In today's social media world, we’ve seen platforms go awry when faced with the scourges of misinformation and trolling. In authoritarian regimes, entire platforms are easily blocked. And yes, a billionaire can buy a platform and change the rules.  Would decentralized (or P-2-P) social media, where there is no central controlling entity, be better? How do you take down damaging posts when there is no central command center? The founders of some of the top decentralized social media networks, from Matrix to Manyverse to the new Bluesky initiative, walk you through the possibilities. With demonstrations of how to use these peer-to-peer alternatives to Facebook, Slack and Twitter. Speakers Jay Graber is CEO of Bluesky, the initiative funded by Jack Dorsey and Twitter, “to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.” Matthew Hodgson is Co-founder of the Matrix.org. Matrix is an open network for secure, decentralized communication with more than 40M users. Andre Staltz is Creator of Manyverse, a free, open source “social network without the bad stuff,” built on the peer-to-peer SSB protocol.  About This Series The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms.  What if we could build something better—what some are calling the decentralized web? In this series of six workshops, we’ll explore the ways in which moving to decentralized technologies may enhance your privacy, empower you to control your own data, and resist censorship. Join us to hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. We’ll see demonstrations of blockchains, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and decentralized storage projects in action. Learn how the decentralized web might yet create systems that empower individuals by eliminating central points of control.

Join Library Futures, METRO Library Council, and the NYU Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at a casual gathering to discuss the issues facing copyright, technology, and libraries. Meet Library Futures Executive Director Jennie Rose Halperin and Board Member Tucker Taylor, eat snacks, drink a beverage, and talk Controlled Digital Lending, digital ownership, copyright, and what's next in libraries and technology in the service of the public good. We'll be joined by METRO Library Council and faculty from NYU School of Law. From 5:30-6:30 we'll be holding a facilitated discussion on the issues, with plenty of time for networking and community building as well. Proof of vaccination required and masks encouraged.

Join us on Wednesday, April 27 from 2:00pm to 3:00pm for a BIPOC Community Call. This event is meant for BIPOC cultural workers only; we kindly ask that allies and comrades who identify as non-BIPOC to sit this one out. Our intention is to create a space that offers community, joy, and conversation during this time. Please come with a spirit of openness and empathy as we share thoughts and feelings without judgment. This call will be facilitated by Traci Mark, Program Manager - Equity, Archives & Media Preservation at METRO, and Zakiya Collier, Community Manager for Documenting the Now (DocNow).

Providing robust readers’ advisory service that values equity, diversity, and inclusion principles is essential to all library service. Moving from being a neutral, well-meaning library where systemic racism is acknowledged to an actively anti-racist organization involves work. In this program you will learn tangible skills to help build enthusiasm for reading and discovering diverse books, begin to deepen RA service through thoughtful inclusion of EDI principles in all interactions with leisure readers, and develop the skills necessary to be a steward of an anti-racist mindset for your organization. Readers’ advisory and collection development experts Becky Spratford and Robin Bradford will make a case for moving away from merely discussing "why" to put EDI concerns at the forefront of your work with readers to "how." Their presentation includes an honest look at actionable steps for all staff. While it may seem uncomfortable at first, Becky and Robin will help you shift your focus, allowing your entire organization to craft an actionable plan to incorporate EDI values into your normal RA practices. In Part 3, join Robin and Becky for an open discussion as they help you craft an actionable plan to begin this important journey. To view recordings of the first two sessions of this series: Part 1, Collection Development Part 2, Readers’ Advisory If you have questions for Robin and Becky, please submit them using this form by 11:59pm ET on Wednesday, April 20, 2022. About our presenters: Becky Spratford, MLIS, is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All. She is under contract to provide content for EBSCO’s NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 20-year locally elected Library Trustee (still serving) and a Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition (ALA Editions, 2021). She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association and currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and organizer of their annual Librarians’ Day. You can follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll. Robin Bradford is currently a collection development librarian in Washington State. During her 29 years of library life, she has been recognized for service to readers, genre readers especially, from institutions like Library Journal to RWA’s Cathie Linz Librarian of the Year in 2016. Robin is a book addict and has a long-time dedication to helping others discover a love of reading. She has earned a BA and MA in English, a MS in Library Science, and a JD, but has found a home in building reader-focused, popular collections in public libraries. She has worked with authors to help get their titles into these collections, worked with librarians to push for equal treatment of genre fiction, and worked with readers so that they can find their favorite authors on their library's shelves. Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services.

Katy Connolly of the Right Question Institute (RQI) and librarian Connie Williams demonstrate the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a deceptively simple yet rigorous protocol that teaches all people how to ask, work with, and pursue their own questions. Viewers will explore how the QFT can be flexibly applied to support students, clients, library patrons, and others to develop research questions that align with their personal needs with more confidence. To access the materials mentioned in this webinar, visit https://bit.ly/QFT41922.  About our presenters: After 28 years as a teacher librarian with Petaluma School, Connie Williams now works part time as a history room librarian in a public library in northern California. She presents and writes about teaching with government information and primary sources, and in partnership with RQI, she has presented and written about question-building and inquiry. She is the author of the book Understanding Government Information: A Teaching Strategies Toolkit for Grades 7-12, co-author with Blanche Woolls of Teaching Life Skills in the Library, and writer of many articles on advocating for school libraries, teaching with primary sources, and infographics. She hosts the Primary Source Starter Kit for Teachers (because every subject has a history) at chwms.libguides.com. Katy Connolly is RQI’s education program coordinator. She designs content for the program’s professional development offerings and manages RQI’s archive of educational resources. She also coordinates RQI’s collaborative partnerships with teachers to ensure that all programmatic work authentically represents and is shaped by the experiences of educators. Katy graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in English education, where she spent most of her time teaching and tutoring high school students. With her background in the classroom, Katy is passionate about collaborating with educators to design pedagogy and classroom environments that allow students to drive their own learning.  This webinar was presented in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library.

Join the METRO Economics & Business Librarians Group to tour the Business & Career Center at Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library at Grand Army Plaza. The Business & Career Center features a variety of individual/small group rooms, technology for loan, and event spaces. The Center welcomes entrepreneurs, freelancers, job seekers and anyone seeking a secure financial future. Phase One of the Central Library's Renovation Plan has been completed, and the tour will also include visits to the new Civic Commons, New & Noteworthy, Major Owens Welcome Area and Grand Lobby spaces. Please plan to meet in the Dweck Auditorium on the Central Library’s lower level. RSVP required. Attendance is capped at 40 for health and safety. This free event is open to business and economic information professionals. You need not be a METRO (Metropolitan New York Library Council) member to attend.

Please join our next ILL Interest Group Meeting! This group meets regularly to discuss all things ILL, from workflows and processes to network delivery services. Please bring any discussion items you'd like to raise.

Want to learn more about prison abolition? Looking to explore the role of information in the prison industrial complex? Excited to discuss ways we can collectively offer resources to address violence caused by mass incarceration? Join the club (literally!). This monthly discussion group with Prison Library Support Network will look at a rotating calendar of media resources for discussion, meeting the 2nd Monday of each month at 7:30pm. While the group's facilitators (and host) are affiliated with libraries, you do not need to be a librarian or information professional to attend this group. We will share our discussion calendar regularly through METRO and the PLSN listserv, so that folks can plan ahead to attend the months that sound interesting to them. To celebrate National Poetry Month, we will be reading this brief article and listening to poems written by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated “poet ambassadors.” ‘Our Minds Are Still Free:’ These Former Prisoners Find Strength Through Poetry Optional: Free Minds Book Club - a collection of poems Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services.

Providing robust readers’ advisory service that values equity, diversity, and inclusion principles is essential to all library service. Moving from being a neutral, well-meaning library where systemic racism is acknowledged to an actively anti-racist organization involves work. In this series you will learn tangible skills to help build enthusiasm for reading and discovering diverse books, begin to deepen RA service through thoughtful inclusion of EDI principles in all interactions with leisure readers, and develop the skills necessary to be a steward of an anti-racist mindset for your organization. Readers’ advisory and collection development experts Becky Spratford and Robin Bradford make a case for moving away from merely discussing "why" to put EDI concerns at the forefront of your work with readers to "how." Their presentations include an honest look at actionable steps for all staff. While it may seem uncomfortable at first, Becky and Robin will help you shift your focus, allowing your entire organization to craft an actionable plan to incorporate EDI values into your normal RA practices. In Part 2, Becky outlines ways to approach readers’ advisory so that the discovery and circulation of titles written by marginalized voices in all libraries is not treated as a trend, but as a requirement. About our presenter: Becky Spratford, MLIS, is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog RA for All. She is under contract to provide content for EBSCO’s NoveList database and writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 20-year locally elected Library Trustee (still serving) and a Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition (ALA Editions, 2021). She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association and currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and organizer of their annual Librarians’ Day. You can follow Becky on Twitter @RAforAll.

Join LASSA to celebrate Library Assistants' Day! We will be hosting a webinar from noon until 1pm on April 7, to be immediately followed by a repeat performance. Please join us at either 12pm or 1pm for an hourlong gathering. After the traditional welcome and reading of the LAD proclamation, Cheryl Marriott will present a Vision Board Workshop. A vision board is a visualization tool which refers to a board of any sort used to build a collage of words and pictures that represent your goals and dreams. The best way to achieve your goals is to keep them top of mind, so you’re always looking for ways to move yourself closer to them – and a vision board is the perfect tool to help you do that. This workshop will share a step-by-step creative process of designing a vision board can elicit deep discovery, meaning, and self- understanding in a collaborative picture and word format. Cheryl M. Marriott, DRE, Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections of The Medical Research Library of Brooklyn, at SUNY Downstate Health Science University. A hard-working Non-teaching professional with 35+years. Ms. Marriott oversees the collection of the historical information and the display of the artifacts of the History of Medicine in Brooklyn. Ms. Marriott is a 2020 SUNY Chancellor Award recipient. Her Motto is, “The World of Libraries has changed in many ways over the years; and that each person is an important piece in the overall puzzle. Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services here: https://metro.org/code-of-conduct

This event has been postponed. We will not be meeting today at noon. We will send further details to participants as it arises. Join LASSA to celebrate Library Assistants' Day! After the traditional welcome and reading of the LAD proclamation, Cheryl Marriott will present a Vision Board Workshop. A vision board is a visualization tool which refers to a board of any sort used to build a collage of words and pictures that represent your goals and dreams. The best way to achieve your goals is to keep them top of mind, so you’re always looking for ways to move yourself closer to them – and a vision board is the perfect tool to help you do that. This workshop will share a step-by-step creative process of designing a vision board can elicit deep discovery, meaning, and self- understanding in a collaborative picture and word format. Cheryl M. Marriott, DRE, Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections of The Medical Research Library of Brooklyn, at SUNY Downstate Health Science University. A hard-working Non-teaching professional with 35+years. Ms. Marriott oversees the collection of the historical information and the display of the artifacts of the History of Medicine in Brooklyn. Ms. Marriott is a 2020 SUNY Chancellor Award recipient. Her Motto is, “The World of Libraries has changed in many ways over the years; and that each person is an important piece in the overall puzzle. Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services here: https://metro.org/code-of-conduct

The Library Assistants and Support Staff Association (LASSA) presents a webinar on creditworthiness, financial planning, and other topics to help you get your financial ducks in a row. Topics include: What constitutes a FICO score?   Does your credit score matter?   How to improve your creditworthiness, with or without a credit score! Presenter Carol O'Rourke is a Certified Financial Planning Professional with extensive experience in personal finance, ranging from budgeting, managing credit, reducing debt to building retirement savings and investing. A graduate of New York University's Stern School of Business (MBA), she worked on Wall Street for twenty-five years and later ran a non-profit presenting financial literacy classes throughout NYC. This event is part of a series programmed and planned by METRO's Library Assistants and Support Staff Association (LASSA). Many thanks to Anthony Wyche, Val Colon, Cheryl Marriott, and the rest of the LASSA board for their hard work in planning this series.

Dive deeper into the features and functions of OpenRefine in this webinar. Building on the concepts covered in Part 1, viewers will learn how to interact with a variety of data formats, transform them to fit your needs, and export the results to share with others. Katie Wolf, Science and Technology Librarian at Fordham University Libraries, demonstrates how to parse HTML with OpenRefine using a Project Gutenberg example, as well as how to work with JSON in OpenRefine using the Library of Congress API. 

Join the code4lib NYC for a code & coffee Zoom the first Friday of each month this winter and spring. Attendees will have the option of joining breakout rooms to socialize and talk about current projects or to quietly work together in a virtual space. Are you interested in joining code4lib NYC as an organizer? Stop by one of these events to chat with current organizers and share your ideas.

Want your FedEx package? Now you must allow the company to scan your ID. Check into a hotel? Hand over your passport. Rent an e-bike? Key in your driver’s license, which includes your address, birthdate, and weight. What if you could maintain control over your personal identity and share only what is needed? Enter decentralized or self-sovereign identity (SSI). In the future, we believe each person will hold an e-wallet and control his/her/their own personal information. About This Series The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms. What if we could build something better—what some are calling the decentralized web? In this series of six workshops, we’ll explore the ways in which moving to decentralized technologies may enhance your privacy, empower you to control your own data, and resist censorship. Join us to hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. We’ll see demonstrations of blockchains, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and decentralized storage projects in action. Learn how the decentralized web might yet create systems that empower individuals by eliminating central points of control. About the Presenters Wendy Hanamura (Moderator) is the Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest digital libraries. She helps to steward the DWeb community that now encompasses eleven global nodes of technologists, policymakers, artists, and activists all working to build a better web. Kaliya Young, "Identity Woman" is Co-Founder of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) and the author of two books: The Domains of Identity (2020) and A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity (2018). For the past 15 years, Kaliya has been working to bring about the creation of a layer of identity for people based on open standards. Lambert Heller is Director of the Open Science Lab, National Science Library of Germany (TIB Hannover). His research centers on how infrastructures and cultural heritage institutions change and grow in a networked, globalized world. His areas of interest include: Responsible Research Data Governance and building digital capability. He has an academic background in sociology, political science and philosophy, and a dedicated professional career in library systems. Irene Adamski is Head of Operations at JOLOCOM, a Berlin-based company focusing on developing Self-Sovereign Identity solutions. She also served as BEPAB Member with the OECD, General Secretary of the German Blockchain Association and Co-Chair of the INATBA Working Group Energy. A big motivation of her work is the gradual increase of system resilience via decentralization and self-sovereign users, as well as coherent international standardization and collaboration. Her academic and professional background is in linguistics, international law and energy transition.

Copy That! is a three-part series focusing on basic principles of U.S. copyright law and its impact on us as library professionals, and in our own creative lives. Part 3 looks at how licensing works for libraries, including licensed databases, e-book lending, open educational resources, and controlled digital lending. Presenter Kiowa Hammons also discussed collection digitization and ways to minimize risk when using materials that are protected by copyright.

Providing robust readers’ advisory service that values equity, diversity, and inclusion principles is essential to all library service. Moving from being a neutral, well-meaning library where systemic racism is acknowledged to an actively anti-racist organization involves work. In this series you will learn tangible skills to help build enthusiasm for reading and discovering diverse books, begin to deepen RA service through thoughtful inclusion of EDI principles in all interactions with leisure readers, and develop the skills necessary to be a steward of an anti-racist mindset for your organization. Readers’ advisory and collection development experts Becky Spratford and Robin Bradford will make a case for moving away from merely discussing "why" to put EDI concerns at the forefront of your work with readers to "how." Their presentation includes an honest look at actionable steps for all staff. While it may seem uncomfortable at first, Becky and Robin will help you shift your focus, allowing your entire organization to craft an actionable plan to incorporate EDI values into your normal RA practices. In Part 1, Robin discusses strategies for building a collection development plan that begins actively breaking down the systems of oppression that have been built over centuries but cannot be allowed to stand any longer. About the presenter: Robin Bradford is currently a collection development librarian in Washington State. During her 29 years of library life, she has been recognized for service to readers, genre readers especially, from institutions like Library Journal to RWA’s Cathie Linz Librarian of the Year in 2016. Robin is a book addict and has a long-time dedication to helping others discover a love of reading. She has earned a BA and MA in English, a MS in Library Science, and a JD, but has found a home in building reader-focused, popular collections in public libraries. She has worked with authors to help get their titles into these collections, worked with librarians to push for equal treatment of genre fiction, and worked with readers so that they can find their favorite authors on their library's shelves.

Want to learn more about prison abolition? Looking to explore the role of information in the prison industrial complex? Excited to discuss ways we can collectively offer resources to address violence caused by mass incarceration? Join the club (literally!). This monthly discussion group with Prison Library Support Network will look at a rotating calendar of media resources for discussion, meeting the 2nd Monday of each month at 7:30pm. While the group's facilitators (and host) are affiliated with libraries, you do not need to be a librarian or information professional to attend this group. We will share our discussion calendar regularly through METRO and the PLSN listserv, so that folks can plan ahead to attend the months that sound interesting to them. Join us this month for a discussion on the realities of motherhood and pregnancy while incarcerated. Digitized issue of Tenacious Zine #5 Mothers Day issue Excerpt from Tenacious Issue 27 Tutwiler: A Marshall Project/Frontline documentary (30 minutes, video) The Realities of Pregnancy and Mothering While Incarcerated (PDF article - recommended) Optional: Pregnant Behind Bars: What We Do and Don't Know About Pregnancy and Incarceration, NPR Radio Interview (4 minutes, audio) Mothers leaving prison try reconnecting with family (7 minutes, video) Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services.

What do you do when your tape is sick? Won’t play? Feels damaged? Chris Nicols and Ana Marie of XFR Collective are here to cure what ails your magnetic media. In this webinar, they walk you through the anatomy of a tape, how to diagnose common audio visual artifacts, and discuss your treatment options. They also highlight some recent experiments with DIY tape baking, and demonstrate how they’ve rehabilitated tapes suffering from sticky shed syndrome.  About The Presenters Chris Nicols is a multimedia archivist and currently works as a Film Archivist at the New York City Municipal Archives. He holds a Masters degree from NYU and previously worked at Storycorps, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the Miami-Dade College Wolfson Archive. He specializes in digitizing and managing collections of historical and documentary analog moving image material. Ana Marie is an Archivist at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before that she completed a two-year NEH Grant to transfer and preserve ~300 hours of WNYC recordings in the Municipal Archives Collection, created between the 1930s and the 1970s. Originally from the Austin area, she attended The University of Texas and received a BA in Art History and a MSIS in Information Studies.

Library workers can make great use of NYC Open Data to both answer questions from patrons and conduct their own research. Once you've got the dataset, though, the process has only just begun. The next step? Ensuring the data is uniform so you can begin to answer those research questions as accurately as possible. In this webinar led by Katie Wolf, Science and Technology Librarian at Fordham University Libraries, you'll learn the basics of working with OpenRefine utilizing a Squirrel Census dataset from NYC Open Data. Get an overview of features and functions of OpenRefine, and will learn how to create a new project, manipulate data fields, and split and create columns. By the end, you should feel confident about working with OpenRefine on your own projects. For a deeper dive into OpenRefine, be sure to register for Managing Messy Data, Part 2: Even Messier Data on Tuesday, April 5 from 4:00pm to 5:00pm. This webinar was presented as part of Open Data Week 2022.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) stems from legal studies and aims to expose, critically analyze and, ultimately, eliminate systemic racism. In librarianship, applied CRT investigates our practices with a goal of dismantling white supremacy and the many ways it manifests in libraries, from our architectures, our collection development, to our teaching and learning practices. We’d like to think together about how critical race theory informs our pedagogy and our practice. We invite you to consider how we can integrate criticalities of race to our approaches to teaching and/or reference practice. How are we reifying power structures of racial inequity in library services, school, and staffing models? How do we continue to support ourselves, faculty, students, patrons, and the public? What do we need to keep doing? Start? Stop? This METRO Reference & Instruction SIG event will be held March 4th, 2022. Let's build a collective discourse that will support practitioners from various institutional contexts and who come to this venture with varying levels of expertise! 2022 Case Studies Presenters Dewhitening Librarianship: A Policy Proposal for Libraries April Hathcock - Director of Scholarly Communication & Information Policy, NYU Dr. Isabel Espinal - Librarian for African Studies, Afro American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies, Native American & Indigenous Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass-Amherst Maria Rios - Humanities Research Services Librarian, UMass-Amherst A Materialist Approach to Understanding Information and Society Betsy Yoon - Assistant Professor & Public and International Affairs Library Liaison, CUNY, Baruch College Beautiful Imposition: An Instructor's Toolkit to Cultivate Critical, Creative and Independent Thinking kynita stringer-stanback - Information Activist/Research Designer/Storyteller Primer in Critical Race Theories in Libraries Dr. Shaundra Walker - Library Director at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia Shaundra Walker serves as Library Director at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. She is also a tenured Associate Professor of Library Science. A native of Macon, Georgia, she earned a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Mercer University. Shaundra also holds a Master of Science in Library and Information Studies from Clark Atlanta University and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Spelman College. A member of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Georgia Library Association (GLA), and GLA-Black Caucus, she was the recipient of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association/DEMCO Outstanding Librarian of the Year Award in 2020. Her research interests include the recruitment and retention of librarians of color, organizational development within Minority Serving Institution (MSI) libraries, and critical librarianship. Shaundra regularly speaks on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in library science. Her most recent book chapter, “Ann Allen Shockley: An Activist Librarian for Black Special Collections,” appears in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight (MIT Press, 2021). She is co-editor of The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, Resistance, and Reawakening (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). The Reference and Instruction Special Interest Group co-leaders are: Kate Adler, Director of Library Services, MCNY, Linda Miles, Head of Reference and OER Librarian, Hostos Community College, & Shawnta Smith-Cruz, Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement, NYU.

Join the code4lib NYC for a code & coffee Zoom the first Friday of each month this winter and spring. Attendees will have the option of joining breakout rooms to socialize and talk about current projects or to quietly work together in a virtual space. Are you interested in joining code4lib NYC as an organizer? Stop by one of these events to chat with current organizers and share your ideas.

Every morning you get the chance to begin your day in a positive way. Linda Carignan-Everts, Employee Assistance Program Wellness Coordinator for the State of New York, shares 22 positive habits and their benefits for an amazing 2022. If you are not a morning person, you just might become one after watching this webinar! Linda has worked for New York State for 25 years as the Wellness Director for the Department of Health, and the EAP Wellness Coordinator, and manages the statewide employee wellness program WellNYS Everyday. Linda’s contact information is linda.carignan-everts@eap.ny.gov. This event is part of a series programmed and planned by METRO's Library Assistants and Support Staff Association (LASSA). Many thanks to Anthony Wyche, Val Colon, Cheryl Marriott, and the rest of the LASSA board for their hard work in planning this series.

Libraries understand the headache of storing materials. How do you create room for an ever-expanding collection? What if you don’t want to weed materials to make room? Enter decentralized storage—a network of P-2-P servers that store materials across a global network in exchange for cryptocurrency. What problems does this solve? What problems does this create? Where is the state of decentralized storage today? See a resource guide for this session here. About The Speakers Wendy Hanamura is the Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive and helps steward the DWeb global network. Jonathan Dotan is the Founder of the Starling Lab, the first major research lab devoted to decentralized web technologies. It is affiliated with Stanford and USC. Arkadiy Kukarkin is the Decentralized Web Lead Engineer for the Internet Archive. Dominick Marino is the Senior Solutions Architect and Ecosystem lead at STORJ. About This Series The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms. What if we could build something better—what some are calling the decentralized web? In this series of six workshops, we’ll explore the ways in which moving to decentralized technologies may enhance your privacy, empower you to control your own data, and resist censorship. Join us to hear from experts in the leading peer-to-peer technologies, from identity to data storage. We’ll see demonstrations of blockchains, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and decentralized storage projects in action. Learn how the decentralized web might yet create systems that empower individuals by eliminating central points of control. This series is a partnership between Internet Archive, DWeb, Library Futures, and Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Join us on Wednesday, February 23 from 2:00pm to 3:00pm for a Black History Month Celebration. This event is meant for BIPOC cultural workers only; we kindly ask that allies and comrades who identify as non-BIPOC to sit this one out. Our intention is to create a space that offers community, joy, and conversation during this time. Please come with a spirit of openness and empathy as we share thoughts and feelings without judgement. This call will be facilitated by Traci Mark, Program Manager - Equity, Archives, and Media Preservation at METRO, and Zakiya Collier, Community Manager for Documenting the Now (DocNow). Please review our Code of Conduct, our Statement on Viewpoints, and details on Interpreter Services.