Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

‘All your data are belong to us’: the weaponisation of library usage data and what we can do about it

There have always been voices within librarianship raising the alarm about the use and misuse of data by our suppliers (ahem I'm sorry, “partners”). However as companies become increasingly public about repositioning themselves from “publishers” to “data brokers”, the rest of the profession seems to be belatedly waking up. This article is a pretty succinct overview of the issues.

At some point soon the Open Education community needs to have a conversation about where to draw the line between being able to measure use of OERs, and opening the door to the same kind of toxic metrics-driven invasion of reader autonomy.

Volume 1, No. 1 – Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education

It's a collectors' edition! The very first issue of Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education has been released, with an impressive collection of articles.

Online access to Archives' records removed after potential privacy breach

Archives New Zealand is not having a good week. Upon discovering that private information was leaking out of their brief public catalogue records, the entire online search system has been taken offline until the problem can be resolved. This is also not good news for Axiell, the vendor for the system that was implemented earlier this year. It will be interesting to see whether the cause of the problem and its eventual resolution become public knowledge.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Chief Scientist plan for free research access for all

The nation’s chief scientist will this year recommend to government a radical departure from the way research is distributed in Australia, proposing a world-first model that shakes up the multi-billion-dollar publishing business so Australian readers don’t pay a cent.

The idea of everyone having to log in to MyGov to read academic papers fills me with horror, and I don't love the Gold model for open access, but this is huge news that if implemented would turn every academic library upside down amongst many other sweeping consequences.

Libraries and open publishing case studies

CAUL's Libraries and Open Publishing Case Studies guide presents a series of case studies of university libraries’ open publishing initiatives and accompanying researcher case studies that demonstrate the value of these initiatives. The case studies were designed for use within and beyond the library sector to support advocacy work in relation to open access publishing and provide examples of open publishing practice from which others can learn.

Baserow: Open source no-code database and Airtable alternative

This looks extremely cool. I'm including it in LLLotW because I know some libraries use Airtable for analysing complex datasets when they lack either the cooperation of IT departments to use more direct database solutions, the IT resources to do this in the first place, or the need to use a fully fledged relational database like MySQL for a small project.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Mapping the social worlds/Arena of open education

A talk by Tanya Elias at the ALT conference in April 2022. Elias talks about research she has done on the various “arenas” of open education and how they intersect and interact. Interesting stuff and not too long to wach.

Getting Real Close: What a Diary Study Can Do for Your Library

This is a really interesting piece in Weave journal about how Berlin State Library used a diary study as part of a building refurbishment project. This is a UX research technique I've not really considered before, but it sounds like it was perfect for their use case, and certainly could be useful in a range of library contexts.

When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

This is from Jenni Nadler of Wix. I've tried to use Wix before and found it maddening, but this article provides some really excellent advice that I've already used to improve an error page at my work. The formula provided for a good error message:

• Say what happened
• Say why it happened
• Provide reassurance
• Help them fix it
• Give them a way out

Great stuff.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Open Access Week 2022

It's Thursday night so I'm a little late to the party, but in case you didn't know it's Open Access Week this week. Open Access Australasia have been running some fantastic events, and there's still a few more to come tomorrow.

cloudStor will be no more after 2023

Late last week AARNet announced that their cloudStor service will be decommissioned at the end of 2023. This may sound like a lot of notice, but many institutions are likely to be thinking 13 months notice to replace critical national research infrastructure will be a close run thing. At least we're not all in the middle of ERA data collection right now.

Are we walking the talk? A snapshot of how academic LIS journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values

A really interesting deep dive into LIS journals (specifically focussed on Academic Libraries and for a US American audience) and to what extent the way their editorial boards enact the profession's stated values. This is a clear-eyed analysis and whilst the conclusion is the inevitable “try harder”, they're not wrong. I also can't walk past a conclusion beginning with “Capitalism is bullshit (Chan, 2019; McMillan Cottom, 2020; Horgan, 2019)”.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

GLAM Digital Survey – Call for Participants

A current research project in the Centre for Digital Humanities Research by Senior Lecturer Dr Katrina Grant and Sean Minney, a recent graduate from the Masters Advanced of Digital Humanities and Public Culture is looking for participants in a short survey (30 questions) on how people employed in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector are using digital tools and software in their work.

Actually Autistic: An Exhibition

Actually Autistic: An Exhibition invites the people of Melbourne to join in on celebrating, nurturing and empowering autistic creativity.

Actually Autistic: An Exhibition is a collection of works aimed at cultivating understanding, celebration and representation in regards to autism. Encouraging members of the public to directly connect with and support autistic artists.

The Fallacy of AI Functionality

A short and snappy evisceration of “Artificial Intelligence” and its governance, presented by Deb Raji and Lizzie Kumar at the ACM FAccT conference. Given the recent interest in machine learning and “AI” for use in library work, and the need to understand more about it from a digital literacy point of view, this is a useful snapshot of where we're at. Spoiler: it's bad.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Digital access for all

A nice to-the-point article from CMM about the need for universities to, well, try harder when it comes to making learning experiences and technology accessible to all users:

the big question [about ICT in universities] is: for all the ICT products and services we buy now and in the future are all students and staff able to use them? There are pressing questions about how educational technologies – selected, tested and integrated within the student experience – are chosen and whether a student-centred critical approach is utilised.

The article quotes a figure of 7.44% of students having a disability, which sound like an underestimate to me but it likely is a question of definition and classification (isn't everything?!). This gets to the heart of it, though:

Products should meet the needs of intended audiences across a broad range of human variance including vision, hearing, speech, dexterity, neurological triggers, neurodiversity and cognition. In addition, there are considerations around affordability, connectivity, digital literacy, compliance and privacy.

It's a long list, but that's why you get to call yourself a professional if you're the one making decisions about technology procurement, right? I notice that “used by organisations you consider your peers” is not on the list.

AI, accessibility and digital collections

Speaking of accessibility, here's a really interesting paper Justin Kelly presented at VALA 2022. Kelly received a Digital Fellowship from the State Library of Victoria and used it to develop a system based on cloud machine learning services to significantly enrich the descriptive metadata for SLV's digital image collection. The tool he built is really exciting, but what I really liked about this paper is that Kelly addresses some of both the ethical questions presented by using machine learning for descriptive metadata, and the practical limits of using algorithms trained on commmercial data sets for describing cultural collections. Worth a read (or watch).

Introducing Discovery Systems

One of my favourite librarians in the whole world, Ruth Kitchin-Tillman has generously shared text from a presentation she was invited to give to information studies students about what library discovery systems are and how they work – with a time limit of ten minutes! It's really impressive stuff, gesturing at how complicated this can all get without getting too into the weeds.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability

This is a really interesting article about the shady ethical behaviour of ...well, basically every machine learning company that exists. The crux of the argument is that commercial “AI” companies are abusing academic research arrangements in order to “datawash” inputs that are otherwise unavailable for commercial use.

This academic-to-commercial pipeline abstracts away ownership of data models from their practical applications, a kind of data laundering where vast amounts of information are ingested, manipulated, and frequently relicensed under an open-source license for commercial use.

And more personally for the author:

I was happy to let people remix and reuse my photos for non-commercial use with attribution, but that’s not how they were used. Instead, academic researchers took the work of millions of people, stripped it of attribution against its license terms, and redistributed it to thousands of groups, including corporations, military agencies, and law enforcement.

open/ed Review project

Last week I linked to the DOERS3 Open Education in Tenure and Promotion Case Studies. This page from the open/ed group assists with another common problem for open education advocates: a widespread belief amongst educators that “you get what you pay for” and therefore OERs cannot possibly be high quality.

A recent nationally representative survey of 2,144 faculty members in the United States found that “most faculty remain unaware of OER” (Babson Survey, 2014 )...This same survey found that college professors rate “proven efficacy” and “trusted quality” as the two most important criteria for selecting teaching resources. Thus we believe that for OER to gain traction it is important to gather empirical research demonstrating its efficacy and quality...To this end, we have gathered articles that focus on the efficacy of OER or teacher/student perceptions of such resources in actual practice.

Shared Vocabularies Create Oceans of Opportunities

From plant taxonomy to disease classification, science depends on precise language and referencing. Finding evidence-based solutions to the grand societal challenges of this century requires that scientists use shared scientific concepts to pool their work. This enables them to aggregate vast amounts of data from multiple sources, often from multiple disciplines and domains, and from countries where differing languages are spoken. Clearly, unless a data collection is tagged using globally agreed terms, it cannot be part of the global web of information systems necessary for tackling challenges such as climate change.

An interesting piece from the ARDC. Read this and then reflect on why “shared” vocabularies aren't always more desirable than localised knowledge systems.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

DOERS3 Open Education in Tenure and Promotion Case Studies

This is a great project looking for authors to contribute to a book of case studies to show how teaching academics can use their open educational publications to leverage career promotion.

The DOERS3 Collaborative, building on its previous work with the DOERS3 OER Contributions Matrix, seeks authors for a book-length project centered around valuing open education work in the tenure, promotion, and reappointment process. To that end, we are interested in case studies written by faculty, staff, and administrators detailing their experiences trying to appropriately value OER and open educational work in that process.

Open source and cloud for managing digital collection materials

An interesting post from the Head of Digital Preservation at Cambridge University Library, about their digital preservation program(me). Cambridge have chosen to use open source software at the local level, and commercial cloud services for the storage layer.

Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy

A joint report from ARL and CARL, who commissioned Ithaka S+R to run a consultation of “university leaders” across the USA and Canada to gauge their priorities, strategic ideas, and how they view their university library within that. Some of what is described seems more particular to the North American higher education cultural and economic context, but there are some really interesting insights here about how university politics works and how academic library leaders need to be thinking about that.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

A bunch of Open stuff for you today.

Automating ERA Benchmarks: An on-demand pilot system for calculating ERA-like benchmarks using open data and transparent analysis

The team from COKI have just released a timely study on whether it's possible to use open research metadata to automate the much-complained-about and extremely resource intensive Exellence in Research Australia (ERA) process. Turns out the answer is “probably mostly yes”:

Given a sufficiently comprehensive dataset, containing output-affiliation links, output citation data, and the journal assignment that was planned for ERA 2023, we show that the COKI pilot system is able to generate ERA-like benchmarks and indicators, aligned with ERA 2018 methodology and proposed ERA 2023 methodology.

NHMRC’s revised Open Access Policy released

In what seems to have been a surprise to most people (including me), the NHMRC announced this week that all new grants, effective immediately, will require open access to all research publications either in “gold” open access journals, or the “green” route of a recognised institutional repository. There were three particularly interesting things about this new policy:

1. Research involving Indigenous knowledges is specifically excluded from the open access requirements in recognition of the cultural sensitivities around how this knowledge is shared.
2. To comply, publications must be CC-BY licensed (no SA or ND licensed allowed)
3. Publishing in hybrid journals is not allowed (except when it is)

On the last point, there's a carve-out for any hybrid journals that are the subject of “read and publish” agreements negotiated by a group of institutions (presumably a reference to the recent CAUL agreements). I can't help feeling like CAUL has accidentally perpetuated the outrageous double-dipping hybrid journals represent, but hopefully this is the beginning of the end for them.

DOERS3 Open Education in Tenure and Promotion Case Studies

An excellent project has been launched by DOERS3 to provide real life case studies of academics whose OER work has assisted them in their academic career progression. The problem of OER creation being either ignored or punished by Big Academia is widely known and observed. These people are trying to do something practical about it.

The DOERS3 Collaborative, building on its previous work with the DOERS3 OER Contributions Matrix, seeks authors for a book-length project centered around valuing open education work in the tenure, promotion, and reappointment process.

A critical part of sustaining OER and open educational practices in higher education is recognizing the contributions by instructors who create and improve OER as part of their professional work. The OER community is very familiar with this issue and is hungry for examples for how others in the community are either navigating this process themselves or are assisting those who are.

By collecting case studies from those who have experience, DOERS3 seeks to provide as many examples from as many types of institutions as possible so that those looking for answers to this problem can find solutions that speak to their particular issues.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

A bit of a mixed bag for you this week.

ICOLC Statement on the Metadata Rights of Libraries

Metadata and the metadata services that describe library collections are critical in supporting content discovery, knowledge creation, and libraries’ public missions. Metadata describing library collections is not typically copyrightable, and should be considered freely shareable and reusable under most circumstances. However, some industry players restrict libraries’ rights to use such metadata through contractual terms and market influence. Such restrictive activity is out of alignment with libraries’ needs and public, not-for-profit/educational missions.

In case you missed the reference, “some industry players” primarily is referring to OCLC and their recent legal action against Clarivate. The reality is that both companies — and others — are in an ongoing battle to enclose as much publicly-funded and produced bibliographic metadata as possible.

Read about it: Tackling the problem of students’ failure to hit the books

Justin Sung from Monash University lays out some interesting research findings and recommendation regarding how and why students read (or, more often, don't read) the readings set for them by their university lecturers and tutors. I found this really illuminating, and it's useful both for academics setting reading, and librarians working with academics to select and supply readinigs as well as those helping students with their academic skills.

Beyond Implementation: Positioning Maintenance as a Core Commitment in Libraries

Ruth Kitchin Tillman presented at CNI in April ahead of a paper coming out in January. This is full of amazing stuff. I've spent over half my library career maintaining library technology and leading teams of library systems maintainers, so this really hit home for me.

Maintenance is understudied in comparison to the role it plays in our day-to-day work. When I asked ILS/LSP maintainers to estimate how much of their work week is spent on maintenance-related tasks, their numbers ranged from 40-60% depending on how strictly we were defining maintenance. But our research, surveys, and case studies focus almost exclusively on migration or implementation of new systems or on development projects. While we assume we know what goes into maintenance, my research suggests that its low visibility negatively impacts both the institutions and the individuals who perform it.

This is spot on in my experience. I really recommend this — you can read the transcript, or there is also a link to a video of this presentation.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.