Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

I'm back for 2024. I intended to start publishing LLLotW again a couple of weeks ago but I lost my mojo. Or my brain was still on holiday. Or something. Anyway here we are.

Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches

It turns out this headline is a little excitable compared to the reality, but this is a pretty fascinating story. Partially because the example they give in the story of the holy grail – “fully private” internet search engines where the search term is not known to the engine – would be impossible to fund with a keyword-based advertising model.

How Universities Lost the Internet

A cry into the void from Robert W Gehl, bemoaning the fact that universities worldwide – at the beginning of the Internet, the place to access, learn about, and develop it – have rapidly moved in the last decade to a point where almost nothing is managed in-house and most things are run by a tiny handful of powerful US companies.

Lessons learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian

This has a software industry flavour to be sure, but it's a really interesting, data-backed paper from Atlassian on their “distributed first” work model and what they have learned from it.

The biggest blockers to productivity, connection, and innovation are not location-based. They center around how work gets done: back-to-back meetings, vague priorities, confusing email threads, and streams of distracting notifications. All knowledge workers face these challenges, regardless of where they work.

Something that was almost a sidenote also jumped out at me, given my own (multi-location) workplace's habit of using synchronous events for Big Announcements by leaders:

We aim to have leaders share announcements asynchronously first, so that Atlassians are less likely to miss important information.

Anyway if you're in a leadership position in an organisation doing “knowledge work” like libraries and universities, this paper is definitely worth a read. You can't necessarily change the work-from-the-office rules, but you can certainly influence the culture and practices in your own team.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every week by Hugh Rundle.

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