Reading Time: 7 minutes
I was running through the syllabus highlights recently as we started a new semester of lawyering skills. It’s primarily a writing and research class, with professionalism and practice technology incorporated when possible. As we touched on artificial intelligence, there were no questions and I didn’t belabor it. If law students use
Law Library
Adding the DNS Sinkhole
By David Whelan
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 End to All Things
By David Whelan
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…
Playing the Long Game
By David Whelan
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…
Do Web Analytics Measure Anything Any Longer?
By David Whelan
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…
Slow News Day
By David Whelan
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
By David Whelan
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
By David Whelan
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…
Where Does The Time Go?
By David Whelan
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…
For Every Searcher, Their Search Engine
By David Whelan
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Wither the web search. You may have started putting in a date delimiter of ChatGPT’s arrival as a cutoff for reliable results on the internet. You may have hacked your default browser search to cut out slop. One thing is for sure: web search is not what it was. Thirsty AEO…