"Shh! No Hacking the Census in the Library"

important info
#1

I am sharing this with the cohort in confidentiality in that the article mentions IMLS funding.

The current director of IMLS has asked me not to share it via social media. However you all should be encouraged to share it among your networks. This is an important article and contains many disturbing trends.

Thanks

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#2

I was coming here to post this @james3neal, thanks for sharing! Will definitely keep it confidential that you shared.

I think this is a vital story for demonstrating the value of what we’re doing here.

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#3

Bad actors and state and local information systems as soft spots gets me nervous … I don’t think anyone thinks about this closely enough until breaches happen …

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#4

We just had a census class here with our partnership specialist from the Bureau. He let us know that the bureau has bought thousands of census.gov-adjacent URL’s to try to combat spoofing. They know that a nation-wide effort to collect personal data online is indeed a privacy nightmare in the making, and libraries should have been part of this conversation from the start. But there money allocated to libraries to create secure systems is few and far-between.

The $1.4 million allocated in New York mentioned in the article only covers New York City. Despite the best efforts of our new state librarian and state-wide complete count committee, we haven’t been able to allocate funding for the rest of the state, despite the fact that some was put aside in the budget.

If anyone else is interested in getting involved with this, it’s a great way to put some of the skills you learned in this course to work. If you haven’t already, you can join or create a complete count committee in your area: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/2020-complete-count-committees.html

In my role with the NY census committee, I’m working on a LibGuide that’s a clearinghouse of information for librarians in NY. It’s still in draft mode, but you can view it here: https://libguides.senylrc.org/Census2020

I would also direct my staff not to share this article, not for the reasons your director gave, but because I’m disgusted that they used that tired old “librarians like to shush” trope in the title.

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#5

Amen to librarian stereotypes! I abhor them as well.

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