Podcasts

I know you've all been missing my Marginalia series terribly, so here's a bumper edition for you.

One of the delights of last year was listening to the podcast Artist in the Archive, and in January this year the latest in the series dropped: Thirty One Cylinders. This story is amazing and has everything: archivists repairing old media technology, Indigenous language renewal, philosophical discussions about metadata and the balance of recognition vs protecting sacred knowledge, and everyone's favourite topic: the endless problems with international copyright law. Not to be missed.

I was also amazed by the History Lab episode about patternmakers, Invisible Hands. They approach this topic with incredible care, and it's a fascinating world that most of us know nothing about. Patternmakers are the people who make the original casts for basically everything that is mass-produced: from jellybabies to tractor buckets.

Tech

I'm a big fan of the work of Mozilla Fellow Darius Kazemi. Two articles he's written recently outline quite nicely what all the fuss is about the 'decentralised web': what it is, how the various incarnations work, and how they can (or do) interact. Check out Why I'm excited about decentralized social networks and Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet. One of the cool projects that uses Dat is Beaker Browser - former Beaker worker Tara Vancil explained how it all works in her JSConf talk Imagine this: a Web without servers.

Craig Mod also wrote recently (ish) about the re-emergence in the popular imagination of email as a publishing platform. Of course email newsletters have been around for decades, but there does seem to be a bit of a fresh cycle happening with people independently writing for (they hope) a large audience, off Facebook et al to email newsletters, rather than back to blogs. Even Seb Chan has gotten in on the action. I still think RSS is under-appreciated both in terms of how it already 'invisibly' powers a lot more push publishing than people realise, and in terms of how much more it could be used, but email is the classic decentralised communication system that despite Google's best efforts, remains still effectively decentralised.

I've been disappointed by OpenStreetMap's apparent stalling in recent years, and Serge Wroclawski has some ideas about why that might have happened. Sarah Bond has another story of volunteer-dependent tech companies behaving badly, declaring that A Virtual Reality App that Reconstructs Ancient Rome May Have Exploited Its Developers. Feeling depressed after reading those? Check out how Low←Tech magazine built a 100% off-grid solar-powered website

Finally, two cool projects academic librarians might be interested in:

1. Academic Markdown and citations: A workflow with Pandoc, BibTEX, and the editor of your choice
2. Crosspull: Python code that pulls metadata for every publication in Crossref that lists a specific institution in it's author affiliations

Librarianship

Meredith Farkas wrote “Devaluing” the MLS vs. respect for all library workers shortly after ALA Annual. In it she addresses credentialism and solidarity in the profession. Farkas refers to a widely-held "sense of our profession being under seige", and attempts to restrict entry for those without reognised qualifications - "...frankly, that attitude makes me ill." But Sam Popowich takes a broader view (CW: Marxism) in the Journal of Radical Librarianship¹, arguing that this kind of protectionism is inevitable because of the 'double bind of capitalistic relations' pitting workers against each other. This article may seem a little intimidating at first, but