Privacy vs. Data: Electronic Medical Records (EMR)

My province, British Columbia, is one of many jurisdictions currently in the process of implementing eHealth, which is basically a large scale, provincially-coordinated  implementation of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR).
And I’m gonna come out and say it: I’m a privacy advocate who is pretty much in favour of government-administrated EMRs.
(Of course, there is a catch…)
I [...]

Caron’s LAC Modernisation message: huh?

(aka the blog post wherein I probably blow any and all future chances of working in government…)
Making the rounds of Canadian LIS (and presumably archives) listservs today has been Librarian and Archivist of Canada Dr. Daniel Caron’s “Message from the Librarian and Archivist of Canada: Modernization.”
As far as messages go, it’s kind of an odd [...]

About that blank media levy

This weekend my 6 year old and I made a mix CD of his favourite music. We’re swapping it with a handful of other families we know who value music that is palatable to both kids and parents. This type of thing is how we discovered a mutual parent-child love the pop-punk band ALL (we [...]

Making sense of DRM

Here’s a confession: I don’t really ‘get’ DRM. I mean, I can describe what it is, talk about related legislation, and discuss its impacts on intellectual property law and practice, but I don’t really know the extent to which it’s present in my life.
I’m one of those people who total non-techies think is a real [...]

YouTube videos on CanWest info issues

I don’t have a television, but I do love to watch stuff on my computer.  Back in the last millenium, when I did have a TV, I didn’t have cable anyway, so I am easily impressed with the amazing diversity of media to which I have access via the Internet.
As you may have noticed from [...]

Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]

YouTube-Viacom lawsuit and IT-ignorant government

If you’ve heard about this week’s court order (ArsTechnica plain-English breakdown here) in the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit, you probably already know it makes a parody of privacy. It clearly states for the world that corporate IP such as search algorithms should be held in the utmost confidence. However, concerns over the revealing of personal information such [...]

“Future Reading” and the digital divide

A few of weeks ago I came across an article in the New Yorker by Anthony Grafton entitled “Future Reading” that first interested me because of the really cool drawing involving a library and google.
The article started with the well known recantment of the role libraries play as a place of knowledge, their history, [...]