Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

EU governments to rein in unfair academic publishers and unsustainable fees

Some very interesting news about draft legislation being negotiated in the EU Council. The path of EU legislation is long, winding, and full of opportunities for corporate lobbying at every stage, but this does sound promising. It seems member states may finally be waking up to the fact that replacing usurious pay-to-read fees with extortionate pay-to-publish fees isn't a very good deal.

4+1 Different Ways Large Language Models like GPT4 are helping to improve information retrieval

Aaron Tay has a really approachable explanation of the range of approaches being taken by web search and question-answering tools when it comes to integrating large language model-based SALAMI. Tay's exploration shows how different approaches to combining large web indexes and large language models can result in vastly different results.

pymarc

Ed Summers created pymarc 25 years ago, and a major new version has recently been released. Here he muses on MARC, web archiving, ephemerality, and why MARC won't die:

It’s a bit of a paradox how web resources can be so fleeting and impermanent, while data formats (like MARC) that circulate by virtue of the web can turn out to be so resilient.

---

Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every week by Hugh Rundle.

Subscribe by following @fedi@lllotw.hugh.run on the fediverse or sign up for email below.