home has meant that I have 4 hours a day – my 2-hour-each-way commute – that I didn’t have before. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use some of those early hours for sleep. But the idle brain is the devil’s playground. When our company starting using desktop video conferencing, I started playing around with the virtual backgrounds. Part of my interest is just curiosity. But also my home workspace…
It can be hard to give and receive feedback. It seems as though experience can actually make it more difficult to receive feedback. People may be reluctant to offer it; the experienced person may not look for it. I recently had to do a challenging activity and did my own self-assessment of how it went. It clashed, as it sometimes does, with the feedback I was getting. Sometimes, you need to really clear the thicket…
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Leaders need time. For the observational leader, the pandemic has allowed us to see bad habits get amplified. One reason seems to be a penchant for busyness. Things we did that were a distraction have now become a drain. We value people being busy rather than thinking about the value of what that busyness produces. A Harvard Business Review article came by that put some of that in perspective. Here’s the article (the HBR edition…
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It’s Friday. Well, not when I’m writing this but … anyway. I’ve had a couple of things rattling around in my head that didn’t really fit anywhere else. One is an idea I’m starting to rough out a little bit for our law library. Another is something that other libraries have done that I want to emulate in spirit. One is just a “how would that work” idea. Thinking Outside the Physical Box This is…