Daniel Messer's Blog

Over the last few days, a couple of people (literally, two… maybe three) asked if I could talk about some use cases for SiReS Ex. Basically, what does this thing do and why it might be useful to librarians working with Polaris and SimplyReports. Rather than answer everyone in chat or in the comments, I thought: Hey, maybe I can write two posts about of this weird little extension. Why not? I wrote the thing because it was something that I would use, and I figured others would use it because it’s...

Come with me on a journey.

I may have written one of the most laser focused, single minded, small target browser extensions ever.

If you work with Polaris ILS, you may have also worked with SimplyReports. It’s a cool and useful bit of browser-based kit that allows you to build reports, pulling data from the Polaris databases, and you don’t have to learn any SQL to use it. You can build reports about circulation stats, patron fines and fees, your library’s acquisitions information, reque...

Goddess above, it’s been a long time since I last wrote a blog post here on the site. But you see, I need to get this off my chest, because it’s been irritating me for a while. And it has to do with fundamentalist religion, book banning, and history.

When you read articles and the news about book banning in the United States, there’s often someone who pops up in a comment section or on social media and says something like “LOL! THESE IDIOTS WOULD BAN THEIR OWN BIBLE IF THEY STAYED TRUE TO THE...

In the time since the last episode of Cyberpunk Librarian I have:

I’ve been searching for some stability, so I can sit down and start writing. Writing notes that turn into outlines that turn into scripts and those scripts become podcasts. And you know what? It’s time.

It’s 2020. We live in the future and your technology is more important now than it ever has been. How you use that...

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a librarian tasked with redesigning a library card must be in want of examples. I’ve been in on a few conversations here and there, both online and in meatspace, where librarians are tasked with redesigning their institution’s library cards. It’s almost a given part of the process to seek out other librarians and ask to see what their library cards look like. How much text do you have? Do you use a full graphic? How about the logo? Multi-colour or...

Over the month of October I made a series of podcasts to celebrate the spookiness, the paranormal, and the overall joy of one of my favourite holidays. When I was cleaning up the podcast files for archiving, I glanced at my folder full of text and realized, hey… there’s a small book right there. I wonder if people would want that?

Well, actually, I don’t know if anyone wants such a thing, but it wasn’t all that much work to take those Markdown files and roll them over into Scrivener and buil...

A rare look inside the data centre for an online advertising network.

I consume a tonne of online content every day.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’m sure many of you reading this do too. Hey, you’re having a look at this post, so I assume you’ve read other things before this and that you’ll click on something afterwards. I seriously appreciate you taking a few minutes to read my drivel and I appreciate others who share their thoughts, creativity, journalism, and work on the web.

But I’m b...

Music is, oddly enough, an incredibly important part of the shows, or at least it is for me. I say that it’s odd because, well, these are shows about libraries, technology, cyberpunk, Generation X, and librarians in space. Sure, lots of podcast have music breaks or a musical intro or outro. But for me, the music is just as important as the subject matter. I’ll go through dozens of songs, making notes, trying to find ones for the show I’m working on or a show that I have in the pipeline. All f...

I’ve got a lot of projects I’m currently working on, both professionally and personally. I don’t think I have quite too many, though I think it might be approaching some kind of limit. At the very least I started to consider some options for trying to apply some level of organization to them, even if that organization isn’t fully complete. My brain is such that, even if I don’t see an item on a list, I sense its presence by the other items on the list. It’s nothing like clairvoyance, I just k...

It’s been a while since a new episode of Cyberpunk Librarian dropped into the feed and there are a couple of reasons for that. The first, and easiest to understand, is that the topic of the show that I had almost 100% ready to go became the topic of a talk that I’ll be giving at the 2018 Innovative Users Group conference in Orlando, Florida. (More on that in a bit!) It seems a bit daft to give a talk before the talk so, instead, I’m going to do the presentation at IUG first, and then likely s...