Mitchell L. Silverman

Information Professional

I am an academic law librarian, information professional, and lawyer.

My professional interests, as a law librarian and information professional, include reference librarianship, technology and the law, free speech, and mindfulness and library practice.

Please note that this is not a law firm or lawyer advertising Web page, and therefore is not regulated by In Re: Amendments to Rules Regulating The Florida Bar - Rule 4-7.6, Computer Accessed Communications (PDF link), 34 Fla. L. Weekly S627 (Fla. Nov. 19, 2009), Case No. SC08-1181. My status as a lawyer is included for informational purposes only.

Nothing here constitutes the practice of law, nor is it legal advice.  No professional relationship can be deemed to exist between myself and anyone else based on anything on this webpage.  Reading this webpage constitutes acceptance of my disclaimer. .

No, really — who is Mitch Silverman?

I'm a bon vivant (on the cheap), trivialist, paronomasiac, and enthusiastic infomaniac, dabbler, and jack of all trades. I'm a proud alumnus of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH (where Dave Chappelle lives); a happy graduate of Broward Community College, now Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, FL (where Harry Crews first taught), and its Honors Institute; a enthusiastic graduate (and extremely supportive alumnus) of New College of Florida, in Sarasota, FL (for which I give much credit to my academic and thesis sponsor Professor Emeritus A. M. "Mac" Miller); and a graduate of the Florida State University College of Law.

In December 2008, I graduated with a master's degree in Information Studies — what used to be called library and information science — from the Florida State University College of Information, now the School of Library and Information Studies of the Florida State University College of Communication and Information, with a specialization in Reference and Instruction.

Since November 2009 I have been working as a reference librarian (full title: "Emerging Technologies, Reference, and Instructional Services Librarian") at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center Law Library and Technology Center. (I love my job!)

My contribution to the world of free/open-source software (F/OSS) is to (heavily) revise a VBScript I downloaded from Lifehacker that tracks time automatically in an Excel spreadsheet, by automating Excel (which is an irony — using F/OSS to control Microsoft Office software). The original VBScript is available here. A list of my revisions and links to the latest version and my blog entries about it are available here.

My Outlook on Life

I just try to follow the Golden Rule (Hillel's version). I consider myself a feminist, but certainly not of the politically correct variety.  My favorite movie is Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

My Interests

My interests include hypertext (I wrote, or tried to, a hypertext thesis at New College); civil rights and civil liberties, especially First Amendment freedoms in Florida and the U.S. (including privacy — here are my personal and professional  PGP keys), religious pluralism and the separation of church and state; Judaism, Reconstructionist and otherwise; freethought; anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and the other social sciences; technology; science fiction and science fiction fandom (from which I get the closing "YHOS"); libertarianism and limited government; federal and Florida state open government and open records laws; and commercial law and contract law in general.

BoingBoing

BoingBoing, "A Directory of Wonderful Things," is one of my favorite blogs. I mentioned to a friend that I had, in fact, been BoingBoinged twice, and he said he knew, and said that I must have mentioned this on my website, right?

Here's a link to the blog post in which I discuss being BoingBoinged.

BoingBoing live!

Boing Boing: a Directory of Wonderful Things

get this for your page

Some Illuminating Quotations

The Golden Rule

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary [the explanation]; go and study it.

— Rabbi Hillel the Elder, Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat, page 31a. (c. 30 B.C.E.)

Feasibility

It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along.

— Abraham Edelcrantz (Abraham Niclas Clewberg), A Treatise on Telegraphs (1796), quoted in Holzmann, Gerard J., and Björn Pehrson, "The First Data Networks," Scientific American, v. 270, no. 1 (January 1994): 124-129.