Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

The State of Scholarly Metadata: 2023

From the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), this is an interactive report/infographic highlighting key points in the scholarly publishing life-cycle where there are particular problems related to PIDs and metadata. Worth a look for research liaison librarians and metadata wizards.

Establishing an Open Source Program Office (OSPO)

The ARDC is calling for expressions of interest to work with them establishing an 'Open Source Program Office'. The idea seems to be a little like research data management support, except for open source software used in research – there is a significant problem with replicability, sustainability/maintenance, and preservation when it comes to the use of open source software (or really, any software) within academic research.

Project Jasper

This was launched a couple of years ago but I only just heard about it. Disregard the horrendous backronym, because the idea is good. It's a recognised problem that academic journals disappear, and open access journals without a sustainable funding model are particularly prone to this. Project Jasper is a collaboration between CLOCKSS, DOAJ, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and PKP to create kind of backup archive for open access journals. If your library has some defunct journals running on OJS in a cupboard somewhere, why not check it out.

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

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Do search+large language models or “augmented retrieval” models (e.g. Bing Chat, Perplexity, Elicit.org) really work? The evidence so far

Aaron Tay has been doing some deep dives into how SALAMI systems are being integrated with search and discovery systems. This post is another interesting one analysing two recent research papers on the subject. A key point from the second paper highlights the conundrum for those trying to provide dynamic “answers” that are factually correct and in fluent natural language:

The paper makes the point that engines that try to closely paraphrase or directly copy from citations are likely to have high citation precision recall, but the answer is likely perceived to be less fluent or useful because it may not answer the question. The more the system tries to paraphrase, the more likely the answer will be rated more fluent or useful but the chances increase it makes a mistake doing so.

The politics of rights retention

An interesting article about 'rights retention' in academic journal publishing, and the various politico-economic forces at play.

Degrowth journal

A new journal all about degrowth.

Degrowth journal is organised as a free, academic, open-access, international, transdisciplinary, and peer-reviewed journal that focuses on advancing the goals of degrowth. It will be published online including open issues and special-issues, and later, rolling submission.

This is not a typical academic journal:

First, we're looking for writers: researchers sharing their latest scientific discoveries or their perspectives about specific issues; thinkers wishing to share their exploration of a topic in an essay; bookworms eager to write a review of their latest read; students excited to summarise their theses; doers who have a story to tell about a conference, a meeting, or anything else they feel might be relevant to the readers of this journal. This is a safe place to grow wild ideas; don't hesitate to submit.

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

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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.

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

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Universities lack resources in academic language and learning

Alex Barthel runs the numbers on academic language and learning advisors in Australian universities: there's not many of them, and the ratio is getting worse as student numbers increase.

CAUL Open Educational Resources Collective grant recipients

Bookmark this one for your academic liaison team – a list of future Australian OERs with grant funding behind them.

University of Alabama Libraries Scholarly API Cookbook

An open online book containing short scholarly API code examples for interacting with various “scholarly web service APIs” including Scopus, CrossRef, PubMed, the World Bank, and more.

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

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Trusting Australia's Ability: Review of the Australian Research Council Act 2001

The long awaited ARC review was released yesterday and whilst the headline news was all about the recommendation that the federal Education Minister should no longer be allowed to veto grants to research they don't like, the recommendation of most interest to me was number 10 – the complete cessation of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) kabuki without replacing it with any metric-based process.

Federated Credential Management (FedCM)

This one will be a bit arcane for most readers but if your job involves managing authentication in library systems of any kind – especially interactions with third party platforms like journal publishers – you need to keep an eye on this project. Within the next couple of years it's quite possible everything most academic libraries use to seamlessly authenticate students and staff against paywalls will break. The irony of this is that the proposed changes are being made with the intention to improve the privacy of web users by making it harder to follow us around with super-cookies, but the effect on those wanting to access scholarly material will probably be the opposite, because it will make it harder to obfuscate the individual identities of scholars.

How to Stop a University

Something a bit different – this is a piece from the co-chairs of the Queen Mary University & College Union branch exploring the tactical and strategic factors favouring indefinite strike action over time-limited withdrawal of labour when the workplace is a university. An interesting read as negotiations over new agreements slowly roll out across Australia.

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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.

CAUL Response to the Universities Accord Discussion Paper

To be honest, I haven't paid any attention to the Australian government's “Universities Accord” process – endless talk-a-thons about “policy settings” bore me – but if you are interested in what CAUL wants the government (and, to an extent, university peak bodies) to know about academic libraries, this is worth a read.

TEQSA advice on SALAMI

TEQSA has some high level advice for academic teaching staff, and university students, about “Artificial Intelligence” [sic].

Has Tony Burke “Secured the future of Trove”?

With apologies for the self-citation, here's something I wrote over the Easter break looking at historical funding for the National Library and how it compares to the recent announcements when we take inflation into account. If you read it when it was first published and thought something was missing, you're right – the charts I created now actually display.

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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.

We missed an edition last week because ...I had a really busy week and didn't have a chance to read anything. Anyway here's some Easter reading.

JAMA’s new editor settles in, bringing open access and other changes

An interview with the new editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Our big problem is not misinformation; it’s knowingness

An interesting take from Jonathan Malesic in Psyche, positing that an attitude that people already know everything and have no need for new information is often the heart of what we often think of as a problem with misinformation.

Funding announced for the National Library and Trove ahead of the Federal budget

Tony Burke made two announcements this week – the first was a “permanent” funding commitment specifically for Trove, the second two days later promised hundreds of millions of dollars for urgent capital works for Canberra-based national cultural institutions, several of which have leaking roofs.

I will have more to say regarding the National Library funding over the Easter period.

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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.

Today's Libraries and Learning Links of the Week:

Confronting White Nationalism in Libraries: A Toolkit

Just posting this tookit from the United States for no particular reason...

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Does what it says on the tin I guess.

What we have here is an early sign we’re stumbling into a massive game of AI misinformation telephone, in which chatbots are unable to gauge reliable news sources, misread stories about themselves, and misreport on their own capabilities. In this case, the whole thing started because of a single joke comment on Hacker News. Imagine what you could do if you wanted these systems to fail.

The Librarians are not OK

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (soft-paywalled, though it wasn't initially). This is focussed on who does and does not have “faculty status” in US universities so it's not completely transferable to Australia, however the attitudes and challenges described certainly apply here as well. Discussion about whether it might not be better to deal with the snobbery of “faculty” vs “staff” directly is left as an exercise for the reader.

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

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Comic Book Bans & Challenges

Episode 59 of ALIA Graphic Podcast from November last year is sadly suddenly more relevant, after the Queensland Police referred a complaint about certain books to the Australian Classification Board.

In this special episode, we discuss challenges and bans to books and specifically to comics in libraries across the United States of America.

Looking from a distance, the current wave of challenges and bans the US is going through seems alien to us. We are concerned about what’s going on. We are concerned that teachers and librarians are being targeted and intimidated.

We are concerned that comics, graphic novels, and books are being pulled off the shelves. Even titles that have won awards, have received world wide recognition and have been part of the curriculum for years.

ALIA Graphic's prediction that this would come to Australia soon was, indeed, correct.

PNAS is not a good journal

Moin Syed with some truth bombs about the sorry state of academic publishing – ridiculous subscription and APC prices isn't the core problem.

Journals are simply not diagnostic of the articles published therein, and thus there is no way any particular journal could be construed as “good.”

This article also includes a hilarious Conflict of Interest Statement:

I made a bet ($5.00) with Ira Hyman in 2019 that the journal impact factor would no longer be used within five years, and thus I have financial motivation to write negatively about impact factors.

Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium

Exploring the future of arts, culture, and technology in Australia – and the mindsets, capabilities and skills we need to get there.

This symposium took place on 14 and 15 February, you can see videos of some of the sessions at the link.

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

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Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI)

A great, short blog post from late 2019 that has resurfaced in the last week or two.

The name “artificial intelligence” has an implicit bias that does not allow for a cognitive perception adherent to reality.

From now on I will attempt to get people to refer to SALAMI instead of AI.

NormConf

NormConf was a small conference aimed at “presentations of middlebrow machine learning topics”. There's a lot here that is relevant to academia too, check it out.

We've always been distracted

From Aeon, an exploration of all the times in written history that people have worried about our relationship to texts, and what it tells us about how we should think about reading, writing, and thinking.

It is remarkable how two different eras could both say something like: ‘We live in a distracted world, almost certainly the most distracted world in human history,’ and then come to exactly opposite conclusions about what that means, and what one should do.

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

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