Jul 14
We are pleased to share that the coordinators of the Internet Librarian Conference – being held this year on October 26-28 in Monterey, California – are offering a registration discount to WiLS members!
Get $200 off your conference Gold Pass or $150 standard full conference registration by using code 21WILS when you register or use this direct link to automatically add your discount.
Jul 9
Join us on Friday, September 17th at 1:00 pm for the next WiLSWorld Shorts to learn how a tool like Slack can make your internal communications more engaging, efficient, and — dare we say it — even fun!
Apr 16
In 2019, WiLS funded Lodi Public Library’s amazing idea of partnering with the Lodi High School to teach podcasting to high school students. They did that AND they have produced a ton of great material to share with other WiLS members looking to get into the podcasting – and teaching podcasting – business! Read more
Mar 16
WiLS is an independent non-profit that serves libraries of all types, as well as cultural institutions, government agencies, and other non-profits. Since 2013, we have not had a physical shared office space and we have amassed a great deal of knowledge about the tools and strategies for effective remote working. We understand the last few days have been a whirlwind for small businesses, non-profits, schools, libraries, and others. The coming weeks could be challenging so we feel this is a good time to share some of what we’ve learned in case you find yourself shifting in-person meetings to virtual and managing staff or communicating with colleagues who may be working from home offices. Read more
Jun 25
This event has already occurred! Watch the slides, view the recording of the presentation, or check out a list of supporting materials.
This hour-long webinar will introduce participants to key concepts related to digital preservation work for libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions. Topics will include “why digital preservation?,” conducting an assessment of digital assets, and creating a digital preservation policy.
Webinar content will help prepare participants for conversations with their organizations’ key stakeholders such as administrators, IT personnel, and content creators. Participants will gain knowledge and confidence to navigate digital preservation discussions and advocate for their organization’s long-term digital asset management and preservation work. Join us for this free learning opportunity!
This webinar will be recorded and shared.
Emily Pfotenhauer
Program Manager
Recollection Wisconsin
Vicki Tobias
Program Coordinator
Curating Community Digital Collections
Jan 29
Jessamyn West has been helping people with their computers in rural Vermont for 15 years and she’s created a simple privacy toolkit to help people understand the complicated world of online privacy. She’ll share her talk and the resources she uses to support the talk so that more librarians can help their patrons stay safer and more confident online.
This webinar will be recorded and shared.
Jessamyn West has been speaking on the intersection of libraries, technology and politics since 2003. Her specific interest areas are:
She has given presentations in thirty-eight U.S. states, three Australian states, and six Canadian provinces. She has given workshops, keynotes, and all-day sessions on technology and library topics. She has written book introductions and chapters and edited two compilations. Librarian.net, her professional blog, just celebrated its twentieth year online and was one of the first librarian blogs. While she travels and speaks often, her main work is at home in Orange County Vermont, helping libraries and librarians make sense of technology and teaching adult education classes in basic technology topics. She has been teaching basic technology classes for twenty-five years.
Jan 22
Join us for a free and virtual WiLSWorld Shorts on Friday, March 1st at 1:00 pm featuring Mukurtu – An Introduction! Read more
Dec 6
Join us for the a second January 2019 WiLSWorld Shorts: Effective Library Advocacy with Connie Meyer, Director of Bridges Library System and Scott Vrieze, Library Director at UW-Stout. The free and virtual webinar will be held on Thursday, January 17th at 11:00 am. Read more
Oct 26
On December 11th at 1:00 pm, please join us in our next edition of WiLSWorld Shorts. This free webinar features Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction. Drawing on conversations sparked by WiLSWorld 2017 keynote speaker Dr. Safiya Noble, this WiLSWorld Short dives deeper with Ms. O’Neil into understanding how unquestioned algorithms perpetuate inequitable systems in our communities and in our libraries.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.
But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in her book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.
Buy Cathy O’Neil’s book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or borrow it from Wisconsin’s Digital Library.
This webinar will not be recorded.
Mar 16
Mukurtu project partners with WSU faculty and staff
WiLS and UW-Madison SLIS are excited to announce a new partnership with Washington State University to help tribal communities share their digital cultural heritage.
The IMLS-funded Mukurtu Hubs and Spokes: A Sustainable National Platform for Digital Community Archiving establishes five regional training and outreach centers for Mukurtu CMS, a culturally relevant and ethically-minded content management system designed for Indigenous communities.
WiLS and the TLAM (Tribal Libraries, Archives and Museums) project at SLIS are working with WSU along with the University of Hawaii’s Department of Linguistics, the Alaska Native Language Archives, the University of Oregon Libraries, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Yale Indian Papers Project teams to create the regional Mukurtu hubs. Each of these partners will then work closely with tribal archives, libraries and museums to identify their specific technical needs and curation preferences, as well as connecting them to training through WSU.
WiLS staff members Erin Hughes and Emily Pfotenhauer visited WSU for two days of training in early March.
“The histories and heritage of American Indian nations are priceless,” said Omar Poler, outreach specialist at SLIS and co-team leader for the Midwest Mukurtu Hub. “By serving as a midwestern Mukurtu training hub, WiLS and UW-Madison will be honored to support tribes as they document their communities as they see fit.”
With the funding provided by IMLS, WiLS has hired Erin Hughes as Mukurtu Hub Manager. Erin brings over a decade of experience in museum collections care and outreach. She’ll complete her MLIS, focusing on Archives and Records Management, this summer.
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