LLLotW 2023.28

Yes, I'm publishing on a Monday. I don't do paid work on Mondays, so it seems like a more sensible day to publish LLLotW. This is our new schedule until I change my mind.

A Request for Comment: Automatic Digital Preservation and Self-Healing DOIs

This is a pretty interesting proposal:

I will write another post, soon, on the reality of preservation of items with a Crossref DOI, but recent work in the Labs team has determined that we have a situation of drastic under-preservation of much scholarly material that has been assigned a persistent identifier. In particular, content from our smaller Crossref members, with limited financial resources, is often precariously preserved. Further, DOI URLs are not always updated, even when, for instance, the underlying domain has been registered by a different third party. This results in DOIs pointing to new, hijacked, and elapsed content that does not reflect the metadata that we hold.

We (Geoffrey) have (has) long-harboured ambitions to build a system that would allow for automatic deposit into an archive and then to present access options to the resolving user. This would ensure that all Crossref content had at least one archival solution backing it and greatly contribute to the improved persistent resolvability of our DOIs. We refer to this, internally, as “Project Op Cit”. And we’re now in a position to begin building it.

Humane Ingenuity 47: AI Is Coming for Scholarship Next

I always enjoy Dan Cohen's newsletter. I don't necessarily always agree with everything he writes, but it makes me think. This is a really interesting overview of the thinking around SALAMI and Universities:

In hallway conversations at the CNI meeting, attendees had no trouble connecting the AI dots: point these tools at your digital lab notebook or other research sources, have AI summarize the existing literature in the field, and then auto-generate drafts of the standard sections of an academic paper. Maybe a little light editing and you’re done! Could the traditional academic struggle of “publish or perish” become a painless series of clicks?

Such chatter went from possibility to probability, and then to profound concern about the future of academia, a month later at the annual meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing. The dark title of SSP’s plenary session: ““Resolved: Artificial Intelligence Will Fatally Undermine the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing.”

The Gamification of Reading Is Changing How We Approach Books

Readers of my blog will know I contribute to the open source project BookWyrm. So I found this article really interesting. Again, I don't agree with everything (or even most things) Greta Rainbow writes here, but I found it an interesting jumping off point for conversations about books and reading. I'm not a competitive reader, but reading has always been a social activity, at least since it escaped the Sumerian bureaucracy. “Speed reading” has been championed for years, and many people watch YouTube videos at 1.5 speed, which is really the same thing. So I'm not really endorsing Rainbow's worldview here, but I do recommend a read of the article, because it's a good prompt to think about your own relationship to recreational reading.


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

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