Reading Time: 5 minutes
The law school’s senior staff meet monthly and we occasionally convert the meeting into a group training. Things as common as managing personality types or corporate finance nuances. Perhaps the most unusual at my current workplace was one on improvisational communication. It went about the way you would think but it
David Whelan Blogs
Latest from David Whelan
Adding the DNS Sinkhole
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I finally turned my attention to a project that had been tickling the back of my task list since we moved into this house. It was our first house with appliances, other than a TV, that were internet-capable. I turned off most of the network options so they cannot communicate but
An Insensitive Document
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I taught legal research and writing last year and had created some mock documents for the final assignment, an open memorandum. The topic was police interrogations and so I created a fake police report, using a template from a local Illinois county sheriff’s department. It was great, because the report really
An End to All Things
Reading Time: 6 minutes
When we use computers, it often feels like we never come to the end of something. Occasionally an app will be closed down—RIP Google Reader and Microsoft Bob—but we get used to versioning. A product is created, captures an audience, and then increments while it remains solvent, whether or
Transparency, To Be Clear
Reading Time: 4 minutes
There was a lot of good information sharing at the AALL annual conference in Cleveland. I feel pretty seasoned as a manager and leader but I always drop in on some of the sessions focused on those topics. It is not just that you can always learn something new but, perhaps
In Step With PACER
Reading Time: 4 minutes
We have been emphasizing PACER as a primary Federal docket resource for just over a year now. This was a change from placing commercial options ahead of the official one. It is part of a complicated set of docket tools that we are making available and was a bit of an
Playing the Long Game
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been blogging for awhile, decades at this point. This blog has the word “exploration” in its title but, really, it may be more about experimenting. One thing about experiments is that you may not see them bear fruit for a long time, if ever. Or you may get results
Like A Good Neighbor
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I had the lawn mower out over the weekend. We had a brief respite from the heat and the rain and the new sod we’d put down needed a trim. As I was finishing up, my neighbor came out with his mower and a similar mindset and we got to chatting.
Do Web Analytics Measure Anything Any Longer?
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The age of bots is here. While we have always been awash with automated crawlers and scrapers, it has now become overwhelming. For a long time, the reporting of website statistics in annual reports or as a service benchmark for law libraries was questionable. Now it is downright pointless.
There was
The Point of Training
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a recent transplant to Chicago. This past spring, I learned that Chicago Public Schools have an administrative governance board at each school. The Local School Council operates as an advisory group for each principal, and is pulled from the school’s community of parents, teachers, and neighbors. The news reported
Slow News Day
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was a newspaper carrier as a kid. That has started to inform some of my thinking about how to consume the news these days. We are seeing that information ingesting is increasingly designed to be disruptive or outright damaging. It is a mixture of many things: small, portable devices, 24-hour
Put Aside the Why
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I’m a satisficer, an embracer of the good-enough-for-now. I do not know when that started but it’s certainly a perspective I feel that I’ve had for most of my career. It may stem from being someone who works with technology which often breaks without an obvious cause. You can spend
Embed the Librarian Intelligence
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a little bit fascinated by the Anthropic-initiated Skills concept. In my mind’s eye, it fixes two of the significant problems with professional use of agentic AI (and generative AI): lack of expertise and lack of re-usability. The gap that I am unsure how to cross is moving from theory
A Herd of One
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I have been using Mastodon for over three years now and have no regrets. I’m aware of confirmation bias in this matter but it still feels right. I was ready to take the next step, which was to try to run my own Mastodon instance. It’s still early days but I
Where Does The Time Go?
Reading Time: 8 minutes
Most people I know are paid for time. It’s an artificial contract. Notionally, I am paid for 40 hours of work a week. There is some expectation that those 40 hours will occur within a specific schedule, like 9am to 5pm. Employers pay me for my time because they have neither
The Light Touch of Leadership
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I was talking with some colleagues recently about leadership and management. Both had new managers. In one case, the person had joined a new team with a seasoned manager. In the other, an existing team had received a person new to management. They were having very different experiences. None of it