Lamborghini Urus Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0

3,250 BTC (~$330 million) were apparently stolen from a bitcoin holder and then quickly moved through multiple exchanges and swapped for the Monero privacycoin. Such a massive swap into Monero was apparently enough to cause the Monero price to spike from around $230 to as high as around $330, before retracting somewhat.

Minutes after the D.C. resident’s funds were liquidated, ZachXBT was walking through the airport on his way to catch a flight when he received an alert on his phone about an unusual transaction. Crypto investigators use tools to monitor the global flows of various coins and set alerts for, say, any transaction over $100,000 that goes through certain exchanges that charge a premium for having few security safeguards. The initial alert that day was for a mid-six-figure transaction, followed by higher amounts, all the way up to $2 million. After he cleared airport security, ZachXBT sat down, opened his laptop and began tracing transactions back to a Bitcoin wallet with roughly $240 million in crypto. Some of the Bitcoin in the wallet dated back to 2012. “At that point it didn’t make sense,” he told me. “Why is a person who held their Bitcoin for this long using a sketchy service that typically sees a lot of illicit funds flow through it?”

He added the wallets associated with the transactions to his tracking and boarded the plane. Once he connected to in-flight internet, more alerts arrived. Throughout the day, the Bitcoin traced to the wallet was being liquidated through more than 15 different high-fee cryptocurrency services.

The source sent ZachXBT several screen-share recordings, which he said were taken when one of the scammers livestreamed the heist for a group of his friends. The videos, which totaled an hour and a half, included the call with the victim. One clip featured the scammers’ live reaction when they realized they’d successfully stolen $243 million worth of the D.C. resident’s Bitcoin. A voice can be heard yelling: “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! $243 million! Yes! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Bro!”

In private chats they used screen names like Swag, $$$ and Meech, but they made a crucial mistake. One of them flashed his Windows home screen, which revealed his real name in the start icon pop-up at the bottom of the screen: Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old from Danbury

Classmates remember Chetal as shy and a fan of cars. “He just kind of kept to himself,” says Marco Dias, who became friends with Chetal junior year. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this was true of Chetal until one day in the middle of his senior year, when he showed up at school driving a Corvette. “He just parked in the lot. It was 7:30 a.m., and everyone was like, What?” Paris says. Soon Chetal rolled up in a BMW, and then a Lamborghini Urus. He started wearing Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on Senior Skip Day, while Paris and many of his classmates went to a nearby mall, Chetal took some friends, including Dias, to New York to party on a yacht he had rented, where they took photos holding wads of cash.

the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door.

When Sushil resisted, the assailants hit him with a baseball bat and threatened to kill him. The men bound the couple’s arms and legs with duct tape. They forced Radhika to lie face down and told her not to look at them, even as she struggled to breathe, pleading that she had asthma. They wrapped Sushil’s face with duct tape and hit him several more times with the bat as the van peeled off.

XKCD #538

Several witnesses saw the attack and called 911. Some of them, including an off-duty F.B.I. agent who lived nearby and happened to be at the scene, trailed the van and the Honda, relaying the vehicles’ movements to the police. The F.B.I. agent managed to obtain partial license plate numbers.

Danbury police officers soon located the van. A patrol vehicle activated its emergency lights and tried to make a stop, but the driver of the van accelerated, swerving recklessly through traffic.

About a mile from where the chase began, the driver careered off the road and struck a curb. Four suspects fled on foot. The police found one hiding under a bridge and apprehended him after a brief chase. Within a couple of hours, the other three were located hiding in a wooded area nearby. The police, meanwhile, found the shaken Chetals bound in the back of the van.

In an affidavit from an unrelated case, an F.B.I. agent described the Com as “a geographically diverse group of individuals, organized in various subgroups, all of whom coordinate through online communication applications such as Discord and Telegram to engage in various types of criminal activity.”
...
When the price of Bitcoin began to rise rapidly in 2017, Com members made an easy shift from Minecraft fraud to crypto theft.

targeted the Chetals to hold them ransom for the money their son had. Independent investigators think that at least one member of the group, Reynaldo (Rey) Diaz, who they say went by the alias Pantic, was a member of the Com; ZachXBT speculates that the thieves might have made themselves targets by sharing stories of their spending with other Com members.

Source

On Sept. 10, after a 23-day party spree in Los Angeles, Lam headed to Miami on a private jet with a group of friends. There, he rented multiple homes, including a 10-bedroom, $7.5 million estate. Within a few days, Lam had filled the driveway with more luxury cars, including multiple Lamborghinis, one with the name “Malone” printed on the side.

Malone was filmed wearing a white Moncler jacket and what appeared to be diamond rings and diamond-encrusted sunglasses. He stood up on the table and began showering the crowd with hundred-dollar bills. As money rained down, servers paraded in $1,500 bottles of Champagne topped with sparklers and held up signs that read “@Malone.” He spent $569,528 in one evening alone.

neglecting to use a VPN when he created an account with TradeOgre, a digital currency exchange, which connected to an I.P. address that was registered to a $47,500-per-month rental home in Encino, Calif. It was leased to Jeandiel Serrano, ... By the time the authorities identified Serrano, he was on vacation in the Maldives with his girlfriend.

On Sept. 18, Serrano flew back from the Maldives to Los Angeles International Airport, where the authorities were waiting for him. He was wearing a $500,000 watch at the time of his arrest. ... Serrano admitted that he owned five cars, two of which were gifts from one of his co-conspirators, given to him with proceeds from a previous fraud. He also confessed to having access to approximately $20 million of the victim’s crypto on his phone and agreed to transfer the funds back to the F.B.I.

Later that day, a team of F.B.I. agents working with the Miami police raided a mansion near Miami Shores. Agents blew open the front metal gate while another group entered by boat via a small saltwater canal in the rear. The sound of flashbangs rang in the neighborhood as the agents entered the home.

French gendarmes have been busy policing crypto crimes, but these aren't the usual financial schemes, cons, and HODL! shenanigans one usually reads about. No, these crimes involve abductions, (multiple) severed fingers, and (multiple) people rescued from the trunks of cars—once after being doused with gasoline.

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. ... The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s.

Or there's the Belgian man who posted online that "his crypto wallet was now worth €1.6 million." His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks.

Source

about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crime laws in various states, including Wyoming.

An example of verbatim theatre, the play draws on hundreds of interviews conducted by the theatre company with inhabitants of the town, company members' own journal entries, and published news reports.

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

Source

Source

in the company of young women—stenographers and typists, trained at the SS school in Obernai, who were known generally as SS Helferinnen, the German word for (female) "helpers".

Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, & Rudolf Höss

Source

Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival.

Source

document the disembarkation of the Jewish prisoners from the train boxcars, followed by the selection process, performed by doctors of the SS and wardens of the camp, which separated those who were considered fit for work from those who were to be sent to the gas chambers. The photographers followed groups of those selected for work, and those selected for death, to a birch grove just outside the crematoria, where they were made to wait before being killed.

The original owner of that album, Lili Jacob (later Zelmanovic Meier), was deported with her family to Auschwitz in late May 1944 from Bilke (today: Bil'ki, Ukraine), a small town near Berehovo in Transcarpathian Rus which was then part of Hungary. They arrived on May 26, 1944, the same day that professional SS photographers photographed the arrival of the train and the selection process. Richard Baer and Karl Höcker arrived at Auschwitz mere days before the arrival of this transport. After surviving Auschwitz, forced labor in Morchenstern, a Gross-Rosen subcamp, and transfer to Dora-Mittelbau where she was liberated, Lili Jacob discovered an album containing these photographs in a drawer of a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks while she was recovering from typhus.

first found a photograph of her rabbi but then also discovered a photo of herself, many of her neighbors, and relatives, including a famous shot of her two younger brothers Yisrael and Zelig Jacob.

Höcker & Helferinnen

Höcker denied having participated in the selection of victims at Birkenau or having ever personally executed a prisoner. He further denied any knowledge of the fate of the approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews who were murdered at Auschwitz during his term of service at the camp. Höcker was shown to have knowledge of the genocidal activities at the camp, but could not be proved to have played a direct part in them. In post-war trials, Höcker denied his involvement in the selection process. While accounts from survivors and other SS officers all but placed him there, prosecutors could locate no conclusive evidence to prove the claim.

On 3 May 1989 a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years imprisonment for his involvement in gassing murders of prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least 3,610 kilograms of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow.

I only learned about the events in Birkenau…in the course of time I was there… and I had nothing to do with that. I had no ability to influence these events in any way…neither did I want them, nor carry them out. I didn’t hurt anybody… and neither did anyone die at Auschwitz because of me.

^{Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash}

The potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI) for metadata workflows have grown rapidly. As a result, there’s a greater need for resources that support metadata managers in leveraging AI to enhance the capabilities of their teams. To address these opportunities for the profession, the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) Metadata Managers Focus Group (MMFG) recently kicked off the Managing AI in metadata workflows working group. The primary goal of the working group is to engage our collective curiosity, identify key challenges, and empower metadata managers to integrate AI into their workflows with confidence.

This community-driven effort builds on earlier RLP work on AI, including Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries (2019), a Metadata Managers’ discussion on “Getting ready for AI” (2024), and the “Transforming Metadata: Getting ready for AI” panel at ALA (2024). The working group offers members of the MMFG an opportunity to dive deeper into a timely topic.

Our call for participation has attracted contributors from the UK, the United States, Canada, and Australia. During our first meeting, we took time to learn how our contributors are currently looking at AI opportunities in their workflows, including:

• How can AI make workflows more efficient and effective?
• How can AI services help reduce backlogs of materials by creating brief records?
• What are the best practices for AI to help libraries with non-Latin script materials?
• How can AI be used to augment metadata workflows for institutional repositories, research data/information management ecosystems, and cultural heritage digital asset management platforms?

We discussed some of the challenges that Metadata Managers are currently facing. Broadly, our conversation touched on:

• People: How to engage in change management within metadata organizations, from supporting existing staff to thinking about future competencies. This includes thinking about how AI can help staff navigate complex cataloging rules and best practices.
• Economics: How to build financial support for AI into library budgets, including for services, training, and future staffing.
• Metadata and platforms: How can metadata managers assess AI platforms and features, especially to understand how to apply them to specific parts of metadata workflows (e.g., generating records, quality control, entity management/authority control)?
• Collections: How to learn about the different kinds of machine learning or AI, and which ones are best suited for different collection types. For example, computer vision can be used to generate metadata for photography vs. subject analysis of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs).
• Professional values and ethics: How can metadata managers explore the above questions/areas while championing professional values and ethics and honoring commitments to protect and steward our collections responsibly and sustainably?

These topics were used as a starting point for a deeper exploration in our three workstream groups, which are currently meeting on a regular cadence:

• Primary cataloging workflows
• Metadata for special/distinctive collections
• Institutional repositories

Thanks to our working group members for carrying this important work forward!

• Helen Baer, Colorado State University
• Michael Bolam, University of Pittsburgh
• Jenn Colt, Cornell University
• Elly Cope, University of Leeds
• Susan Dahl, University of Calgary
• Michela Goodwin, National Library of Australia
• Amanda Harlan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
• Miloche Kottman, University of Kansas
• Chingmy Lam, University of Sydney
• Yasha Razizadeh, New York University
• Jill Reilly, National Archives and Records Administration
• Mia Ridge, British Library
• Tim Thompson, Yale University
• Mary Beth Weber, Rutgers University
• Cathy Weng, Princeton University
• Helen Williams, London School of Economics

We expect work to conclude by the end of June, with additional blog posts about our findings to follow.  Stay tuned!

The post Artificial intelligence to support metadata workflows: an OCLC RLP working group appeared first on Hanging Together.

The biennial NDSA Excellence Awards were established in 2012 to recognize and encourage exemplary achievement in the field of digital preservation stewardship at a level of national or international importance. Over the years many individuals, projects, and organizations have been honored for their meaningful contributions to the field of digital preservation. 

The time has come again to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of our colleagues! Nominations are now being accepted for the NDSA 2025 Excellence Awards.

Anyone, any institution, or any project acting in the context of the award categories (noted below) can be nominated for an award. No NDSA membership or affiliation is required. Self-nomination is accepted and encouraged, as are submissions reflecting the needs and accomplishments of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities.

We encourage you to help us highlight and reward distinctive approaches to digital preservation practice. Please submit nominations here: 2025 NDSA Excellence Awards Nominations form. Awards will be presented at the Digital Preservation 2025 event this fall. 

Nominations are accepted in the following categories:

• Individual Award: Recognizing those individuals making a significant contribution to the digital preservation community through advances in theory or practice.
• Educator Award: Recognizing academics, trainers, and curricular endeavors promoting effective and inventive approaches to digital preservation education through academic programs, partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum development.
• Future Steward Award: Recognizing students and early-career professionals making an impact on advancing knowledge and practice of digital preservation stewardship.
• Organization Award: Recognizing those organizations providing support, guidance, advocacy, or leadership for the digital preservation community.
• Project Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution or strategic or conceptual understanding necessary for successful digital preservation stewardship.
• Sustainability Award: Recognizing those activities whose goals or outcomes make a significant contribution to operational trustworthiness, monitoring, maintenance, or intervention necessary for sustainable digital preservation stewardship.

If you need a little inspiration, check out our webpage for lists of past winners or this blog post on submitting a notable nomination. If you have any questions about the nomination form, please contact the Excellence Awards Working Group co-chairs.

The post Now Accepting Nominations for Excellence Awards 2025 appeared first on DLF.

In Brief 

This paper explores an ethics of care framework in academic libraries, specifically with the implementation of a professional development initiative for student employees. Using the Architecture Library at Texas Tech University as a case study, we examine how formal professional development opportunities align with care ethics principles by responding to students’ individual needs, fostering nurturing relationships, and contributing to the academic learning environment. Through an exploration of Noddings’ relational theory of care and Tronto’s phases and elements of care, the aim of this paper is to highlight the ability of higher education to engage in a practice of care towards student workers.  

By Lindsey Jackson 

Introduction

Academic libraries often embody a culture of care, whether through deliberate action or instinctive response. Librarians and library staff routinely provide support and assistance, often without explicitly labeling their actions as “care ethics” – they simply see a need and respond. This caring approach is fundamental to educational settings, where the goal is to empower learners and facilitate their growth. 

Student workers in these environments occupy a unique position, straddling the roles of both learner and employee, and as we will later explain, both cared-for and ones-caring. Through their work in the library, they develop essential workplace skills and learn to navigate professional relationships. The supervisor (for the purposes of this paper, a person who may be a librarian or library staff) is responsible not only for overseeing the daily tasks, but also for supporting workers as they learn to navigate a workplace environment, often for the first time.  

This paper will first provide some context of the ethics of care, then focus on the relational (one-caring/cared for) approach of Nel Noddings and finally examine the expanded ethics of care of Joan Trontom which moves into realms of organizational care. Second, we will provide a literature review of current practices of care in academic libraries and higher education. Then, we will discuss the actors in academic libraries broadly and finally share a practice of care enacted at the Texas Tech Architecture Library.  

Ethics of Care Theories: An Overview 

The ethics of care as a philosophical theory largely began with psychology researcher Carol Gilligan. Participating in a study on moral development with her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, graduate student Gilligan pointed out that the research findings were largely biased against girls. The study operated under the theory that moral development moves from universal to principled thinking, and under that assumption, girls were “behind” boys in their moral thinking. Gilligan argued that girls are not morally stunted, they have a different perspective, and an inter-relational way of approaching conflict. The question being asked of children (“Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?”) could be interpreted as “Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?” (with boys largely saying Heinz “yes, he should”) and “Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?” (with girls largely saying “no, he needs to find another way to get the medicine- what if he’s arrested?”). Gilligan argued that both considerations were engaging in moral development, one with a perspective of justice and another with a perspective of care. Gilligan says that without the voices of girls in the study, the consideration of care was largely unheard (1982, 2011). 

This intellectual disagreement with Kohlberg led to the publication of In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development in 1982. Gilligan’s study on moral development has been criticized for seemingly contributing to stereotypes about gender, with critics arguing that it posits a strict demarcation between the behaviors of men and of women and ignored the gendered socialization of boys and girls (Peirson-Hagger, 2023). As Gilligan has continued to write on the moral development and experiences of girls and women, her theory has been refined but still highlights the societal issue of gendering care as feminine, instead of as a human action. In her 2011 book Joining the Resistance, Gilligan clarifies: 

Listening to women thus led me to make a distinction I have come to see as pivotal to understanding care ethics. Within a patriarchal frame, care is a feminine ethic. Within a democratic framework, care is a human ethic. (p. 22)  

Gilligan argues that she is not making these statements about how all men act and how all women act. The issue is that in a patriarchal society care is gendered as feminine, while justice is seen as “aligned with reason, mind, and self—the attributes of ‘rational man’” (p. 23-24). An ethic of care, for Gilligan, is democratizing—it requires interdependence and a responsibility to others.  

Writing soon after Gilligan, Noddings builds on the ethics of care and applies it to an educational framework. Her early framework drew heavily on women’s traditional caregiving roles, which she described as examples of “natural” caring. She often illustrated her concepts using mother-child relationships, drawing criticism for this potentially limiting and essentialist perspective that seemed to require self-sacrifice for the child’s benefit. Her theories are largely framed as a relationship, and she later called her version of ethics of care “relational ethics” instead of “feminist ethics” (Noddings, 2013). 

Like Gilligan, Noddings has refined her theory and reflected back on her works. In the 2013 edition of Caring, she clarifies her ethics of care as being chiefly concerned with “how, in general, we should meet and treat one another—with how to establish, maintain, and enhance caring relations” (p. x) after commenting that “hardly anyone has reacted positively to the word feminine” (p. xiii).  
 
Noddings suggests in her 1984 work Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education that teachers demonstrate caring tendencies that drive them to address students’ specific needs. While discussing teacher-student dynamics, she employs the terms “one-caring” and “cared-for” to characterize their interactions. In this relationship, the “one-caring” (teacher) becomes invested, or engrossed, in the development of the “cared-for” (student). Using Noddings’ concepts to apply to the library workplace environment, we can frame student workers as recipients of care (the cared-for) and supervisors as providers of care (the one-caring) much like Noddings attributes those roles to students and teachers. This perspective establishes the relational framework necessary for implementing a care-based practice. 
 
On the tasks of the teacher/one-caring, Noddings says they must “stretch the student’s world by presenting an effective selection of that world with which she [the one-caring] is in contact and to work cooperatively with the student in his struggle towards competence in that world” (p. 167). Teachers/ones-caring use their knowledge and resources to address the questions and problems of the cared-for, a process familiar to librarians as we field questions about reference and problems of accessing and finding materials on varied subjects for varied patrons. Those questions and problems are unique to each individual, and an effective one-caring is attentive to those differences when presenting solutions. The questions and problems of the student worker as cared-for may include how to polish skills necessary for their career goals and transferring those skills to other communities.  

While one goal of ethics of care is to establish reciprocal relationships of care, it is not always the case that the cared-for will participate in caregiving to the one-caring. However, when student workers help their fellow students, they participate in caregiving, taking on a one-caring role themselves. The success lies not in their care being directed back to supervisors, but in their ability to continue this cycle of support within the academic community. 

It is important to note there is a power imbalance in the relationship between a supervisor and a student worker that must be considered to properly enact an ethics of care, an ethic concerned with addressing vulnerabilities. Noddings says of this imbalance, “Social worker and client, physician and patient, counselor and student in their formal roles necessarily meet each other unequally” (p. 62). Crawley et al. (2008) comments in their essay that the recognition of the power imbalances is necessary for a feminist approach to education: “one must consider not only the power relations among classroom actors (e.g., teachers and students) but also the power relations implicit in knowledge construction, ultimately working toward empowerment of students” (p. 3). Recognizing the vulnerability of the cared-for and viewing our actions from their perspective is the first step in addressing the power imbalance inherent in learning and working environments and is also an embodiment of Noddings’ idea of “engrossment.” 

An ethical model that frames interactions between a one-caring and a cared-for has received criticism for being narrow and chiefly concerned with caring for those physically close to you, as opposed to extending care out towards people with whom you may not interact, which is Joan Tronto’s critique of Nodding’s dyadic model (Tronto, 1993). Modern care ethicists have grown the theory to include looking at care from various perspectives, viewing care as a gender neutral activity, and expanding care beyond the encounters of two people. Tronto expands the scope of care beyond relational interactions between educator and the educated, beyond one-caring and cared-for, to institutions, bureaucracies, and governments. Care for people, rather than economics, should be the driving force for these organizations.  

In her 1993 book Moral Boundaries, Tronto describes ethics of care as: 

A species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (p 103) 

Tronto is often cited in works about using a practice of care in higher education, as the consideration of the institution’s responsibility of care to its workers and students arises. We will reference Tronto’s phases of care and elements of care as it pertains to the role of the librarian supervisor and the evolution of our professional development project.  

Tronto’s phases of care: 

1. Caring about – the act of noticing that care is needed in the first place 

2. Taking care of – taking on the responsibility for caring 

3. Care-giving – the work of giving care 

4. Care-receiving – the response of being cared-for 

Out of these phases of care arise the necessary ethical elements required for care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, 1993, pp. 127-131). It is these elements that we will further reference in our discussion about enacting care. These are useful for determining how well a project may be adhering to an ethics of care, and we will be using them as we reflect on our project. 

Practices of care regularly show up in areas where there are elements of collaboration, consideration, and concern for vulnerabilities. And it is not surprising that it is demonstrated in professions that have historically been feminized (education, librarianship, etc.) and may shed light on why care-giving is often wrongfully relegated as “women’s work.” Often called the “feminist ethic,” it is important to note that a feminist ethic or practice may be enacted by anyone or any institution.  

Ethics of Care in Libraries and Academia: A Review of the Literature 

In addition to the literature of Noddings and Tronto, the study of using an ethics of care approach in higher education and libraries has shaped this paper and this project as well as work about the importance of student training in academic libraries.  

Ladenson (2017) describes using the feminist framework for reference services in libraries as a practice that is more than simply helping a student find a certain resource but also digging a bit to identify the “why” it is important for them to do so. Is it a passion project? A new curiosity? Why is this interesting? These extra questions invite the students to reflect on their own research and work to establish a beginning of a back-and-forth between the researcher and the library/librarian. Bruce (2020) goes on to say about a caring approach to librarianship: “These one-on-one sessions are not just about the exchange of information. Instead, they are a moment which adds to a student’s sense of belonging and care with regards to their academic and personal selves” (para. 8). The attentiveness and recognition in each individual researcher and each question are elements that re-cast the interaction as practice of care, embodying the ideas of Noddings as well as Tronto. Librarians may find themselves frequently in positions of engaging in care as they establish relationships with library users, guide people through the research process, and advocate for library services to assist users.  

Beyond the library, an ethics of care framework is useful in considering the interactions and responsibilities of the university towards students and the interactions of faculty members with each other to cultivate a supportive learning community. “An Ethic of Care in Higher Education: Well-Being and Learning” (Keeling, 2014) highlights the importance of focusing on the entire student and addressing issues of access for individuals. On the other hand, Sai’s 2024 work highlights that the current practice of most institutions of higher education prioritizes faculty outputs and profit, to the point of neglect for the faculty’s well-being and life outside of the university. These papers act as a call for reimagining the culture of higher education as one that values all members of the academic community as whole people and that values knowledge creation not just as metrics and outputs.  

A similar autoethnographic paper focuses on the concept of “critical friendships” in academia. “Critical friendship: An alternative, ‘care-full’ way to play the academic game” (Sotiropoulou, 2022) looks at the collaborative relationships between academic colleagues, fostering working environments that support others across disciplines: 

Finding the time to get to know each other better and to continuously invest in practicing our critical friendship was a strategy we utilized to deviate from the fast-paced and measurable mandates of the neoliberal academia and our way of prospering both personally and professionally as academics. (p. 1112)   

This approach to collaborating with others, sharing feedback, actively listening, and taking time to meet with and discuss life and careers was a tactic to push against the culture of academia that prioritizes hustle and churning out work. It is a mistake of the neoliberal academic institution that individualizes work, instead of seeing the work of academia as collaborative. Naylor (2023) writes in “A Feminist Ethic of Care in the Neoliberal University”:  

To transform neoliberal academic spaces into spaces that are caring means recognizing that collective support within a department does not have to be an archipelago, but can be contiguous and form a web of reinforcement that does not have strict borders which isolate research from teaching and service. (para. 7) 

Encouraging an environment concerned with care and collaboration in our working and learning environments is a way to push back against hierarchical systems of neoliberal academia that encourage competition and rugged individualism. 

Student Workers (Cared-For) 

On-campus jobs are an opportunity for students to work in environments that allow them to balance the needs of academic work, usually providing flexibility around classes, projects, and exams. Working in an academic library provides student workers a further opportunity to have access to collection materials, a closer connection to faculty, occasional “down time” to work on homework, and opportunities to cultivate transferable soft skills like teamwork and customer service. It is important to note the vulnerable position of student workers, working jobs that offer them flexibility and training but little pay, while primarily focusing on coursework for which they have paid thousands of dollars. 

Student workers in academic libraries engage in customer service, organizational tasks, circulation duties, and the daily tasks necessary for the smooth running of an academic library. Their work brings them into contact with their peers and their professors at the library. Student workers have the opportunity to participate in supporting research, navigating the library collection, and using library technology like scanners and software. These tasks develop and polish skills like communication, critical thinking, and technological proficiency. Mitola, et al. (2018) discuss academic library work as a high-impact practice, saying: “The work experiences of undergraduate students can also shape their college experiences and contribute to the development of skills employers seek in college graduates” (p. 352). 

Student workers, however, are first and foremost students juggling academic and social obligations in addition to working. These competing responsibilities require flexibility and a willingness to understand each unique student’s situation, academic goals, and career aspirations on the part of the supervisor. The academic environment offers a workplace where student-workers are learning about the expectations of professional environments and developing necessary skills, and their supervisors are in a position of educating and training students in these skills. 

The Role of Supervisors (Ones-Caring)  

What is our responsibility to our student workers? How can we approach training and development in a way that is responsive to student workers? How can we prepare students for the working world outside of the university? Asking and exploring these questions represents Noddings’ sense of engrossment for the needs of the cared-for and aligns with Tronto’s framework, specifically embodying the elements of “attentiveness” and “responsibility.”  

Library-specific training and the freedom to explore supplemental career-specific training fosters an environment of growth and supports the further career aspirations and goals of students. It also offers an opportunity to enact care with thoughtful feedback and support. To be able to enact any care successfully, there must already be a groundwork of support and trust established, which is the responsibility of the supervisor to cultivate.  

The academic library serves as an environment for student workers to grow personally and professionally through high impact practices that demonstrate “an affective orientation of care for student employees” (Vine, 2022, conclusion). All this while “respecting other’s positionalities, autonomy and embodied differences and working with them to improve the capacity of those cared for and about to make better decisions” (Sai, 2024, p. 533). By building programs and initiatives that are responsive to student needs, we can support students as they navigate what it means to be a member of a workplace and also provide an opportunity to explore their professional curiosities and talents. 

Competence in supervising students, another of Tronto’s elements of care, requires that supervisors effectively communicate the goals of training or practices. When we discuss students engaging in professional development, we clarify that we intend this project to help develop students’ abilities to articulate their strengths, practicing the task of advocating for themselves in future workplaces. A supportive, caring work environment can reinforce to the students that their labor is valuable and appreciated, hopefully setting the bar for future supervisors and workplaces to meet. 

Why Professional Development? 

How is professional development an act of care? Our goal is not to oil the wheels of capitalism, ensuring that workplaces have well-trained cogs for their machine, but rather to prepare student workers for the transition from an academic environment to the workplace arena. With a focus on setting their own self-development path, a supportive space, and a concern for the costs (time and money) that later professional places may not provide, we want to give students a leg up as they are moving from being student workers to workers.  

The National Association of College Employers (NACE) produces a list of competencies that we use to frame our professional development project. NACE gets these competencies from annually polling many companies about what skills they find valuable in new employees out of college. It is important to note that these professional expectations are coming from employers and professional organizations, who represent The Market. These eight NACE competencies are self-development, communication, technology, equity and inclusion, leadership, critical thinking, professionalism, and teamwork. They also encompass behaviors that can be regarded as caring actions, with the opportunities for the cared-for to engage in the actions of the ones-caring. The practice of these learning competencies may develop behaviors that ripple out to influence other communities.  

We found the NACE framework on the Texas Tech University career center website, among many tips for students preparing and applying for jobs, going on interviews, and preparing to leave the work of being a student for the work of The Market—with its expectations of knowing the rules (rules often left unsaid by a dominant culture). NACE often works in partnership with career centers of universities, the goal being to prepare students for the transition into workplaces. We discovered that it offers many overlapping skills that are useful in learning and working communities. After finding Franklin Oftsund’s (2022) study on career-readiness for student workers, where they also used the NACE framework, we determined it would be useful for our library as well.  

The concept of “professionalism” and success can vary widely based on location, gender expression, and industry. There are many spoken and unspoken rules workers navigate, and learning how to navigate those is a skill in itself. NACE defines professionalism on their webpage “What is Career Readiness” as “Knowing work environments differ greatly, understand and demonstrate effective work habits, and act in the interest of the larger community and workplace” (National Association of College Employers, n.d). NACE writer, Gray (2022) comments that while professionalism can change based on various factors (in-person vs. virtual interactions, industry norms, or geographic location) a common thread is to “show respect for others and make sure you contribute” (para. 17).  

We do not want to surrender to market values, defining worth by marketability, because the human experience encompasses much more. We also want to respect the goals of the students who may aspire to succeed by the definitions of The Market, while also instructing student workers about their successes in skills that may be beneficial in enriching communities. Or as Beilin states it: “We ought to encourage alternative definitions of success while at the same time ensure success in the existing system” (2016, p. 18).  

Returning to Tronto’s definition of care, and speaking to her comment on “repairing our world,” mindfully engaging in promoting supportive and caring work cultures can be considered an attempt to respond to the harm of “hustle culture” and commonplace worker exploitation, especially of new workers starting out on their path. This also speaks to Noddings’ charge that the ones-caring respond to a problem of the cared-for, in this instance the problem of addressing the potential injustice student workers may find in their post-university workplaces.  While our library might be just one small workplace among many, taking care to make it a positive one will hopefully have some ripple effects in the complex web and set a standard of a supportive, inclusive, and compassionate workplace.  

Practice of Care at the Architecture Library 

Now that the theories, supporting literature, and players have all been identified: what does a practical application of care look like? The Texas Tech Architecture Library has engaged in an initiative with its student workers that embodies an ethics and practice of care for nearly two years at this point. Texas Tech is an R1 university with an Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) status since 2019.  Our architecture library is a branch library, embedded in the Huckabee College of Architecture, a program that has over 700 students, undergrad and graduate. Our ones-caring at the library include three faculty librarians and a member of staff who is the direct student supervisor. The reference to “we” throughout this paper is the public services librarian and the member of staff who serves as the direct student supervisor. We have, on average, seven to ten student workers in the role of the cared-for (and, as the job requires, participating in caregiving for library patrons). They are responsible for working at the circulation desk, assisting with scanning issues, pulling and shelving books, and participating in inventory projects. The job involves a lot of interaction with fellow students, members of architecture faculty and staff, and other library departments.  

Noddings says we must address the problems of the cared-for. We do so by offering professional development opportunities to address the problems and expectations of transitioning into post-graduate life and answer the questions of “what skills do I have?” and “how do I leverage this work experience into future work experience?” We want student workers to develop competence to tackle and navigate future workplaces while also supporting their individual interests and building skills that transfer to other communities. During our mid-semester check-ins, we pose questions like “What does professionalism mean to you?” to facilitate discussion and talk about how these skills have been useful in other areas. One student worker commented in our mid-semester check-in that they were applying their practice of leadership to collaborate and communicate better in their student organizations.  

The nature of the student assistant job requires skills that address these competencies like customer service, communication, and time management: soft skills necessary for most workplaces. We wanted the students to consider how else they can grow their skills during their time at the Architecture Library. The inspiration for a professional development project initially came from helping student workers with their resumes and letters of reference. Students often listed their tasks (shelve and organize books, use scanner/printer, check in/out books) and we found ourselves recommending the mention of specific skills, saying “You didn’t JUST check out books! You provided good customer service, communicated library policies, and worked effectively on a library team.” We decided to be clearer about the skills they were engaging in and developing, so that they can recognize the value they brought to our workplace and better articulate their skill sets, strengths, and experience for future jobs. The project also came from a desire to expand the scope of skills that students practice as a way of encouraging self-directed discovery and thinking about how their work in the library could inform their future careers. The NACE competencies were chosen a year into the project as a way to further structure the semester-long project.  

In consideration to the students’ financial situations, these projects are to be done on work time, and to be done with resources freely available to them. Texas Tech has a subscription to a platform called Udemy that the students are encouraged to explore. This platform offers multiple types of online learning materials across many topics. Their access to these materials only lasts while they are students at Texas Tech University. In the future, professional development may have to be on their own time and own dime, but while the library can support this development we feel that we should.   

This approach reflects an ethic of care through the practice of supporting students’ development and fostering skills relevant to their goals. Engaging in this practice through a lens of care means that we must view each student holistically and give support and consideration to their larger aspirations. The supervisor (the one-caring) applies Tronto’s elements of care- attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness—in the development and implementation of the project, while the student worker (the cared-for) practices these elements while engaging in the project.  

An outline of the project as it embodies elements of care: 

1. Each student decides their professional development project based on their wants and needs for growth into their professional aspirations. This demonstrates an attentiveness by the supervisor to encourage students in self-development, and attentiveness by students to reflect on their goals.  

2. The supervisor, as a means of offering guidance and embodying responsibility, provides a list of potential training materials that students can explore.  

3. While a requirement, it is weighted among other tasks so students who do not complete a professional development project have other opportunities to succeed at the job and demonstrate competency with their work.  

4. Students do this work during their working hours with tools available to them for free. This is an act of being attentive to the value of the students’ time, and to offer an opportunity to take advantage of resources made available by the university. This also requires responsibility from the student to prioritize this project as much as their other work tasks. 

5. The supervisor conducts regular check-ins about the students’ professional development progress before end-of-semester evaluations to provide feedback or offer guidance. These check-ins create opportunities for the supervisor and student workers to be responsive to feedback as we finish the semester.  

6. At the end of the semester, the supervisor sends out an anonymous survey to student workers for feedback and adapts projects based on that feedback. The nature of it being a semester-long project means that we can quickly adjust expectations as a way of being responsive to feedback.  

We are now almost two years into this professional development initiative, and the projects that students have chosen have ranged from creating library signage in graphic design software to language learning on DuoLingo to learning industry software like Blender, Rhino, and Grasshopper. Given that many of our students are architecture students, it is not surprising that many have chosen to refine their skills on design software common for their major. This has also had the added benefit of increasing the knowledge of these software for our student patrons, giving our student workers the opportunity to step into the role of teacher/care-giver as they help our student patrons navigate these programs.  

A particularly exciting project a student worker wanted to pursue was to start a book club at the library. This student had been a participating member of many student organizations and wanted to take the opportunity to plan and implement a program for the library. We discussed what a full expression of this project would look like (a process that hits many NACE competencies for the cared-for as well as Tronto’s ideas of attentiveness and responsiveness for the ones-caring). To fully support this project, we explored ways to fund meetings in a library system that does not offer much funding for programs. The public services librarian applied for and was awarded an internal grant for faculty-led book clubs meant to increase participation for those interested in a free book, coffee, and scones. The student worker was responsible for the tasks of choosing the text, signage, and leading discussion prompts. We offered support with the administrative aspects of the grant (ordering materials, reporting receipts, etc), social media posts, and participation in the book group. This specific project required a lot more engagement in Tronto’s elements of care compared to student workers who chose to view and discuss training videos. But being attentive to the individual interests and strengths of this student was required of the ones-caring, a task we were happy to engage in. The results of this project were that our student worker got to perform a project interesting to them with our full support and caring and to give care to the learning community through thoughtful discussions.  

We collect qualitative data during our in-person check-ins as well as the end-of-semester anonymous survey as we attempt to answer the questions: Are we cultivating a supportive workplace? Do the students feel confident in their skills? 
 
At the end of the semester, we discuss how the library can support the career goals of student workers and perform an in-person evaluation that looks at all of their work over the semester. We discuss the semester’s work based on library-specific tasks like shelving, reporting reference interactions, teamwork, and professional development. Generally our feedback from students is positive, though it must be said that the inherent power dynamic between student employee and supervisor must be considered when taking into account in-person feedback, so we provide an anonymous survey for feedback. We enjoy a high level of student retention semester to semester and many student workers recommend their classmates and friends to apply when we have openings.  

While we vary the end-of-semester survey each semester, questions we ask about their professional development have included: 

Student workers responded that they feel like their work in the library is supportive of their future career aspirations and that they felt most confident in “communication” and “professionalism” of the NACE competencies. Students reported feeling very positively about their work and enjoy the fact that they can pursue projects that are interesting to them. They believe they effectively communicate with their team/colleagues and enjoy working with their coworkers.  
 
Quotes from students collected via anonymous end-of-semester anonymous survey: 

While we did not set out to conduct a project guided by the ethics of care, or a feminist approach to supervising students, our interest and engagement with our student workers led, perhaps Noddings would say “naturally,” to enacting one. This professional development initiative demonstrates that an ethics of care approach is not merely a theoretical construct, but a practical method of supporting student workers. Our students have grown in their abilities to communicate their skills and competencies. This practice enriches the cared-for and the workplace, creates meaningful work for the one-caring, and ideally extends out further to other communities.  

Conclusion 

While this project is one element of cultivating a caring and supportive workspace, it is not sufficient enough to be the only element that is necessary for supervising student workers with a praxis of care. The holistic working environment must be operating as a space that seeks to offer care broadly, and this professional development project has been able to grow out of that established space on that groundwork of trust that has been cultivated.  

This approach to workplace dynamics acts as a challenge to traditional transactional labor to a nurturing, collaborative relationship that empowers student workers. Embracing care-centric practices in academic institutions can create environments that create meaningful learning, and teaching, experiences for the academic community, instead of treating them as individual components of an institutional machine.  

Tronto ends her work Moral Boundaries with a call to care:  

To recognize that value of care calls into question the structure of values in our society. Care is not a parochial concern of women, a type of secondary moral question, or the work of the least well off in society. Care is a central concern of human life. It is time we began to change our political and social institutions to reflect this truth. (1993, p. 180)  

We aim to reflect this truth in our small library workplace, where our faculty, staff, and students feel supported, purposeful, and seen.  

Acknowledgements 

The author would like to thank their peer-reviewers: Pam Lach, Brittany Paloma Fiedler, and Liz Vine as well as the editors of In the Library with a Lead Pipe for their feedback, guidance, and direction during this work. Their care means a lot!  

Bibliography 

Beilin, I. (2016). Student success and the neoliberal academic library. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, 1(1), 10-23.  

Benjamin, M., & McDevitt, T. (2018). The benefits and challenges of working in an academic library: A study of student library assistant experience. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 44(2), 256–262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2018.01.002 

Bruce, S. (2022). Teaching with care: A relational approach to individual research consultations. In the Library with a Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/teaching-with-care/  

Crawley, S. L., Lewis, J. E., & Mayberry, M. (2008). Introduction—Feminist pedagogies in action: Teaching beyond disciplines. Feminist Teacher, 19(1), 1–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40546070 

Gilligan, C. (2003). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development (38th print). Harvard University Press. 

Gilligan. C. (2011). Joining the resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press.  

Gray, K. (March 4, 2022). Addressing the Shifting Standards of Professionalism. National Association of College Employers. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/addressing-the-shifting-standards-of-professionalism/  

Keeling, R. P. (2014). An ethic of care in higher education: Well-being and learning. Journal of College and Character, 15(3), 141–148. https://doi.org/10.1515/jcc-2014-0018 

Ladenson, S. (2017). Feminist reference services: Transforming relationships through an ethic of care. The feminist reference desk: Concepts, critiques, and conversations. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press. 
 
Mitola, R., Rinto, E., Pattni, E. (2018). Student employment as a high-impact practice in academic libraries: a systematic review. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 44(3), 352-373. 

Naylor, L. (Oct 2, 2023). A Feminist Ethic of Care in the Neoliberal University. Society and Space Magazine. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/a-feminist-ethic-of-care-in-the-neoliberal-university  

Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics & moral education (2nd ed., updated). University of California Press. 

Ofsthun, F. (2022). Just like the library: exploring the experiences of former library student assistants’ post-graduation careers and perceptions of job preparedness as impacted by library work [Doctoral dissertation, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]. 

Peirson-Hagger, E. (Oct 12, 2023). Carol Gilligan: why I changed my mind on the gender binary. The New Statesman. 
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/10/carol-gilligan-gender-binary-human-voice#:~:text=Pragya%20Agarwal%2C%20the%20data%20scientist,empathetic%20and%20self%2Dsacrificing.%E2%80%9D  

Sai, L., Gao, G., Mandalaki, E., Zhang, L. E., & Williams, J. (2024). Co-constructing new ways of working: Relationality and care in post-pandemic academia. Culture and Organization, 30(5), 523–538. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2024.2323726 

Sotiropoulou, P., & Cranston, S. (2022). Critical friendship: An alternative, ‘care-full’ way to play the academic game. Gender, Place & Culture, 30(8), 1104–1125. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2022.2069684 

Stoddart, R., Pesek, J., & Thornhill, K. (2022). Assessing student employment in libraries for critical thinking & career readiness. In Library Assessment Conference Proceedings 2022. 

Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. 

Vine, L. (2021). HIP check: Equity, learner-centered pedagogies, and student employment. In Ascending into an open future: The proceedings of the ACRL 2021 virtual conference (pp. 321-329). ACRL. 

Vine, L. (2022). Training matters: Student employment and learning in academic libraries. In the Library with a Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/student-employment-academic-libraries/  

“What is career readiness?” (n.d). National Association of College Employers. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined/  

From Thich Nhat Hanh in How to Focus:

The contemplation on impermanence can help us live our life with the insight of impermanence so we can be free from many afflictions such as anger, fear, and delusion. It isn’t the idea or notion of impermanence, but the insight of impermanence that can free and save us. Impermanence is not a negative note in the song of life. If there were no impermanence, life would be impossible. Without impermanence how could your little girl grow up and become a young woman? Without impermanence how could you hope to transform your suffering? You can hope to transform your suffering because you know it is impermanent. So impermanence is something positive. We should say, “Long Live Impermanence!”

I think working in digital preservation, and as a memory worker in general, it’s easy to see impermanence as a, if not the, enemy. If you are thinking about a specific item in isolation, say a computer file, or an archival document, it kind of is. But if you focus your attention on the information artifact for a little bit you often come to discover that it is actually related to other artifacts and entities that may or may not still available, and that it is already incomplete, in many ways. This incompleteness is what gives the artifact value, and makes it worth preserving, and is also why exact preservation of its current state isn’t always possible. Forever is mental trap that causes anxiety and suffering.

Registration is now open for the in-person Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Forum and Learn@DLF, happening in Denver, Colorado, November 16-19, 2025.

The program for Learn@DLF, which features 6 exciting workshops, is also now available. The DLF Forum program will be released in early summer.

Secure the early bird rate, register for Learn@DLF workshops, and start planning for yet another memorable week with DLF. 

DLF member organizations receive one complimentary DLF Forum registration as part of their member benefits. Not sure who received your code? Email us at forum@diglib.org. 

Register Today

If you have any questions, please write to us at forum@diglib.org. We’re looking forward to seeing you in Denver this fall.

-Team DLF

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The post Registration is Now Open for the 2025 DLF Forum, Learn@DLF Program Available appeared first on DLF.

The ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC) 2025 conference took place on March 29, 2025, and it was hosted by the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. CAPWIC provides a low-cost, regionally tailored platform for women and minorities in computing, including students, faculty, professionals, and supporters. 

The kind folks at the Prosocial Design Network asked me to be a guest for April’s “pro-social,” a very low-key virtual gathering for folks interested in creating more inclusive digital spaces.

More about PDN:

The Prosocial Design Network connects research to practice toward a world in which online spaces are healthy, productive, respect human dignity, and improve society.

Here’s their recap of the event, and a video of our Q&A segment (15 minutes).

They shared the questions in advance, which I very much appreciated! Here are my prepared notes - we certainly didn’t cover it all during the call.

What principles should be front of mind in designing inclusive digital spaces, particularly social spaces?

First off, hire people with different lived experiences from yours. Hire trans people. Hire Black people. Hire disabled people. Hire disabled Black trans people. Let them cook. Listen to them. Otherwise you are, as my wife says, “Pissing into the wind.”

Prioritize accessibility. Ensure spaces are accessible for users on many devices, using different device settings, in different contexts in the real world including with assistive technologies. Often accessibility is an afterthought. Shift left and allow it go drive your design and architecture decisions from the jump. For social apps, this includes setting smart defaults - i.e. requiring folks to add alt text if they’re uploading images.

Keep your tech stack light and boring. Design for a 4-year-old Android phone on a 3g connection, with bandwidth paid for by the megabyte. Bloatware takes longer to load and harms or disincentivizes participation from folks on slower connections or older tech.

Design for trust, privacy and safety. Design for people to be able to protect their privacy, control what they share and what they see.

• Don’t ask for information you don’t need, and tell people why you’re asking for what you do need.
• Make privacy and sharing settings crystal clear.
• Remind folks that no site is 100% secure even if you’re encrypting every bit.
• Provide feedback/reporting mechanisms.
• Allow people to block/opt out of interacting with others or groups, or types of content.
• Don’t overpromise! If you have gaps or areas still under development, name them.
• Have good documentation and support. Don’t leave people wondering what to do.
• Look to successful, intentionally-designed communities - like BlackSky - for cues about designing inclusive, safe spaces.

Allow people to define themselves. The way you do it ain’t the way everybody else does it.

• Be aware of any type of binary options when it comes to identifying themselves - not just gender, but everything else. Are you technical or nontechnical? Employed or unemployed? Full-time or part-time? In all of these cases it’s not so clear.
• Think in terms of checkboxes, not radios. Tagging, not categorizing.
• Give people freedom in choosing avatars or profile images.
• Give people freedom to change/update usernames and login email addresses without hassle.
• Don’t make inferences about who people are or what they’d like based on their gender, race or other things that they choose to share with you.
• Confront your own ideas about people having one “true identity” - like a real name policy or assuming that everyone has the same interactions with everyone in their lives in every context. We certainly know this is true because 4chan exist(ed) - but let’s also remember that this might be the way that a trans person tries on a new name for the first time.

You may have noticed this isn’t necessarily specific to trans-inclusive design. That’s because this is the kind of work that, by considering folks in marginalized positions, benefits everyone. It’s the curb cut effect for accessibility AND privacy AND safety AND inclusion. By focusing our design on the margins we include everyone between them too.

Since you wrote your article in 2019, what are fails sites continue to make when it comes to trans inclusive design?

The biggest fail I continue to see is that folks are asking for gender or sex information at all, because it is usually not needed. It usually means that this data is being brokered into a database somewhere and sold for money.

I don’t need to tell you my gender to book a hotel. Why are you asking for it?

The unnecessary asking for gender gets worse now that we are seeing a rollback of previous progress in inclusive design we had made in the past few years. We’d been doing so well! The US Web Design system had a really thoughtful pattern about asking for gender that was starting to roll out to all these government forms. But now agencies are in the process of removing the pattern for asking for gender in an inclusive way, and replacing it with a binary option for sex.

These design systems changes are in addition to removing all references to being trans from websites, and no longer offering services or information for trans people. It’s a very literal erasure of trans identity. It’s really upsetting, scary, and for trans folks, it’s existential.

I encourage practitioners to plan ahead for the moment when you are asked to do something that you know is wrong. That day will come. What will you say? What will you say no to? What’s your red line?

What new concerns do you have with AI and do you have any advice for tech folk?

I have a lot of concerns with AI. I do think there are useful applications for the technology, and 99.99% of the applications out there are either actively predatory, passively harmful, gratuitous and mid, or all of the above. And they are all harming the environment and our health.

1. Garbage in, garbage out. AI is pattern recognition. And the patterns it’s trained on are filled with bias! Bias harms people who are in the minority. According to a recent study out of Stanford:

   “synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs …perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities.” - Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models (2024)

2. …and this includes code. When AI is trained on design patterns or code that is widely popular, but that also includes a lot of code that’s inaccessible or unusable, the resulting code is also inaccessible or unusable. We should also be extremely wary of any AI tool that claims it can refactor a codebase written in a language that most modern coders are not using.

3. AI is a tool of capitalism and state violence. Generative AI is being used to consolidate, analyze, and generate information in a way that can be used to surveil, prosecute, incarcerate, and kill people.

4. AI is seen as a smart humanoid. People tend to believe algorithms more than each other as task complexity increases - but we also tend to view AI as human-like. We anthropomorphize AI tools by giving them human-like names or designing them as chat prompts (rather than command prompts or even search boxes), which leads us to believe that we are in fact talking with another living being rather than a computer. It also leads some folks to think that AI will become sentient. It won’t, actually, but it will if humans believe that it is, which is perhaps worse.

5. AI is mid. And by that, I mean that what it produces is functionally a middle-of-the-road, average, non-“edge case” output. This flattens our differences and creates a “norm” which actually does not exist. Individual people aren’t “normal”, but AI sure likes to tell us that’s a thing, and that really harms people who are far from that norm. Saying that everyone is the same denies the fact that we are all weird as hell. It’s our differences that make us stronger, more creative, better.

6. Critique is painted as fear. Proponents of AI say that skeptics are “afraid” of AI or don’t understand it. I, for one, am not afraid of it - I’m frustrated by how folks are positioning it as the solution to all our problems. I do understand it! I know too much. Dismissing AI detractors as “fearful” allows proponents to dismiss valid critique outright rather than engage with it. It’s a strawman argument.

   If you are AI-critique curious:

   • Algorithmic Justice League
   • Distributed AI Research Institute
   • Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
   • We deserve better than an AI-powered future

My AI wishlist for technologists

If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Do something else. Turn off default settings that include AI. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and turn off AI features. Turn off Apple intelligence. Turn off Google Gemini. Take a harm-reduction approach to your tech use. (FWIW, this is my approach to eating animal food products. I’m not vegan or even completely vegetarian, but I don’t build my food habits around animal products, which reduces how many animal products I consume.)

Don’t make AI your main thing. Charles Eames said, “Never delegate understanding.” Don’t rely on AI alone to make decisions about what’s true, certainly not for core parts of your work.

Understand the bias that ships with your LLM. Do everything you can to critically evaluate outputs for inaccessible, biased or otherwise harmful content. Right-size your models and turn down the “creativity” setting.

Advocate for sustainable, safe AI, including regulation and environmental mitigation measures. Individual choices get us down the road a piece, but what we really need is to mitigate the impacts at a high level.

Engage your discomfort. If someone critiques AI and it makes you uncomfortable, listen to understand and be open to changing your mind. Most of the folks who are warning about the harms of AI are minoritized people - Black and brown women, queer and trans people. Believe them!

Are there any questions you think researchers could help answer regarding trans-inclusive design?

This is an excellent question. Some of the things I’d ask folks to understand include…

What are ways we can design for trust and safety? How can we create digital spaces where people feel safe? What are some of the ways we can foster trustworthiness?

What would trans-informed design look like? How can we use the very concept of transness - boundary-crossing, liminality, non-binary thinking - to expand our thinking about how technologies can be used, and to what ends?

Oliver Haimson is studying this very thing, and his new book Trans Technologies is available for free, open access, from MIT Press.

How might trans-inclusive digital design change IRL service design? We’re already seeing this as part of our work in Civic Tech, moving from automation to true digital transformation. We all know that real-world constraints map to technological design choices. How then do we transform the tech stack and use that to change our very service delivery model?

On May 7, 2025, we held our fourth annual WS-DL Research Expo.  We continued the same format as the prior years (2024, 2023, 2022 & 2021), with one student from each WS-DL professor giving a short overview of their research.  Links to all the materials (slides, papers, software, data) are gathered in the GitHub repo, but repeated here are the links for the students and their presentations: 

• Kritika Garg: Not Here, Go There: Analyzing Redirection Patterns on the Web
• Kumushini Thennakoon: Beyond Gaze Overlap: Analyzing Joint Visual Attention Dynamics Using Egocentric Data
• Lamia Salsabil: A Context-Based Ensemble Classifier for Open Access Dataset and Software URLs in Scholarly Documents
• Akshay Nayak: Adapting Online Customer Reviews for Blind Users: A Case Study of Restaurant Reviews
• Jhon G. Botello: Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing Changes in Web Archive Content: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach

We were fortunate enough to welcome back some of our alumni, including: Chuck Cartledge (PhD, 2014), Gavindya Jayawardena (PhD, 2024), Mat Kelly (PhD, 2019), and Sawood Alam (PhD, 2020). We really appreciate the ongoing relationship we have with our alumni -- WSDL is for life! 

If you were unable to attend, we recorded the students' presentations and have embedded the video below.

--Michael 

The @WebSciDL 2025 Research Expo is happening now! @phonedude_mln initiated the session followed by faculty and alumni intros!

Check out the event details here: https://t.co/klzPAyB9dI

5 students from 5 @WebSciDL faculties are delivering presentations today #2025WSDLExpo pic.twitter.com/k3BIiJFz95

— Himarsha R. Jayanetti (@HimarshaJ) May 7, 2025

Several OCLC Research reports have exerted influence on the library profession. Among these, the 2008 report Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums, offers timeless lessons to the library profession that are worth revisiting.  

Collaboration is a topic of ongoing interest and need for libraries. It has long been an important area of inquiry at OCLC Research because of its fundamental role in effective library work. One participant in the RLP discussion groups that led to the report said,

“Within our professional competencies, there is. . . an ethical requirement for us to be thinking about the future. I don’t think I’d consider myself a good librarian if I wasn’t actually thinking about collaborations across boundaries.” 

The Silos report, despite its punny name, delivers enduring value by offering a compelling framework for how collaborations mature. And while the report was focused on libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), its findings and recommendations apply across many library activities.  

Collaboration continuum 

The Collaboration Continuum framework depicts collaborative activity across a spectrum, illustrating a gradual increase in interdependency and benefits. The framework is elegant in its simplicity, offering a simple yet compelling view of how and why collaborations flourish.

The Collaboration Continuum. Originally published in Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums.

As collaborations move from left to right on this continuum, collaborative efforts require greater investments, risk-taking, and trust, while offering the potential for greater rewards for all participating partners. The initial stages (Contact, Cooperation, Coordination) are seen as additive, fostering working relationships that are layered on top of existing processes, without changes to institutional hierarchies or organizational structures. Cooperation and Coordination rely upon both informal and formal agreements between groups to achieve common goals.  

But the fourth stage, Collaboration, offers “a new vision for a new way of doing things.” It involves fundamental change and transformation, which makes it a much more ambitious undertaking. Convergence represents a state where collaboration has matured to the level of infrastructure that is so ingrained that it may no longer even be recognized as a collaborative effort.  

It’s not just about LAMS 

While written to foster greater collaboration between libraries, archives, and museums, the Silos report is relevant to a much broader library audience. In fact, as academic libraries are increasingly assuming new research support responsibilities–such as research data management, ORCID adoption, and research impact services—collaboration with other campus units become imperative. This imperative stems from the complex research lifecycle that spans multiple stakeholder groups where no single unit, including the library, can “own” research support. Instead, cross-unit collaboration is increasingly required, and the library must now work with unfamiliar partners such as research administration, faculty affairs, and campus communications.  

The Collaboration Continuum offers a framework that can guide libraries as they develop research support capacity with campus partners in support of institutional goals. Building trust relationships is challenging in a decentralized university environment characterized by local autonomy and incessant leadership churn, and more recent OCLC Research outputs such as Social Interoperability in Research Support: Cross-Campus Partnerships and the University Research Enterprise, build upon the Silos report to offer strategies and tactics that librarians may apply to build social interoperability, “the creation and maintenance of working relationships across individuals and organizational units that promote collaboration, communication, and mutual understanding.”  

Both the Silos and Social Interoperability reports inform current OCLC Research work as we observe libraries forging new partnerships with other units in the campus community. Many partnerships are ad hoc and experimental, falling in the Cooperation and Coordination sections of the Collaboration Continuum. But some collaborations are establishing more formalized operational structures, such as the University of Manchester Office of Open Research or Montana State University Research Alliance, where library expertise and capacities are combined with those of other campus units, moving these partnerships closer to the Collaboration segment of the Collaboration Continuum. These changes have implications for library strategies, organizational structures, and value proposition, which we are examining in the OCLC Research Library Beyond the Library project.  

Building a pedestrian bridge in Dublin, Ohio, home to OCLC. Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons   

Collaboration catalysts 

The Silos report also describes nine Collaboration Catalysts that can help partnerships flourish. This list can serve as a useful checklist for assessing readiness for moving further along the Collaboration Continuum, and the absence of catalysts can suggest project risk. I summarize these briefly here, but I encourage you to read the richer explanation and examples in the report.  

• Vision—A collaboration must be embedded in an overarching vision shared by all participants. This is core. 
• Mandate— A mandate, conveyed through strategic plans or high-level directives, can incentivize collaboration. 
• Incentives—Collaborations nurtured by incentive structures reward both individual and collective efforts. 
• Change agents—Collaborations require leadership from a trusted individual, department, or programmatic home base to provide stability and sustained stewardship. 
• Mooring—Collaborations thrive when they have an administrative home base from which they can operate, communicate, and incorporate their efforts into broader institutional goals. In practice, however, collaborations are often handshake agreements with individuals reporting to different units, which can threaten the partnership in a dynamic institutional environment. 
• Resources—Collaborations must be adequately resourced in order to succeed. This includes funding, human labor, expertise, and necessary infrastructure. 
• Flexibility—When professionals approach collaboration with open-mindedness, they can learn and embrace new ideas from other stakeholders.  
• External catalysts—Factors like peer pressure, funding requirements, and user needs can influence the decision to partner with others.  
• Trust—Trust is foundational to any collaborative relationship due to the resulting interdependencies. 

Enduring relevance 

Beyond the Silos of the LAMs is aging well and remains one of the greatest hits in the OCLC Research back catalog. The report offers timeless guidance for libraries, museums, and archives that extends to broader library audiences today.   

I invite you to read the full report—available open access like all OCLC Research reports—and consider where your collaborations fall on the continuum and whether your partnerships have multiple collaboration catalysts in play, as the report suggests.  

AI Nota Bene: I used AI tools to write this blog post. I found Claude to be useful as an editor and proofreader of my final draft, as I prompted it to recommend ways I could improve clarity and conciseness. I also prompted Claude to help me find a title for this essay. I incorporated many, but not all, of Claude’s suggestions.  

The post Timeless lessons on collaboration from OCLC Research   appeared first on Hanging Together.

LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with novelist Nancy Kricorian, whose work explores the experiences of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora. Her debut novel, Zabelle, published in 1998, has been translated into seven languages and adapted as a play. Her essays and poems have appeared in journals like The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, and The Mississippi Review. Kricorian has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools, and she has been a mentor with We Are Not Numbers. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. Her newest book, The Burning Heart of the World, follows the story of an Armenian family caught up in the Lebanese Civil War, and was recently published by Red Hen Press. Kricorian sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.

The Burning Heart of the World was published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War and the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, events which are central to the book’s story. How did the idea for linking these events, and the more recent trauma of 9/11 come to you? What insights can be gained from thinking about these terrible episodes of history in relation to one another?

I am interested in the way that mass trauma events inform and shape people’s life trajectories, and in the Armenian case the way that the genocide haunts families across generations. That haunting is often a silent or unspoken one, and all the more powerful for being so. In making these connections visible I hope to open spaces for repair and renewal. Sometimes going back to imagine and give shape to our forebears’ traumas is also a way of building strength to deal with our present ones.

This new book, and your work as a whole addresses the experiences of the Armenian diaspora, of which you are a part. How has your own personal and familial history influenced your storytelling? Are there parts of The Burning Heart of the World that are based upon that history?

My first novel, Zabelle, was a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as a genocide survivor and immigrant bride. My next book, All the Light There Was, told the story of someone of my generation growing up in my hometown under the shadow of the unspoken familial and community experience of the Armenian genocide. All the Light There Was, which is set in Paris during World War II, went far beyond the scope of my personal and family history in a way that required extensive research, as did The Burning Heart of the World, but there are small details in both of those novels that are drawn from personal history as well as different elements of my main characters’ temperaments that are similar to mine.

Your story is told from the perspective of a young person living through these events, but chronicles their effect on multiple generations. Is this significant? Are there things that a youthful perspective allows you to do, that a more mature outlook might not?

I have had a long fascination with the bildungsroman, the novel of formation, which in its classical form is the story of the growth and character development of a young man. In college I took a course on the “female bildungsroman” in which we read The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre, among other texts, and learned that the novel of development for women traditionally ended in either death or marriage. In all four of my novels, I write from the point of view of girls as they make their way towards adulthood. With Vera in The Burning Heart of the World, I wanted to show the Lebanese Civil War from a young girl’s perspective as she moves through adolescence. I am interested in centering the experience of girls and women in my work, with a particular focus on the way they manage and care for their families in times of great violence.

Did you have to do any research, when writing your book? If so, what were some of the most interesting and/or memorable things you learned?

I want the reader to be immersed from the first page in the time and place I am writing about—to be able to see, smell, and hear the world that the characters inhabit. It takes deep research and knowledge to build that world, and my favorite part of that work is listening to people who lived through the time I’m writing about tell their stories. I collect anecdotes and details in the way that a magpie gathers material to build a nest. So, for The Burning Heart of the World, I read over 80 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and interviewed upwards of 40 people. I also made three trips to Beirut so that I could become familiar with the city and the neighborhood that Vera lived in.

Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you have a particular place you prefer to write, a specific way of mapping out your story? Does your work as a teacher influence how you yourself write?

My writing process varies from project to project. For the last two novels, I have sat cross-legged in my favorite armchair with my laptop. Sometimes I make up rules for myself—such as I have to write one page a day, or if I’m busy with other commitments, I tell myself I must write for fifteen minutes a day. If I sit down for fifteen minutes, it will often turn into an hour or two, and if it’s only fifteen minutes, the piece I’m working on will stay in the front of my mind as I’m walking the dog or going to the subway. I have not been teaching formal university classes much in the past ten years but have moved to a one-on-one mentoring model that I enjoy a great deal. The careful attention that I pay to my mentees’ writing has made me more attentive to my own.

What is next for you? Are there other books in the works that you can share with us?

I’m currently working on a series of essays about my family that I think will be a memoir in pieces. I have written one essay about my relationship to the Armenian language and my grandmother that’s called Language Lessons, and one about my father’s relationship to motor vehicles called His Driving Life. Next up is a piece about my Uncle Leo, who was an amazing character—as a teenager he was the Junior Yo-Yo Champion of New England and for many decades was a guitar player in an Irish wedding band, the only Armenian in the band but quite a rock star in Boston’s Irish community.

Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?

In my study, I have shelves filled with books about Armenian history, culture, and literature. I particularly love and collect books of Armenian folk tales and proverbs. In the bedroom, we have all our novels, memoirs, and literary biographies. There is one shelf devoted to Marcel Proust, and another to Virginia Woolf. Poetry collections, photo and art books, and books about the history of New York City are in the living room.

What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?

I recently read and loved a collection of Etel Adnan’s essays entitled Voyage, War, Exile. I’m currently reading my friend Patricia Kaishian’s new book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, which blends nature writing with memoir. And for poetry, I recommend Mosab Abu Toha’s beautiful and devastating collection Forest of Noise.

I apologize for the length of this post (I am a professor, after all), but I've broken things up into sections so you can skip around as desired. 

Executive Summary: Academic research is essential for the advancement of technology and scientific/medical breakthroughs and is how we train the next generation of researchers. American research universities have become the envy of the world largely thanks to the support of the US federal government through the awarding of highly-competitive research grants. I am greatly saddened by what already enacted and proposed future cuts will mean for basic research and research universities in the US.

Background on Academic Research Funding

Agencies and Programs

IMLS. The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), along with the NEH, provided grants to libraries and museums throughout the country. In 2024, IMLS awarded over $250 million to fund research, education, and preservation activities, some of those described in this article on the impact of IMLS. While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s a tiny fraction of the US federal budget. Along with staff terminations, grants that had been awarded were terminated with little notice. IMLS funded some of my research in web archiving (most recently, our terminated National Leadership Grant, which I'll describe later), mainly used to provide stipends for my graduate student researchers. Through this, I have met amazing IMLS program officers, including Dr. Ashley Sands and Erin Barsan, who ensure that funding goes to worthwhile projects. Many IMLS staff members have degrees in library and information science and have dedicated their careers to supporting state and local library and museum services that help to educate people throughout the nation. Like with NEH, you can explore the outstanding projects that IMLS funds through their interactive map at https://www.imls.gov/map. 

DoD Minerva. The goal of the Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative (link is to the archived version of the page since the live page has been removed) was to "improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S."  Dr. Nicholas Evans from UMass-Lowell wrote a great article about the importance and impact of the Minerva Initiative. Quoting from his article: "In launching the program, then-Secretary Robert Gates claimed that 'Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.' Minerva was designed to address the gap between operations and social science." Science reported on the cancellation of this initiative, "Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research".

Terminated Projects and Impact

IMLS National Leadership Grants

DoD Minerva Research Initiative

We were excited to be invited to join this interdisciplinary and international collaboration to study residents' perceptions of safety and security in hard-to-reach areas. This grant was particularly competitive with 400 white paper proposals submitted, 42 of which were invited to submit full proposals, and only 15 were ultimately funded. Our study sites were two informal settlements, Khayelitsha Site-C near Cape Town, South Africa, and Villa Caracas, Barranquilla in Colombia. The overall goal of the project was to explore the limitations and potential knowledge gaps when only certain methodological or epistemological approaches are feasible in such settings. Each research team used a different methodology to carry out their study: visual sociology, institutional ethnography, citizen science, surveys, and web/social media analysis. In addition, another team performed meta-analysis to study how the interdisciplinary teams collaborated. Our part of the project was to use public data sources, such as worldwide news databases and social media, to learn about the sites. We hope to still be able to produce a tech report to describe our findings.

This post is adapted from an email thread in the DLF DAWG listserv.

Kristin Briney posted Writing Alt Text for a Scientific Figure on August 15th, 2024 where she provides a brief introduction and shares resources to guide the reader in describing scientific figures. In response to this post, members of DAWG shared other resources and experiences (Thanks to Wendy Robertson at the University of Iowa for sharing Briney’s post and Jasmine Clark for compiling and organizing the thread in blog form): 

Direct Responses to Briney’s Post: 

We’re working with our campus screenreader specialist on making our content accessible, and he’s pretty excited by the idea. Our grad student created the ALT text, and did so by dropping the images into UMGPT (our campus’ private secure ChatGPT clone), taking the generated captions, and cleaning them up. You can see examples of the resulting ALT text attached to the images in this draft internal presentation (which we ended up not using, but it’s useful backup for this conversation). The screenreader specialist liked these. 

<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11GYfjobY1ufKi4YZHGOcUUkZRtcczTcwX3YMsPYrD40/edit#slide=id.g2814b8755f3_0_320> 

Here is our final version. Less ALT text, and more links to screenreader-adapted versions of the original spreadsheets from which we drew the data for the images. 

<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vd4gLoYy8I1ghLoUC1phg3LS4pFOPkMaZ41EjZVC_Fo/edit#slide=id.g23e73b1b019_0_17>

– Courtesy of PF Anderson, University of Michigan 

I love the formula for writing alt text for data visualizations, in Briney’s post. I ran WAVE on the link that Jen-chien sent.

alt text = *Chart type* of *type of data* where *reason for including chart*. *Link to source data.*

with the example

Column chart of research data availability where research data on the internet disappears at a rate of 2.6% per year. For underlying data, see “Figure2_UnavailableByYear.csv” file at https://doi.org/10.22002/h5e81-spf62

Embedded in this recommendation is the assumption that the researchers have published their data: in an open repository, in an accessible and usable format, with a persistent ID.

This recommendation seems as though it would also improve the article. If you can’t summarize your visualization in this format, then perhaps it doesn’t support your argument, or it isn’t needed, or it’s too complicated, or you don’t really understand your research!

I’m interested to hear the opinions from actual users of assistive technology. Is the advice in these posts helpful or unhelpful?

– Courtesy of Susan Hoover, University of Houston

Additional Related Resources: 

Demo: AI to interpret charts for the visually impaired — arXiv Accessibility Forum 2024

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUsk7wVVQAo> 

AI and Accessibility — arXiv Accessibility Forum Session 2024

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdzC9J78i6I> 

Graphic Medicine in Disability Studies – Getting Started with Graphic Medicine in Disability Studies, by Ann Fox

– Courtesy of PF Anderson, University of Michigan

Dena Strong published a “data verbalization” post that shows “how to craft a simple and effective data verbalization…” 

– Courtesy of Jen-chien Yu, Director Of Library Assessment, University of Illinois

Response to Strong’s post (shared by Yu above): 

This is great! We’ve been having debates about the accessibility of comics when used in presentations. This:

“What type of visual is this?

What does it show?

Why does it matter?”

maps to what we’re calling functional ALT text, as contrasted with descriptive ALT text. For presentations, it’s about why is this on screen — is it decorative, a cognitive or symbolic placeholder for more complex content, is it communicating information, etc. For functional alt text, we keep the “what does it show” really simple and short. 

What we are finding is that folk who were blind from birth have different desires from alt text than folk who lost vision later in life. Our screenreader specialist was blind from birth, and will tell us, “I don’t care if it’s pink. That doesn’t tell me anything. Just tell me why it’s there.” Folk who have memories of color and shape may actually want that information. 

I also had tried putting the links to the screenreader-versions of data in the ALT text and have been instructed to NOT do this, because it’s annoying to have to listen to the computer read the URL aloud. I’ve also been told not to put the full  links on the slide itself, but I balk at that, because for accessibility for me, I want to be able to see that before I click on it, and I don’t want to have to hover to see it. A suggestion provided by Ann Fox was to add the stripped down functional alt text in the presentation slides, and create a separate external Google Doc or downloadable file with enriched alt text. I’m working right now on my first effort to do this. It’s a lot of work. It looks something like this.

SLIDE 1

Image 1 (functional ALT text): …

Image 1 (descriptive ALT text): … 

Image 1 (additional resources, links, data): …

Image 2 …

– Courtesy of PF Anderson, University of Michigan

A final response to the different resources shared:

I think those guides are indeed valuable resources to share with graduate students for their theses and dissertations—they offer helpful guidance across various areas.

Resources like the Do No Harm Guide, referenced from Writing Alt Text for a Scientific Figure by Kristin Briney, provide excellent frameworks for describing charts, such as the Four-Ingredients and Four-Levels Models, which can effectively address diverse user needs based on vision experiences, as PF mentioned. However, I’d like to offer a quick clarification on alt text for graphs that might help us apply these tags more effectively. Balancing alt text length is crucial; alt text within the <alt> tag is most effective when kept short and direct, ideally a single sentence conveying the key information.

For more detailed descriptions, best practice suggests using a <longdesc> tag or a linked long description with a <div> tag to add structure. This method enables screen reader users to navigate complex information more easily, reducing the risk of feeling “trapped” in lengthy, continuous alt text.

Another alternative is to link to a detailed description near the image, leading users to a separate page or section with a fuller explanation. This setup allows users to engage with image details at their own pace, focusing on specific information without becoming overwhelmed. For complex visuals, this flexible approach can enhance both accessibility and the user experience.

Just throwing this out there—I feel a bit panicked when I see people trying to put an entire block of text into alt text. It can easily end up overwhelming and confusing for screen reader users…

– Courtesy of Wen Nie Ng, MIS, UXD, CPWA, Digital Collections Librarian

The post A conversation around “Writing Alt Text for a Scientific Figure” by Kristin Briney appeared first on DLF.

BTC "price"

proof-of-work can only achieve payment security if mining income is high, but the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of income. ... the economic design of the transaction market fails to generate high enough fees.

In the case of blockchain protocols, the mathematical and economic reasoning behind the safety of the consensus often relies crucially on the uncoordinated choice model, or the assumption that the game consists of many small actors that make decisions independently. If any one actor gets more than 1/3 of the mining power in a proof of work system, they can gain outsized profits by selfish-mining. However, can we really say that the uncoordinated choice model is realistic when 90% of the Bitcoin network’s mining power is well-coordinated enough to show up together at the same conference?

Miners' Revenue

Transaction Fees

Transaction Rate

Mempool Size

Cost Per Transaction

New data tells us that mining a single Bitcoin or one BTC costs the largest public mining companies over $82,000 USD, which is nearly double the figure it did the previous quarter. Estimates for smaller organisations say you need to spend about $137,000 to get that single BTC in return. BTC is currently only valued at $94,703 USD, which seems to be a problem in the math department.

These costs can even get worse depending on the country you're doing your mining. Germany is typically considered to be one of the worst places to mine BTC from a profit perspective. It costs around $200,000 USD to mine a single coin there.

Hash Rate

We show that the Bitcoin mining capacity is highly concentrated and has been for the last five years. The top 10% of miners control 90% and just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control close to 50% of mining capacity. Furthermore, this concentration of mining capacity is counter cyclical and varies with the Bitcoin price. It decreases following sharp increases in the Bitcoin price and increases in periods when the price drops or. Thus, the risk of a 51% attack increases in times when the Bitcoin price drops precipitously or following the halving events.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the evolution of the market shares of Bitmain’s affiliated pools and those of other large pools until early 2021. Bitmain-affiliated pools’ market shares have been consistently at or above 30% since October 2016. Bitmain core refers to pools in which Bitmain has known ownership stakes (AntPool, BTC.com, and ViaBTC). Bitmain total adds to the core pools those that are Bitmain’s business partners (BTC.Top, OKExPool, Huobi.pool, and 1THash;

Table 1

As of March 2021, the pools in Table 1 collectively accounted for 86% of the total hash rate employed. All but one pool (Binance) have known links to Bitmain Technologies, the largest mining ASIC producer.

AntPool and BTC.com are fully-owned subsidiaries of Bitmain. Bitmain is the largest investor in ViaBTC. Both F2Pool and BTC.TOP are partners of BitDeer, which is a Bitmain-sponsored cloud-mining service. The parent companies of Huobi.pool and OkExPool are strategic partners of Bitmain. Jihan Wu, Bitmain’s founder and chairman, is also an adviser of Huobi (one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and the owner of Huobi.pool).

Mining pools 25 June 2018

• "Unknown" is 5.3%.
• 3 identifiable pools together control more than 50%
• 6/17 identifiable pools each have more than 5%
• 5 of the 6 are Bitmain affiliates

Mining Pools 5/17/24

• "Unknown" is 7%.
• 2 identifiable pools together control more than 50%
• 5/10 identifiable pools each have more than 5%
• 5 of the 10 are Bitmain affiliates

Mining pools 4/30/25

• "Unknown" is 56%.
• 0 identifiable pools together control more than 50%
• 3/7 identifiable pools each have more than 5%
• 4 of the 7 are Bitmain affiliates

^{Photo by Nerene Grobler on Unsplash}

Libraries seek to create welcoming and respectful spaces for all users; this includes the library catalog, a crucial tool for discovery and access. In 2022, OCLC convened experts, practitioners, and community members, and created the report Reimagine Descriptive Workflows. This project highlighted the opportunity to improve descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives to improve and contextualize cultural institutions’ collection descriptions. While the report offers a valuable framework, it primarily centers on the historical and social contexts of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States. For libraries in the UK and Ireland (UKI), the need to reimagine descriptive workflows is equally significant but with attention to specific cultural and historical nuances. During OCLC RLP workshops in London, Sheffield, and Glasgow in May 2024, catalogers and other stakeholders collaboratively explored their work in this area.  

With this in mind, the OCLC RLP team did what it does best – convene stakeholders to workshop this issue and illuminate insights from expert practitioners and to collectively identify productive next steps. Thanks to participants for their illuminating insights: 

Setting the scene 

In a series of meetings held virtually in late 2024, participants recognized that current descriptive practices often fail to adequately represent the diversity of UKI communities. There is a particular need for increased awareness and sensitivity towards the specific impact of British expansion on descriptive practices. Efforts to move forward can be geographically isolated.  As one discussion participant explained, “So much of these conversations [around changing descriptive practices] that we have are from a non-UK perspective… ” The broadly used Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Library of Congress Classification (LCC) carry inherent US-centric orientation.  UKI institutions can move beyond simply adopting North American models for reparative description and prioritize issues specific to their context. 

Discussions thus far have raised possible next steps that can be addressed through actions at individual institutions and areas where sector-wide investments would be useful.  

Actions for individual institutions: practical steps forward 

Identify and address capacity and resourcing for reimaginging description practices. Discussion participants, while eager to dig into learning followed by action, were concerned about additional expectations placed on sometimes overburdened staff. Whether creating projects to revisit legacy data or taking a fresh look at incoming collections, institutions must adequately resource this work to make progress. Although individual institutions need to carry out this work, and the rationale for resourcing must align with local priorities, participants see toolkits for advocating for resources as a shared need.  

Communicate with and engage communities in addressing change. Several participants talked about their desire to build mechanisms for receiving feedback from the public, especially community members who have been impacted by prior descriptive practices. Examples included implementing a feedback button in the discovery layer, supported by templated responses in addition to a well-articulated (and resourced) plan to take action on feedback. Other examples included the creation of public-facing webpages describing activities to support and engage with communities in the management and presentation of collections; participants saw such efforts as contributing to transparency. Special and cultural collections are often a locus for direct conversations with communities. These relationships could be positively leveraged to ensure that the words used to describe these community members are vetted and approved, and that community representatives can be included in ongoing dialog about descriptive terms. For effective outcomes, institutions should consult with people from their communities with different backgrounds and experiences; this work should be undertaken without placing undue burden on the individuals being consulted.  

Other examples of work that can be carried out locally (but which would naturally be enhanced by a broader community of practice) included: 

• Undertaking pilot projects to demonstrate the value of reimagining description work and building technical skills and confidence. One participant emphasized the importance of “bite-sized projects” to develop confidence and expertise. 

• Building on the work or experience of others could support the development of toolkits and learning materials to increase metadata staff confidence in doing work in this area.   

• Establishing an annual language sensitivity review of terminology and subject headings. This is an area that would lend itself to focusing on a small but important segment of library collections.  

• Library system migrations present an opportunity to examine how language has been used and how it may be updated.  

Actions for the sector: collective effort for positive impact 

Participants identified several sector-wide actions to support an emerging community of practice. 

Sharing information about existing UKI-specific efforts, pilots, and emerging best practices. The willingness to share experiences, challenges, and even setbacks is a crucial element for progress. Participants know that there is a lot of good work happening in the sector, but such information is not tracked or consolidated in a single location. It is difficult to find, sometimes available only through subscription to the right listserv or via referral in one-on-one conversations. Sharing information in a central resource hub would facilitate learning, collaboration, and advancing best practices. Even failed efforts are important to share, as there are always lessons to be learned. Participants supported the idea of identifying a “bank of mentors,” those who are experienced in reimagined descriptive workflows. They also noted that approaches in special collections and archives may differ from library cataloging, although the two sectors have much to learn from one another. Knowledge sharing builds a common understanding of user experience in relation to inclusive description and supports shared insights on community collaboration. 

Opportunities to collaborate on projects within community hubs. A shared community of practice would provide opportunities to collaborate among those doing this work, especially where institutions have complementary collecting areas or are serving similar communities.  

Considering the role of AI.  Many participants are interested in using AI to streamline processes, particularly for identifying and updating language in the catalog, while also being mindful of potential biases that can be introduced by AI. Because of the need for appropriate resourcing and knowledge sharing, this may be an area for sector-wide collaboration of AI applications and approaches.  

Time estimation tools. Development of such tools would help institutions budget the time and resources needed for reparative description efforts. Data to inform how long efforts take could be informed by pilot projects and time tracking.  

Next steps 

Over the next few months, the group will conclude discussions, and we will share additional learnings. Many themes emerging from our discussions strongly resonate with those of the Reimagine Descriptive Workflows project: investing in staff training to develop internal communities of practice; promoting and supporting community-led co-design and creative cultures of reciprocity; and establishing feedback mechanisms.  

Despite the scale of the task and gaps in shared knowledge, there are many reasons for inspiration. The discussions clearly demonstrated the passion and commitment of individuals in our group to address issues, advance initiatives underway, and effect change. As elsewhere, the journey to reimagining descriptive workflows in the UK and Irish context is a long one, requiring sustained effort, collaboration, and a commitment to centering marginalized voices. By activating both individual institutional efforts and collective action, the UKI library and archive sector can move towards creating more welcoming spaces for all users. 

Notes on use of AI: a preliminary draft of this blog post was prepared using AI tools that generated meeting transcripts and summarized meeting notes and related resources, including the Reimaging Descriptive Workflows report. (As a rule, we do not expose RLP community transcripts or meeting notes to commercial genAI tools but rely on internal sandbox environments to protect the privacy of community documents.) This process was useful in identifying themes to highlight. AI tools were also used to evaluate the tone and make some editorial improvements. These tools did not replace the human expertise needed to craft a final version but helped to make the process a little easier and prompted deeper reflection on our communication choices and practices. I’m grateful to the very human Mercy Procaccini for her assistance. 

The post Reimagine Descriptive Workflows in the UK and Ireland: An OCLC RLP community-informed discussion appeared first on Hanging Together.

Introduction

Me: Give me additional verses

DeepSeek: Okay, the user has already asked about what the Quran says regarding misinformation and received several detailed responses with cited verses. Now they're asking for additional verses. I need to make sure I don't repeat the ones already mentioned. Let me recall the previous answers and check which verses were covered.

In the last interaction, I listed seven key verses in Arabic with translations. So the user now wants more verses beyond those. Let me think of other relevant Quranic verses that address truthfulness, lying, false testimony, or spreading false information.

Surah Al-Isra (17:35) comes to mind about fulfilling measures and testifying with justice. Then Surah Al-Ma'idah (5:8) talks about standing for justice even against oneself. Surah Al-Mu'minun (23:3) mentions avoiding vain talk. Surah Al-Hajj (22:30) advises avoiding false speech. Surah Al-Baqarah (2:283) discusses trust and testimony. Surah Al-Nahl (16:105) specifies that liars disbelieve in Allah's signs. Surah Al-Mutaffifin (83:1-3) condemns fraud. Surah Al-An'am (6:144) warns against speaking without knowledge. Surah Al-Nisa (4:112) talks about bearing sin for false accusations.

I should present these new verses in Arabic with transliteration and translation, ensuring they haven't been mentioned before. Also, the user might be looking for a comprehensive list for study or reference, so context and lessons are important. Need to organize them clearly, maybe with headings for each verse. Let me verify the references to avoid errors. Once checked, structure the response with each verse, its Arabic text, transliteration, translation, context, and a key lesson. Conclude by summarizing the Quran's stance on truth and integrity. Make sure the formatting is consistent with previous answers for clarity.

Certainly! Here are additional Quranic verses in Arabic that emphasize truthfulness, condemn falsehood, and guide ethical communication, along with translations and contexts:

________________________________________

1. Prohibition of False Testimony

Quran 17:35

Arabic:

وَأَوْفُوا الْكَيْلَ إِذَا كِلْتُمْ وَزِنُوا بِالْقِسْطَاسِ الْمُسْتَقِيمِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ خَيْرٌ وَأَحْسَنُ تَأْوِيلًا

Transliteration: Wa awfū al-kayla idhā kiltum wa zīnū bil-qisṭāsi al-mustaqīm. Dhālika khayrun wa aḥsanu ta’wīlā.

Translation: "Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with an even balance. That is best and fairest in the end."

Context: Condemns dishonesty in speech and action, urging fairness and integrity.

________________________________________

2. Command to Uphold Justice

Quran 5:8

Arabic:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا كُونُوا قَوَّامِينَ لِلَّهِ شُهَدَاءَ بِالْقِسْطِ ۖ وَلَا يَجْرِمَنَّكُمْ شَنَآنُ قَوْمٍ عَلَىٰ أَلَّا تَعْدِلُوا ۚ اعْدِلُوا هُوَ أَقْرَبُ لِلتَّقْوَىٰ

Transliteration: Yā ayyuhalladhīna āmanū kūnū qawwāmīna lillāhi shuhadā’a bil-qisṭi wa lā yajrimannakum sha’nānu qawmin ʿalā allā taʿdilū. Iʿdilū huwa aqrabu lil-taqwā.

Translation: "O believers! Stand firm for Allah as witnesses for justice, and do not let hatred of a people lead you to injustice. Be just—that is closer to righteousness."

Context: Commands justice in speech and testimony, even toward enemies.

________________________________________

3. Avoiding Vain Speech

Quran 23:3

Arabic:

وَالَّذِينَ هُمْ عَنِ اللَّغْوِ مُعْرِضُونَ

Transliteration: Wa alladhīna hum ʿani al-laghwi muʿriḍūn.

Translation: "And those who turn away from ill speech."

Context: Praises those who reject gossip, slander, and meaningless talk.

________________________________________

4. Prohibition of False Speech

Quran 22:30

Arabic:

وَاجْتَنِبُوا قَوْلَ الزُّورِ

Transliteration: Wa ijtānibū qawla al-zūr.

Translation: "And shun false speech."

Context: Part of a broader command to avoid all forms of sin, including lies.

________________________________________

5. Condemnation of Breaching Trusts

Quran 2:283

Arabic:

وَلَا تَكْتُمُوا الشَّهَادَةَ ۚ وَمَن يَكْتُمْهَا فَإِنَّهُ آثِمٌ قَلْبُهُ

Transliteration: Wa lā taktumū al-shahādah. Wa man yaktumhā fa-innahu āthimun qalbuh.

Translation: "Do not conceal testimony, for whoever conceals it has a sinful heart."

Context: Warns against withholding or distorting truthful testimony.

________________________________________

6. Truthfulness as a Mark of Faith

Quran 16:105

Arabic:

إِنَّمَا يَفْتَرِي الْكَذِبَ الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِآيَاتِ اللَّهِ

Transliteration: Innamā yaftarī al-kaḏhaba alladhīna lā yu’minūna bi-āyāti Allāh.

Translation: "Only those who disbelieve in Allah’s signs fabricate lies."

Context: Links lying to a lack of faith, emphasizing truthfulness as a hallmark of belief.

________________________________________

7. Warning Against Fraud and Deception

Quran 83:1–3

Arabic:

وَيْلٌ لِّلْمُطَفِّفِينَ. الَّذِينَ إِذَا اكْتَالُوا عَلَى النَّاسِ يَسْتَوْفُونَ. وَإِذَا كَالُوهُمْ أَو وَّزَنُوهُمْ يُخْسِرُونَ

Transliteration: Waylun lil-muṭaffifīn. Alladhīna idhā aktālū ʿalā al-nāsi yastawfūn. Wa idhā kālūhum aw wazanūhum yukhsiṛūn.

Translation: "Woe to those who give less [than due], who demand full measure from others but give less when they measure or weigh [for them]."

Context: Condemns dishonesty in transactions, a form of misinformation for gain.

________________________________________

8. Rejecting Baseless Accusations

Quran 6:144

Arabic:

وَمَن يَكْسِبْ خَطِيئَةً أَوْ إِثْمًا ثُمَّ يَرْمِ بِهِ بَرِيئًا فَقَدِ احْتَمَلَ بُهْتَانًا وَإِثْمًا مُّبِينًا

Transliteration: Wa man yaksib khaṭī’atan aw ithman thumma yarmi bihi barī’an faqadi iḥtamala buhtānan wa ithman mubīnā.

Translation: "Whoever commits a sin or error and then blames it on an innocent person has burdened himself with slander and a blatant sin."

Context: Forbids shifting blame through lies or false accusations.

________________________________________

9. Command to Speak Kindly and Truthfully

Quran 4:112

Arabic:

وَمَن يَكْسِبْ خَطِيئَةً أَوْ إِثْمًا ثُمَّ يَرْمِ بِهِ بَرِيئًا فَقَدِ احْتَمَلَ بُهْتَانًا وَإِثْمًا مُّبِينًا

Transliteration: Wa man yaksib khaṭī’atan aw ithman thumma yarmi bihi barī’an faqadi iḥtamala buhtānan wa ithman mubīnā.

Translation: "Whoever commits a sin or error and then blames it on an innocent person has borne a grave slander and a manifest sin."

Context: Reiterates the gravity of false accusations.

________________________________________

Key Lessons

• Integrity in Speech: The Quran repeatedly ties truthfulness to faith (e.g., 16:105).

• Social Justice: Lies harm individuals and communities (2:283, 83:1–3).

• Divine Accountability: Every word and intention is recorded (50:18).

• Rejecting Harm: Silence in the face of falsehood is complicity (24:15–16).

These verses collectively establish a robust ethical framework for combating misinformation, urging believers to prioritize truth, fairness, and responsibility in all communication.

Item number eight states that the phrase

وَمَن يَكْسِبْ خَطِيئَةً أَوْ إِثْمًا ثُمَّ يَرْمِ بِهِ بَرِيئًا فَقَدِ احْتَمَلَ بُهْتَانًا وَإِثْمًا مُّبِينًا

is from Quran 6:144 but it is actually the entire verse Quran 4:112

The correct verse from Quran 6:144 is:

وَمِنَ ٱلۡإِبِلِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ وَمِنَ ٱلۡبَقَرِ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ‌ۗ قُلۡ ءَآلذَّڪَرَيۡنِ حَرَّمَ أَمِ ٱلۡأُنثَيَيۡنِ أَمَّا ٱشۡتَمَلَتۡ عَلَيۡهِ أَرۡحَامُ ٱلۡأُنثَيَيۡنِ‌ۖ أَمۡ ڪُنتُمۡ شُہَدَآءَ إِذۡ وَصَّٮٰڪُمُ ٱللَّهُ بِهَـٰذَا‌ۚ فَمَنۡ أَظۡلَمُ مِمَّنِ ٱفۡتَرَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ ڪَذِبً۬ا لِّيُضِلَّ ٱلنَّاسَ بِغَيۡرِ عِلۡمٍ‌ۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يَہۡدِى ٱلۡقَوۡمَ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ 

The translation is:

And of the camels two (male and female), and of oxen two (male and female). Say: "Has He forbidden the two males or the two females or (the young) which the wombs of the two females enclose? Or were you present when Allâh ordered you such a thing? Then who does more wrong than one who invents a lie against Allâh, to lead mankind astray without knowledge. Certainly Allâh guides not the people who are Zâlimûn (polytheists and wrong-doers)."

It is interesting that item number nine in the answer, right below number eight, is the same verse but correctly referenced this time.

Wrong chapter and verse number from DeepSeek

I asked DeepSeek for additional verses, and this time, DeepSeek started to hallucinate. The answer included a phrase that does not exist in the Quran at all, but DeepSeek attributed the phrase to a specific verse in the Quran.

Me: Give me additional verses

Thought for 37 seconds

DeepSeek: Okay, the user has asked for additional Quranic verses related to misinformation again. Let me see. They previously requested verses in Arabic with translations, and I provided several. Now they want more.

First, I need to recall which verses I've already listed. The previous ones included 2:42, 49:6, 24:15-16, 17:36, 50:18, 25:72, 49:12, and then in the last response, I added 17:35, 5:8, 23:3, 22:30, 2:283, 16:105, 83:1-3, 6:144, 4:112. So I need to find more verses that haven't been mentioned yet but still address truthfulness, falsehood, gossip, or accountability in speech.

Let me check other relevant verses. Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:2 comes to mind about cooperation in righteousness. Also, Surah Al-Isra 17:34 about fulfilling promises. Surah Al-Hujurat 49:11 prohibits insulting others. Surah Al-Mutaffifin 83:29-36 talks about the consequences for those who mock believers. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:188 warns against deceit in property. Surah Al-Ahzab 33:70-71 encourages truthful speech. Surah Al-Mumtahanah 60:12 on not hiding testimony. Surah Al-Nahl 16:116 against lying about what's permissible. And Surah Al-Tawbah 9:119 urges being with the truthful.

I need to present these in the same format as before: Arabic, transliteration, translation, and context. Make sure the translations are accurate and the contexts clearly relate to misinformation or ethical communication. Also, check if any of these were already covered. For example, 2:283 was mentioned before, so I should avoid repetition. Wait, 2:188 is about property, which is a form of deceit, so it's relevant. Similarly, Surah Al-Tawbah 9:119 is about being with the truthful, which supports truthfulness in general.

Ensure that each verse adds value to the topic. For instance, Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:2 encourages cooperation in good deeds and avoiding sin, which ties into promoting truth and avoiding falsehood. Surah Al-Isra 17:34 about fulfilling promises relates to honesty. Surah Al-Hujurat 49:11 is about not insulting, which is a form of harmful speech.

Double-check the translations for accuracy. Maybe use Sahih International or another reputable translation. Also, verify the Arabic script to ensure it's correct. Organize them in a logical order, perhaps by theme. Start with cooperation in righteousness, then fulfilling promises, avoiding insults, mocking others, deceit in transactions, truthful speech, hiding testimony, lying about halal/haram, and the call to be with the truthful.

Finally, summarize the key lessons from these additional verses to reinforce the Quran's stance on truthfulness and against misinformation. Make sure the response is clear and helpful, providing the user with meaningful content that expands on the previous answers without redundancy.

Certainly! Here are additional Quranic verses in Arabic that emphasize truthfulness, condemn deception, and guide ethical communication, along with translations and contexts:

________________________________________

1. Cooperation in Righteousness, Not Sin

Quran 5:2

Arabic:

وَتَعَاوَنُوا عَلَى الْبِرِّ وَالتَّقْوَىٰ ۖ وَلَا تَعَاوَنُوا عَلَى الْإِثْمِ وَالْعُدْوَانِ

Transliteration: Wa taʿāwanū ʿalā al-birri wa al-taqwā wa lā taʿāwanū ʿalā al-ithmi wa al-ʿudwān.

Translation: "Cooperate in righteousness and piety, and do not cooperate in sin and aggression."

Context: Encourages collective efforts to uphold truth and justice while rejecting complicity in falsehood or harm.

________________________________________

2. Fulfilling Promises and Trusts

Quran 17:34

Arabic:

وَأَوْفُوا بِالْعَهْدِ ۖ إِنَّ الْعَهْدَ كَانَ مَسْئُولًا

Transliteration: Wa awfū bil-ʿahdi inna al-ʿahda kāna mas’ūlā.

Translation: "Fulfill your promises, for you will surely be held accountable for them."

Context: Highlights the importance of honesty in commitments, a form of truthful communication.

________________________________________

3. Prohibition of Insulting Others

Quran 49:11

Arabic:

وَلَا تَلْمِزُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ وَلَا تَنَابَزُوا بِالْأَلْقَابِ

Transliteration: Wa lā talmizū anfusakum wa lā tanāabazū bil-alqāb.

Translation: "Do not insult one another or call each other by offensive nicknames."

Context: Forbids demeaning speech, which can fuel division and false narratives.

________________________________________

4. Condemnation of Mockery

Quran 83:29–36

Arabic:

إِنَّ الَّذِينَ أَجْرَمُوا كَانُوا مِنَ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا يَضْحَكُونَ. وَإِذَا مَرُّوا بِهِمْ يَتَغَامَزُونَ

Transliteration: Inna alladhīna ajramū kānū mina alladhīna āmanū yaḍḥakūn. Wa idhā marrū bihim yataghāmazūn.

Translation: "Indeed, the wicked used to laugh at the believers, winking [mockingly] when they passed by them."

Context: Condemns mockery and belittling others, behaviors that often accompany misinformation.

________________________________________

5. Prohibition of Deceit in Transactions

Quran 2:188

Arabic:

وَلَا تَأْكُلُوا أَمْوَالَكُم بَيْنَكُم بِالْبَاطِلِ

Transliteration: Wa lā ta’kulū amwālakum baynakum bil-bāṭil.

Translation: "Do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly."

Context: Forbids deceitful practices, including lying for financial gain.

________________________________________

6. Command to Speak Truthfully

Quran 33:70–71

Arabic:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَقُولُوا قَوْلًا سَدِيدًا. يُصْلِحْ لَكُمْ أَعْمَالَكُمْ

Transliteration: Yā ayyuhalladhīna āmanū ittaqū Allāha wa qūlū qawlan sadīdā. Yuṣliḥ lakum aʿmālakum.

Translation: "O believers! Fear Allah and speak uprightly. He will mend your deeds for you."

Context: Links truthful speech to divine guidance and rectification of actions.

________________________________________

7. Rejecting Hidden Testimony

Quran 60:12

Arabic:

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ إِذَا جَاءَكَ الْمُؤْمِنَاتُ يُبَايِعْنَكَ عَلَىٰ أَن لَّا يُشْرِكْنَ بِاللَّهِ... وَلَا يَكْتُمْنَ شَهَادَةً

Transliteration: Yā ayyuha al-nabiyyu idhā jā’aka al-mu’minātu yubāyiʿnaka ʿalā an lā yush’rikna billāh... Wa lā yaktumna shahādah.

Translation: "O Prophet! When believing women pledge allegiance to you... [they must] not conceal testimony."

Context: Requires transparency in testimony, rejecting the suppression of truth.

________________________________________

8. Condemnation of False Oaths

Quran 16:116

Arabic:

وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَا تَصِفُ أَلْسِنَتُكُمُ الْكَذِبَ هَٰذَا حَلَالٌ وَهَٰذَا حَرَامٌ

Transliteration: Wa lā taqūlū limā taṣifu alsinatukumu al-kaḏiba hādhā ḥalālun wa hādhā ḥarām.

Translation: "Do not say about what your tongues falsely claim, ‘This is lawful, and this is forbidden.’"

Context: Condemns lying to legitimize or prohibit matters falsely.

________________________________________

9. The Call to Be with the Truthful

Quran 9:119

Arabic:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَكُونُوا مَعَ الصَّادِقِينَ

Transliteration: Yā ayyuhalladhīna āmanū ittaqū Allāha wa kūnū maʿa al-ṣādiqīn.

Translation: "O believers! Fear Allah and be with those who are true."

Context: Urges alignment with truthful people, rejecting circles of falsehood.

________________________________________

Key Lessons from These Verses

1. Collective Responsibility: Uphold truth collectively (5:2) and avoid complicity in lies.

2. Integrity in Transactions: Deceit for gain is forbidden (2:188).

3. Dignity in Speech: Mockery, insults, and belittling others are condemned (49:11, 83:29–36).

4. Transparency: Concealing testimony or distorting facts violates trust (60:12, 16:116).

5. Divine Alignment: Truthfulness aligns believers with God’s guidance (33:70–71).

These verses reinforce the Quran’s comprehensive framework for combating misinformation, emphasizing that truth is a divine mandate and lies are a moral and spiritual corruption. In an age of misinformation, these teachings call for vigilance, integrity, and collective accountability.

Item number seven in the answer attributed the phrase:

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ إِذَا جَاءَكَ الْمُؤْمِنَاتُ يُبَايِعْنَكَ عَلَىٰ أَن لَّا يُشْرِكْنَ بِاللَّهِ... وَلَا يَكْتُمْنَ شَهَادَةً

to Quran 60:12

The first sentence exists in Quran 60:12 but the second sentence, after the three dots, does not exist in the Quran at all. It translates to "And them (believing women) will not conceal a testimony".

The correct Quran 60:12 is:

يَـٰٓأَيُّہَا ٱلنَّبِىُّ إِذَا جَآءَكَ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنَـٰتُ يُبَايِعۡنَكَ عَلَىٰٓ أَن لَّا يُشۡرِكۡنَ بِٱللَّهِ شَيۡـًٔ۬ا وَلَا يَسۡرِقۡنَ وَلَا يَزۡنِينَ وَلَا يَقۡتُلۡنَ أَوۡلَـٰدَهُنَّ وَلَا يَأۡتِينَ بِبُهۡتَـٰنٍ۬ يَفۡتَرِينَهُ ۥ بَيۡنَ أَيۡدِيہِنَّ وَأَرۡجُلِهِنَّ وَلَا يَعۡصِينَكَ فِى مَعۡرُوفٍ۬‌ۙ فَبَايِعۡهُنَّ وَٱسۡتَغۡفِرۡ لَهُنَّ ٱللَّهَ‌ۖ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ غَفُورٌ۬ رَّحِيمٌ۬ 

The translation is:

O Prophet! When believing women come to you to give you the Bai'âh (pledge), that they will not associate anything in worship with Allah, that they will not steal, that they will not commit illegal sexual intercourse, that they will not kill their children, that they will not utter slander, intentionally forging falsehood (i.e. by making illegal children belonging to their husbands), and that they will not disobey you in Ma'rûf (Islâmic Monotheism and all that which Islâm ordains) then accept their Bai'âh (pledge), and ask Allâh to forgive them, Verily, Allâh is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

Wrong answer from DeepSeek

I stopped asking DeepSeek at this point because after performing this experiment on Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and now DeepSeek and getting the same type of errors and hallucinations, I am convinced that LLMs are not capable of correctly quoting verses from the Quran in Arabic. In addition, archiving my questions and DeepSeek's answers by public web archives is not possible because the chat page is behind a login wall which makes it not archivable.

Conclusions

I initially was looking to study LLMs' improvements over the past two years quoting verses from the Quran. Although testing the same prompts in the paper did not produce any errors, slightly changing the prompts while keeping the same meaning resulted in producing errors and hallucinations in the answers using all three tools (Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek). Some researchers warned that misinformation and disinformation cannot be eliminated from LLMs output. They argue that LLMs' errors will continue to increase and result in a total collapse of the model.

Types of errors produced by Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek

Introduction

I discussed LLMs' hallucinations and demonstrated their inability to correctly cite Quranic verses using Google Gemini as an example in part 1 of this blog post. Google Gemini's answers to different prompts included incorrect Quranic citations and phrases that do not exist in the Quran attributed to specific verses in the Quran. I also explained the importance of correctly citing and presenting Quranic verses in Arabic. Here, in part 2, I present a comparison between Google Gemini and Open AI's ChatGPT. Using the same prompts, ChatGPT-4o hallucinations produced similar results to that of Google Gemini. Again, misinformation remains one of the biggest challenges that compromises LLMs' credibility quoting verses from the Quran in Arabic. Experts in Classical Arabic and those who memorize the Quran word for word can identify errors in ChatGPT's output, however, less educated people will have difficulty distinguishing between correct and incorrect answers from ChatGPT. Some Arabic speakers have examined ChatGPT's answers and found them to have significant errors when referencing the Quran.

Improvements in ChatGPT over the last two years

The paper I reviewed in part 1 of this post tested ChatGPT-3.5 in 2023 using a sample of prompts regarding the Quran's views on misinformation. The authors found the output to have significant and consistent errors. They regenerated queries to the question “What does the Quran have to say about misinformation?”. They also sampled responses from ChatGPT with the additional prompt “please cite verses in Arabic”. The errors in the output ranged from producing correctly quoted and cited, yet irrelevant Quranic material to misordering the words of Quranic verses; the errors were not minor. They also found hallucinations in ChatGPT's answers attributing text that doesn't exist in the Quran at all to specific chapters and verses in the Quran. I repeated their experiment on ChatGPT-4o in January 2025 and I was unable to reproduce their output. I did not get incorrect Quranic citations or verses that did not exist in the Quran. I did not get any altered verses from the Quran in any way. Every output was correct, accurate, and authentic. 

Correct answers from ChatGPT

However, when I repeated the experiment I did with Google Gemini in part 1 of this post in January of 2025 and asked ChatGPT for additional verses in Arabic, the results were not much better than the ones I got from Google Gemini. ChatGPT provided the wrong reference one time when I asked for additional verses on misinformation. In addition, ChatGPT provided phrases that do not exist in the Quran and attributed them to specific verses in the Quran when I tried different prompts that are not in the paper, but they have the same meaning. Although the errors in ChatGPT's output are not as bad as the ones I found in Google Gemini's, I think the impact is worse because the wrong verses are closer to correct verses in the Quran, and they can definitely be taken as correct verses to the non-expert. The difference was in one letter in one case and one word in another case. The output's syntax was also wrong in the latter.

Wrong chapter and verses' numbers from ChatGPT

Me: Give me additional verses

ChatGPT:

Certainly! The Quran repeatedly emphasizes the dangers of misinformation, falsehoods, and irresponsible speech. Here are additional verses in Arabic that address this issue:

6. Do Not Spread Falsehood Knowingly

📖 Surah Aal-e-Imran (3:78)

وَإِنَّ مِنْهُمْ لَفَرِيقًا يَلْوُونَ أَلْسِنَتَهُمْ بِالْكِتَابِ لِتَحْسَبُوهُ مِنَ الْكِتَابِ وَمَا هُوَ مِنَ الْكِتَابِ وَيَقُولُونَ هُوَ مِنْ عِنْدِ اللَّهِ وَمَا هُوَ مِنْ عِنْدِ اللَّهِ وَيَقُولُونَ عَلَى اللَّهِ الْكَذِبَ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ

🔹 "And indeed, there is among them a party who alter the Scripture with their tongues so that you may think it is from the Scripture, but it is not from the Scripture. And they say, 'This is from Allah,' but it is not from Allah. And they speak a lie against Allah while they know [it]."

7. Lying Brings a Curse from Allah

📖 Surah Aal-e-Imran (3:61)

فَمَنْ حَاجَّكَ فِيهِ مِنْ بَعْدِ مَا جَاءَكَ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ فَقُلْ تَعَالَوْا نَدْعُ أَبْنَاءَنَا وَأَبْنَاءَكُمْ وَنِسَاءَنَا وَنِسَاءَكُمْ وَأَنْفُسَنَا وَأَنْفُسَكُمْ ثُمَّ نَبْتَهِلْ فَنَجْعَلْ لَعْنَتَ اللَّهِ عَلَى الْكَاذِبِينَ

🔹 "Then whoever argues with you about it after knowledge has come to you, say, 'Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves, then supplicate earnestly and invoke the curse of Allah upon the liars.'"

8. Do Not Falsify Facts or Distort the Truth

📖 Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:41)

يُحَرِّفُونَ الْكَلِمَ مِنْ بَعْدِ مَوَاضِعِهِ

🔹 "They distort words from their [proper] places..."

9. Lying is from Shaytan (Satan)

📖 Surah Al-Mujadilah (58:14-15)

وَإِذَا رَأَيْتَهُمْ تُعْجِبُكَ أَجْسَامُهُمْ وَإِنْ يَقُولُوا تَسْمَعْ لِقَوْلِهِمْ كَأَنَّهُمْ خُشُبٌ مُسَنَّدَةٌ ۖ يَحْسَبُونَ كُلَّ صَيْحَةٍ عَلَيْهِمْ ۚ هُمُ الْعَدُوُّ فَاحْذَرْهُمْ ۚ قَاتَلَهُمُ اللَّهُ أَنَّىٰ يُؤْفَكُونَ

🔹 "And when you see them, their forms please you, and if they speak, you listen to their speech. [They are] like pieces of wood propped up – they think that every shout is against them. They are the enemy, so beware of them. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?"

10. Lying Leads to the Fire

📖 Surah Az-Zumar (39:60)

وَيَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ تَرَى الَّذِينَ كَذَبُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ وُجُوهُهُمْ مُسْوَدَّةٌ ۚ أَلَيْسَ فِي جَهَنَّمَ مَثْوًى لِلْمُتَكَبِّرِينَ

🔹 "And on the Day of Resurrection, you will see those who lied against Allah – their faces will be blackened. Is there not in Hell a residence for the arrogant?"

11. Truthfulness Leads to Salvation

📖 Surah Al-Ahzab (33:70-71)

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَقُولُوا قَوْلًا سَدِيدًا ۝ يُصْلِحْ لَكُمْ أَعْمَالَكُمْ وَيَغْفِرْ لَكُمْ ذُنُوبَكُمْ ۗ وَمَنْ يُطِعِ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ فَازَ فَوْزًا عَظِيمًا

🔹 "O you who have believed, fear Allah and speak words of appropriate justice. He will [then] amend for you your deeds and forgive you your sins. And whoever obeys Allah and His Messenger has certainly attained a great attainment."

Conclusion

The Quran strongly condemns misinformation, distortion, and falsehood. It teaches that:

✅ Truthfulness leads to success

❌ Spreading falsehoods leads to regret and punishment

⚠️ Lies cause harm, injustice, and corruption in society

Would you like a deeper explanation of any verse? 😊

The 9th quoted verse (highlighted in red) is a verse from the Quran, but it is not in Quran 58:14-15. It is in Quran 63:4. The two verses in Quran 58:14-15 are:

 أَلَمْ تَرَ إِلَى الَّذِينَ تَوَلَّوْا قَوْمًا غَضِبَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِم مَّا هُم مِّنكُمْ وَلَا مِنْهُمْ وَيَحْلِفُونَ عَلَى الْكَذِبِ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ (14) أَعَدَّ اللَّهُ لَهُمْ عَذَابًا شَدِيدًا ۖ إِنَّهُمْ سَاءَ مَا كَانُوا يَعْمَلُونَ (15)

The translation is:

Have you noted those who befriended people with whom GOD is angry? They neither belong with you, nor with them. They deliberately swear lies! (14) GOD has prepared for them a severe retribution. Miserable indeed is what they used to do. (15)

ChatGPT correctly cited the Quran 63:4 (highlighted green) in the following answer when I repeated the prompt.

Me: Give me additional verses

ChatGPT:

Certainly! The Quran contains many verses warning against misinformation, lying, and spreading falsehoods. Here are additional verses in Arabic, along with their meanings:

12. Lying is a Major Sin

📖 Surah Az-Zumar (39:32)

فَمَنْ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّنْ كَذَبَ عَلَى اللَّهِ وَكَذَّبَ بِالصِّدْقِ إِذْ جَاءَهُ ۚ أَلَيْسَ فِي جَهَنَّمَ مَثْوًى لِلْكَافِرِينَ

🔹 "So who is more unjust than one who lies about Allah and denies the truth when it has come to him? Is there not in Hell a residence for the disbelievers?"

13. Speaking Falsehood is a Sign of Hypocrisy

📖 Surah At-Tawbah (9:77)

فَأَعْقَبَهُمْ نِفَاقًا فِي قُلُوبِهِمْ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ يَلْقَوْنَهُ بِمَا أَخْلَفُوا اللَّهَ مَا وَعَدُوهُ وَبِمَا كَانُوا يَكْذِبُونَ

🔹 "So He penalized them with hypocrisy in their hearts until the day they will meet Him – because they failed Allah in what they promised Him and because they used to lie."

14. Allah Hates Falsehood

📖 Surah An-Nahl (16:105)

إِنَّمَا يَفْتَرِي الْكَذِبَ الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِآيَاتِ اللَّهِ وَأُو۟لَٰئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْكَٰذِبُونَ

🔹 "Only those who do not believe in the verses of Allah fabricate falsehood, and it is they who are the liars."

15. Spreading Falsehood Corrupts Society

📖 Surah Al-Baqarah (2:191)

وَالْفِتْنَةُ أَشَدُّ مِنَ الْقَتْلِ

🔹 "And fitnah (spreading corruption and falsehood) is worse than killing."

16. Lying Leads to Destruction

📖 Surah Al-Ankabut (29:3)

وَلَقَدْ فَتَنَّا الَّذِينَ مِنْ قَبْلِهِمْ ۖ فَلَيَعْلَمَنَّ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ صَدَقُوا وَلَيَعْلَمَنَّ الْكَاذِبِينَ

🔹 "And We have certainly tested those before them, and Allah will surely make evident those who are truthful, and He will surely make evident the liars."

17. Spreading False News Causes Harm

📖 Surah Al-Ahzab (33:58)

وَالَّذِينَ يُؤْذُونَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَالْمُؤْمِنَاتِ بِغَيْرِ مَا اكْتَسَبُوا فَقَدِ احْتَمَلُوا بُهْتَانًا وَإِثْمًا مُبِينًا

🔹 "And those who harm believing men and believing women for [something] other than what they have earned have certainly borne upon themselves a slander and manifest sin."

18. False Speech Leads to Hellfire

📖 Surah Al-Mutaffifin (83:10-12)

وَيْلٌ يَوْمَئِذٍ لِلْمُكَذِّبِينَ ۝ الَّذِينَ يُكَذِّبُونَ بِيَوْمِ الدِّينِ ۝ وَمَا يُكَذِّبُ بِهِ إِلَّا كُلُّ مُعْتَدٍ أَثِيمٍ

🔹 "Woe that Day to the deniers, those who deny the Day of Recompense. And none denies it except every sinful transgressor."

19. Hypocrites Spread Falsehood

📖 Surah Al-Munafiqun (63:4)

وَإِذَا رَأَيْتَهُمْ تُعْجِبُكَ أَجْسَامُهُمْ ۖ وَإِنْ يَقُولُوا تَسْمَعْ لِقَوْلِهِمْ ۖ كَأَنَّهُمْ خُشُبٌ مُسَنَّدَةٌ ۖ يَحْسَبُونَ كُلَّ صَيْحَةٍ عَلَيْهِمْ ۚ هُمُ الْعَدُوُّ فَاحْذَرْهُمْ ۚ قَاتَلَهُمُ اللَّهُ ۖ أَنَّىٰ يُؤْفَكُونَ

🔹 "And when you see them, their forms please you, and if they speak, you listen to their speech. [They are] like pieces of wood propped up – they think that every shout is against them. They are the enemy, so beware of them. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?"

20. Allah Commands Speaking the Truth

📖 Surah Al-An’am (6:152)

وَإِذَا قُلْتُمْ فَاعْدِلُوا وَلَوْ كَانَ ذَا قُرْبَىٰ

🔹 "And when you speak, be just, even if it concerns a near relative."

Conclusion

The Quran provides a strong warning against spreading misinformation, lying, and distorting the truth. It encourages:

✅ Speaking truthfully and justly

✅ Verifying information before spreading it

✅ Avoiding false accusations and rumors

Would you like more explanations or interpretations of any of these verses? 😊

I tried the same prompts that made Google Gemini hallucinate; the output to the first prompt was correct.

Correct answers from ChatGPT

Me: Give me Quran verses in Arabic about falsehood

ChatGPT:

Certainly! Here are several Quranic verses in Arabic about falsehood (الباطل والكذب):

1. Falsehood Will Perish

📖 Surah Al-Isra (17:81)

وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

🔹 "And say: Truth has come, and falsehood has vanished. Indeed, falsehood is bound to perish."

2. Lying is a Great Sin

📖 Surah Az-Zumar (39:3)

أَلَا لِلَّهِ الدِّينُ الْخَالِصُ ۚ وَالَّذِينَ اتَّخَذُوا مِن دُونِهِ أَوْلِيَاءَ مَا نَعْبُدُهُمْ إِلَّا لِيُقَرِّبُونَا إِلَى اللَّهِ زُلْفَىٰ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَحْكُمُ بَيْنَهُمْ فِي مَا هُمْ فِيهِ يَخْتَلِفُونَ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَهْدِي مَنْ هُوَ كَاذِبٌ كَفَّارٌ

🔹 "Unquestionably, for Allah is the pure religion. And those who take protectors besides Him [say], 'We only worship them that they may bring us nearer to Allah in position.' Indeed, Allah will judge between them concerning that over which they differ. Indeed, Allah does not guide one who is a liar and disbeliever."

3. Falsehood Leads to Hellfire

📖 Surah Al-Mutaffifin (83:10-12)

وَيْلٌ يَوْمَئِذٍ لِلْمُكَذِّبِينَ ۝ الَّذِينَ يُكَذِّبُونَ بِيَوْمِ الدِّينِ ۝ وَمَا يُكَذِّبُ بِهِ إِلَّا كُلُّ مُعْتَدٍ أَثِيمٍ

🔹 "Woe that Day to the deniers, those who deny the Day of Recompense. And none denies it except every sinful transgressor."

4. Falsehood Brings Allah’s Curse

📖 Surah An-Nahl (16:105)

إِنَّمَا يَفْتَرِي الْكَذِبَ الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِآيَاتِ اللَّهِ وَأُو۟لَٰئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْكَٰذِبُونَ

🔹 "Only those who do not believe in the verses of Allah fabricate falsehood, and it is they who are the liars."

5. Do Not Conceal the Truth

📖 Surah Al-Baqarah (2:42)

وَلَا تَلْبِسُوا الْحَقَّ بِالْبَاطِلِ وَتَكْتُمُوا الْحَقَّ وَأَنْتُمْ تَعْلَمُونَ

🔹 "And do not mix the truth with falsehood or conceal the truth while you know [it]."

6. False Speech is Forbidden

📖 Surah Al-Hajj (22:30)

فَاجْتَنِبُوا الرِّجْسَ مِنَ الْأَوْثَانِ وَاجْتَنِبُوا قَوْلَ الزُّورِ

🔹 "So avoid the impurity of idols and avoid false speech."

7. The Wicked Spread Falsehood

📖 Surah Al-Jathiyah (45:7)

وَيْلٌ لِكُلِّ أَفَّاكٍ أَثِيمٍ

🔹 "Woe to every sinful liar."

8. Liars Will Be Held Accountable

📖 Surah Qaf (50:18)

مَّا يَلْفِظُ مِن قَوْلٍ إِلَّا لَدَيْهِ رَقِيبٌ عَتِيدٌ

🔹 "Man does not utter any word except that with him is an observer prepared [to record]."

9. Do Not Follow Falsehood

📖 Surah Al-Furqan (25:72)

وَالَّذِينَ لَا يَشْهَدُونَ الزُّورَ وَإِذَا مَرُّوا بِاللَّغْوِ مَرُّوا كِرَامًا

🔹 "And [the servants of the Most Merciful are] those who do not testify to falsehood, and when they pass near ill speech, they pass by with dignity."

10. Liars Will Be Disgraced

📖 Surah Al-Kahf (18:5)

مَا لَهُم بِهِۦ مِنْ عِلْمٍ وَلَا لِأَبَآئِهِمْ ۚ كَبُرَتْ كَلِمَةً تَخْرُجُ مِنْ أَفْوَٰهِهِمْ ۚ إِن يَقُولُونَ إِلَّا كَذِبًا

🔹 "They have no knowledge of it, nor do their forefathers. Grave is the word that comes out of their mouths; they speak not except a lie."

Conclusion

The Quran strongly condemns falsehood, lies, and deception. It teaches that:

✅ Truthfulness is a virtue

❌ Falsehood leads to loss and punishment

⚠️ Spreading lies and misinformation is a major sin

Would you like more verses or interpretations? 😊

I asked for additional verses and that's when worse errors began to take place.

Wrong answers from ChatGPT

Wrong answers from ChatGPT

Me: Give me more verses

ChatGPT:

Certainly! Here are more Quranic verses in Arabic that address falsehood (الباطل) and lying (الكذب):

11. The Falsehood of Idol Worship

📖 Surah Al-Ankabut (29:17)

إِنَّمَا تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ أَوْثَٰنًا وَتَخْلُقُونَ إِفْكًا ۚ إِنَّ الَّذِينَ تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ لَا يَمْلِكُونَ لَكُمْ رِزْقًا فَٱبْتَغُوا۟ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرِّزْقَ وَٱعْبُدُوهُ وَٱشْكُرُوا۟ لَهُۥٓ ۖ إِلَيْهِ تُرْجَعُونَ

🔹 "You only worship, besides Allah, idols, and you invent falsehood. Indeed, those you worship besides Allah do not possess [for] you [the ability to provide] sustenance. So seek sustenance from Allah and worship Him and be grateful to Him. To Him you will be returned."

12. Liars Will Be Exposed on the Day of Judgment

📖 Surah Az-Zumar (39:60)

وَيَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ تَرَى ٱلَّذِينَ كَذَبُوا۟ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ وُجُوهُهُم مُّسْوَدَّةٌ ۚ أَلَيْسَ فِى جَهَنَّمَ مَثْوًىۭ لِّلْمُتَكَبِّرِينَ

🔹 "And on the Day of Resurrection, you will see those who lied about Allah with their faces blackened. Is there not in Hell a residence for the arrogant?"

13. Falsehood is a Tool of the Corrupt

📖 Surah Al-Baqarah (2:78-79)

وَمِنْهُمْ أُمِّيُّونَ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ الْكِتَابَ إِلَّا أَمَانِيَّ وَإِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا يَظُنُّونَ ۝ فَوَيْلٌ لِلَّذِينَ يَكْتُبُونَ الْكِتَابَ بِأَيْدِيهِمْ ثُمَّ يَقُولُونَ هَٰذَا مِنْ عِندِ اللَّهِ لِيَشْتَرُوا بِهِ ثَمَنًا قَلِيلًا ۖ فَوَيْلٌ لَهُمْ مِمَّا كَتَبَتْ أَيْدِيهِمْ وَوَيْلٌ لَهُمْ مِمَّا يَكْسِبُونَ

🔹 "And among them are unlettered ones who do not know the Scripture except [indulgement in] wishful thinking, but they are only assuming. So woe to those who write the 'scripture' with their own hands, then say, 'This is from Allah,' in order to exchange it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for what they earn."

14. Falsehood Leads to Corruption

📖 Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:41)

يَسْمَعُونَ لِلْكَذِبِ أَكَّالُونَ لِلسُّحْتِ

🔹 "They listen to falsehood and consume forbidden gain..."

15. False Oaths Do Not Protect Liars

📖 Surah An-Nahl (16:94)

وَلَا تَتَّخِذُوا أَيْمَانَكُمْ دَخَلًا بَيْنَكُمْ فَتَزِلَّ قَدَمٌ بَعْدَ ثُبُوتِهَا وَتَذُوقُوا السُّوءَ بِمَا صَدَدتُّمْ عَن سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ وَلَكُمْ عَذَابٌ عَظِيمٌ

🔹 "And do not take your oaths as a means of deception among yourselves, lest a foot slip after it was firmly planted, and you would taste evil for what you diverted from the way of Allah, and you would have a great punishment."

16. Satan Uses Falsehood to Mislead

📖 Surah Al-A’raf (7:27)

يَٰبَنِىٓ ءَادَمَ لَا يَفْتِنَنَّكُمُ ٱلشَّيْطَٰنُ كَمَآ أَخْرَجَ أَبَوَيْكُم مِّنَ ٱلْجَنَّةِ يَنزِعُ عَنْهُمَا لِبَاسَهُمَا لِيُرِيَهُمَا سَوْءَٰتِهِمَا ۚ إِنَّهُۥ يَرَىٰكُمْ هُوَ وَقَبِيلُهُۥ مِنْ حَيْثُ لَا تَرَوْنَهُمْ ۗ إِنَّا جَعَلْنَا ٱلشَّيَٰطِينَ أَوْلِيَٓاءَ لِلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ

🔹 "O children of Adam, let not Satan tempt you as he removed your parents from Paradise, stripping them of their clothing to show them their private parts. Indeed, he sees you, he and his tribe, from where you do not see them. Indeed, We have made the devils allies to those who do not believe."

17. Falsehood Brings Eternal Regret

📖 Surah Al-Kahf (18:103-104)

قُلْ هَلْ نُنَبِّئُكُم بِالْأَخْسَرِينَ أَعْمَالًا ۝ ٱلَّذِينَ ضَلَّ سَعْيُهُمْ فِى ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا وَهُمْ يَحْسَبُونَ أَنَّهُمْ يُحْسِنُونَ صُنْعًا

🔹 "Say, 'Shall We inform you of the greatest losers in respect to [their] deeds? Those whose effort is lost in worldly life, while they think that they are doing well in work.'"

18. False Promises Are a Tool of Hypocrites

📖 Surah Al-Munafiqun (63:1)

إِذَا جَاءَكَ ٱلْمُنَٰفِقُونَ قَالُوا۟ نَشْهَدُ إِنَّكَ لَرَسُولُ ٱللَّهِ ۗ وَٱللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ إِنَّكَ لَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱللَّهُ يَشْهَدُ إِنَّ ٱلْمُنَٰفِقِينَ لَكَٰذِبُونَ

🔹 "When the hypocrites come to you, [O Muhammad], they say, 'We testify that you are the Messenger of Allah.' And Allah knows that you are His Messenger, and Allah testifies that the hypocrites are liars."

19. Those Who Lie About Allah Will Face Severe Punishment

📖 Surah Al-Kahf (18:15)

مَنۢ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّنِ ٱفْتَرَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ كَذِبًا

🔹 "Who is more unjust than one who invents a lie against Allah?"

20. Justice and Truth Will Prevail

📖 Surah Yunus (10:82)

وَيُحِقُّ اللَّهُ الْحَقَّ بِكَلِمَاتِهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْمُجْرِمُونَ

🔹 "And Allah establishes the truth by His words, even if the criminals dislike it."

Conclusion

The Quran strongly warns against falsehood, deception, and lying. It teaches that:

✅ Truth will always triumph

❌ Falsehood leads to disgrace and punishment

⚠️ Lying is a characteristic of the corrupt and hypocrites

Would you like more explanations or interpretations? 😊

ChatGPT attributed the phrase يَسْمَعُونَ لِلْكَذِبِ أَكَّالُونَ لِلسُّحْتِ to Quran 5:41 in item number 14 in the answer. While this is an incorrect citation and the syntax of the phrase is also incorrect, Quran 5:42 has a very similar phrase سَمَّاعُونَ لِلْكَذِبِ أَكَّالُونَ لِلسُّحْتِ

The phrase in ChatGPT's output translates to: They are listening to lies, devourers of what's forbidden (bribery).

The phrase from Quran 5:42 translates to: Listeners to lies, devourers of what's forbidden (bribery).

I was able to catch this error quickly because I have read the entire Quran multiple times and have seen and heard the correct verse so many times. I absolutely remember it. For someone who haven't seen it or unaware of the wrong syntax, they will not be able to identify this error.

The second error in ChatGPT's output is even worse because the difference is only in one letter. I was only able to identify this error because I checked each and every verse in the output of this entire experiment with an authentic copy of the Quran (word for word). ChatGPT attributed the phrase مَنۢ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّنِ ٱفْتَرَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ كَذِبًا to Quran 18:15 in item number 19 in the answer. While this is an incorrect citation, the syntax of the phrase is not necessarily incorrect. The only difference between this phrase and a phrase in Quran 18:15 is a deletion of one letter (ف) from the first word in the phrase. The deletion does not change the meaning or make it wrong syntactically since the output is lacking the context (the previous phrase in the same verse). To someone who doesn't memorize this verse word for word, this error cannot be identified.

Quran 18:15 has the phrase فَمَنْ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّنِ افْتَرَىٰ عَلَى اللَّهِ كَذِبًا

The translation of both phrases (the correct one and the wrong one) is:

Who is more evil than the one who fabricates lies and attributes them to GOD?

In January 2025, I was unable to reproduce the errors that Ali-Reza Bhojani and Marcus Schwarting found in 2023 in ChatGPT's output. The output of ChatGPT was consistently correct to the prompts mentioned in the paper. I tried to archive the ChatGPT's answers to the prompts I issued. Although SPN said that a snapshot was captured, when trying to retrieve the archived copy, the page said that the Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.

The Internet Archive was unable to archive chat with ChatGPT

It is possible to archive the entire chat(s) with ChatGPT if the user created a public link (shareable) for the chat and submitted it to archive.is

Creating a public link to chat with ChatGPT

The created/updated link from ChatGPT to be shared and archived

I archived my chat with ChatGPT on archive.is.

Note that this method of archiving the chat with ChatGPT does not work with the Internet Archive. It looks like the page has been saved using SPN, but the page does not replay.

Using SPN to archive my chat with ChatGPT

The Wayback Machine has not archived the link I submitted for archiving

ChatGPT cannot provide accurate citations from the Quran in Arabic

From this experiment, I found that ChatGPT "improvement" is similar to that of Google Gemini (from part 1 of this post). They both did not produce errors for the same prompts issued in the paper in 2023. The results were all correct citations with no errors, however, the answers had wrong citations to correct verses in the Quran for different prompts that have the same meaning. ChatGPT, as well as Google Gemini, provided phrases that do not exist in the Quran (mixtures of words that exist in the Quran and elsewhere) and attributed them to the Quran. Some of these phrases included syntax errors and altered verses attributing them to the Quran which is problematic for Muslims who believe that the Quran is free from errors and modifications. 

After two years and going from ChatGPT-3.5 to ChatGPT-4o, the errors and hallucinations remain present when using slightly different prompts. Some researchers argue that LLMs' errors and hallucinations not only will remain present in all LLMs, but they will increase as more and more LLMs' generated content make it to the training datasets (content on the internet), and result in a total collapse of the model.

Conclusions

Introduction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been omnipresent in the past few years and everyone, in one way or another, is using them. The most popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini use LLMs to generate text. Although the technology doesn't seem to be harmful to the casual eye, some of its applications have already been used to plagiarize, solve homework assignments, and even write research papers. These are valid reasons to be careful about possible misuses of LLMs, but the technology is here to stay and we shouldn't be worried about it going anywhere. What we should worry about is the truthfulness of LLMs' generated content. I believe that misinformation is one of the biggest challenges for LLMs because if users who are consuming the output of LLMs believe it to be a fact, the consequences could be disastrous. The nature of LLMs (being trained on enormous amounts of data from the internet and other sources) makes them susceptible to being loaded with misinformation and disinformation that already exist in the training data. Moreover, even if all the data used to train a model is correct and annotated by humans (supervised learning), there is a chance that the output is not correct because LLMs take an input (text) and generate more text by predicting the next word based on the input. Of course, one can always advocate and say that LLMs' performance is improving and, one day, they will be perfect but the problem isn't that LLMs are not improving. The problem is that the LLMs will continue to allow false information to be present in their output because of how LLMs work.

LLMs have their place and I believe that using them for some NLP tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER) and  narrative characterization is great, however, for other tasks including question answering or fact checking, the results cannot be trusted because the fact that LLM often tells truth is an accident. There are many cases of AI deception and the outcome could be damaging to people's careers and reputation.

It is crucial for LLMs' Quran-related output to be true

Do LLMs have to tell the truth? Using LLMs to answer religious questions or find citations in religious texts should be avoided if the information is going to be presented as facts. For Muslims, the Quran is the word of God, which hasn't been altered since it was revealed to the prophet Muhammad over 1400 years ago. In fact, Muslims believe the Quran to be the biggest proof of the Islamic faith and the prophethood of Muhammad because of its unmatched eloquence. Its inimitable rhetoric challenged Arab poets at the peak of the Arabic literary boom in the Arabia.

 Quran 17-88: Say, "If all the humans and all the jinns banded together in order to produce a Quran like this, they could never produce anything like it, no matter how much assistance they lent one another."

Quran 11-13: If they say, "He fabricated (the Quran)," tell them, "Then produce ten verses like these, fabricated, and invite whomever you can, other than GOD, if you are truthful."

Quran 10-38: If they say, "He fabricated it," say, "Then produce one verse like these, and invite whomever you wish, other than GOD, if you are truthful."

Quran 2-23: If you have any doubt regarding to what we revealed to our slave (Muhammad), then produce one verse like these, and call upon your own witnesses against GOD, if you are truthful.

Muslim Speakers, YouTube channel, streamed a live video on Feb 20, 2024 on Youtube showing that ChatGPT was unable to produce a verse similar to the ones in the Quran.

The addition, deletion, or substitution of words, letters, or even diacritics in the Quran will affect its superiority and negate the Islamic belief that it is the word of God because the altered version is not the word of God. The problem is that LLMs sometimes present text(s) that consists of combination(s) of words from the Quran and elsewhere in a Quran-like format with diacritics as a true Quranic verse and provide incorrect citations of the Quran. For experts with enough knowledge about Classical Arabic (CA) and memorize the Quran, it is obvious that the output of LLMs is not always a correct verse from the Quran. However, for the majority of Arabs who are not knowledgeable about CA nor memorize the Quran, altered verses are not easy to spot.

It is worth mentioning that LLMs' inability to correctly cite verses from the Quran is not as important in languages other than Arabic because Muslims do not believe Quran translations to be the word of God. However, incorrect citations from Quran translations are also troublesome because Quran translations are considered interpretations of the word of God (the Quran in its original language). For average non-Arab Muslims who do not speak Arabic, LLMs' output related to Islam in their language could be taken as a fact while it may or may not be true.

Did LLMs' truthfulness improve over the last two years?

I read a paper highlighting an experiment on LLMs providing Quranic-like material, and inaccurate Quranic citations as verses from the Quran in 2023. The authors studied a small sample of regenerated queries to ChatGPT-3.5 and Google Bard (now Gemini) regarding the Quran’s perspective on misinformation. They found LLMs' output to have significant and consistent errors because of LLMs' stochastic and probabilistic nature. They regenerated queries to the question “What does the Quran have to say about misinformation?” five times in Google Bard and five times in ChatGPT-3.5. They also sampled five responses from Google Bard with the additional prompt “please cite verses in Arabic” and five responses to the original query on ChatGPT-3.5 in Arabic. They found that only two out of the twenty responses they gathered (one from ChatGPT-3.5 and one from ChatGPT-3.5 in Arabic) had no mistakes referencing the Quran. The errors in the output ranged from producing correctly quoted and cited, yet irrelevant Quranic material to misordering the words of Quranic verses; none of the errors were trivial. The example they provided is the Quranic text from Chapter 17 verse 81:

وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

The second word: جَاءَ 

The third word: الْحَقُّ 

The translation is: "And say, the truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Indeed, falsehood is bound to vanish.”

For all three LLM attempts to reference the verse, the third word was incorrectly placed as the second word before the verb and presented as follows:

وَقُلِ الْحَقُّ جَاءَ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

The second word: الْحَقُّ 

The third word: جَاءَ 

The difference between the correct verse and the modified one

While it may seem as a small error for those who don't speak Arabic, the impact of this error on the oratory of the phrase is not small.

The authors also found hallucinations in each of ChatGPT-3.5 Arabic and Google Bard attributing text that doesn't exist in the Quran at all to specific chapters and verses in the Quran. I repeated their experiment on Google Gemini and I was unable to reproduce their output. I did not get incorrect Quranic citations or verses that did not exist in the Quran. I did not get any altered verses from the Quran in any way. Every output was correct, accurate, and authentic. I found that Google Gemini correctly cited 17:81 from the Quran along with another correct citation of Quran 21:18

My activity on Google Gemini

My activity on Google Gemini

Correct answers from Google Gemini

Me: What does the Quran have to say about misinformation?

Gemini: The Quran does not directly address the modern concept of "misinformation" as we understand it. However, it strongly emphasizes truthfulness and warns against spreading falsehoods. Here are some key verses:

Surah Al-Isra (17:81):

وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

"And say, 'Truth has come, and falsehood has vanished. Indeed, falsehood is [by nature], ever bound to depart.'"

Surah Al-Anbiya (21:18):

بَلْ نَقْذِفُ بِالْحَقِّ عَلَى الْبَاطِلِ فَيَدْمَغُهُ فَإِذَا هُوَ زَاهِقٌ ۚ وَلَكُمُ الْوَيْلُ مِمَّا تَصِفُونَ

"But We cast the truth upon falsehood, and it destroys it. And woe to you for what you describe [falsely]."

These verses emphasize the ultimate triumph of truth and the eventual demise of falsehood.

Key Islamic principles related to this:

Truthfulness (Sidq): Islam strongly emphasizes honesty and truthfulness in all aspects of life.

Avoiding slander and backbiting: The Quran and Sunnah condemn spreading rumors, gossip, and harmful information about others.

Seeking knowledge and verification: Muslims are encouraged to seek knowledge and verify information from reliable sources.

While the Quran may not explicitly mention "misinformation," these principles provide guidance on how to approach information critically and avoid spreading harmful or inaccurate content.

I tried their second experiment with the additional prompt in Google Gemini and the result was an accurate citations of Quran 49:6

Correct answers from Google Gemini

Me: What does the Quran have to say about misinformation? please cite verses in Arabic

Gemini: The Quran emphasizes truthfulness and warns against spreading falsehoods. Here's a relevant verse:

Surah Al-Hujurat (49:6):

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِن جَاءَكُمْ فَاسِقٌ بِنَبَإٍ فَتَبَيَّنُوا أَن تُصِيبُوا قَوْمًا بِجَهَالَةٍ فَتُصْبِحُوا عَلَىٰ مَا فَعَلْتُمْ نَادِمِينَ   

Translation: "O you who have believed, if there comes to you a disobedient one with information, investigate, lest you harm a people out of ignorance and become over what you have done regretful."   

This verse highlights the importance of verifying information before acting upon it, especially when it comes from an unreliable source. It warns against the potential harm that can be caused by spreading false or misleading information.

Key Islamic principles related to this:

Truthfulness (Sidq): Islam strongly emphasizes honesty and truthfulness in all aspects of life.

Avoiding slander and backbiting: The Quran and Sunnah condemn spreading rumors, gossip, and harmful information about others.

Seeking knowledge and verification: Muslims are encouraged to seek knowledge and verify information from reliable sources.

While the Quran may not explicitly mention "misinformation," these principles provide guidance on how to approach information critically and avoid spreading harmful or inaccurate content.

The reported errors in Google Gemini's output in the paper in 2023 no longer exist when I verified them in 2025. The output of Google Gemini was consistent and correct. It should've been archived in public web archives so that the performance history of Google Gemini is preserved through an example but Save Page Now (SPN) was unable to archive my interactions with Google Gemini. I tried another public web archive, Archive.is, but it also was not able to archive the page. 

Archive.is was unable to archive my chat with Google Gemini

To me, this error-free output seemed like a great improvement. Google Gemini was able to correctly cite 17:81, 21:18, and 49:6 from the Quran and present them in their authentic form multiple times in a row (more than five times). After that, I thought looking at just a few examples is by no means enough to make such claim. I continued to send prompts to Google Gemini and after four more attempts, it produced a mixture of words from the Quran and elsewhere and attributed the mixture to a specific verse from the Quran repeating the same mistake two times in a row.

Wrong answers from Google Gemini

Me: Give me Quran verses in Arabic about falsehood.

Gemini: Certainly! Here are some Quranic verses in Arabic that address falsehood:

Surah Al-Isra (17:81):

وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

Surah Al-Baqarah (2:116):

وَمِنَ النَّاسِ مَن يَشْرِي نَفْسَهُ بِالْغَيِّ لِيُضِلَّ عَن سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ ۚ فَاتَّخِذُوا مِنْهُ سَخِرًا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَهْدِي مَن يَشَاءُ ۗ وَاللَّهُ لَا يُحِبُّ الظَّالِمِينَ

These verses highlight the importance of truthfulness and the ultimate demise of falsehood.

I hope this is helpful! Let me know if you would like me to translate these verses or provide additional verses

The citation of Quran 17:81 is correct, accurate, and relevant. However, the citation of Quran 2:116 is neither correct, accurate, or relevant. This phrase is not a verse that can be found anywhere in the Quran, incorrect syntactically, and it makes absolutely no sense in Arabic. It loosely translates to "And among people are the one who sells himself to wrongdoing that he may mislead others from the way of God so they made fun of him. Indeed, God guides whom He wills, and God does not like those who are unjust.". This behavior is known as LLMs' hallucinations.

The correct Quran 2:116 is the following:

وَقَالُوا۟ ٱتَّخَذَ ٱللَّهُ وَلَدًۭا ۗ سُبْحَـٰنَهُۥ ۖ بَل لَّهُۥ مَا فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ كُلٌّۭ لَّهُۥ قَـٰنِتُونَ

The translation is: “ They say, “Allah has offspring.” Glory be to Him! In fact, to Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth—all are subject to His Will.”

Hallucinations were not present in subsequent repetitions of the same prompt, but it came right back when I asked for more verses.

Me: Give me additional verses

Gemini: Certainly! Here are some additional Quranic verses in Arabic that address falsehood:

Surah Al-Nisa (4:25):

وَالَّذِينَ يَأْتُونَ الْفَاحِشَةَ مِنْ دُونِ أَزْوَاجِهِمْ فَاسْتَشْهِدُوا عَلَيْهِمْ أَرْبَعَةً مِنْكُمْ ۖ فَإِن شَهِدُوا فَأَمْسِكُوهُمْ فِي الْبَيْتِ حَتَّىٰ يَتُوبَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِمْ ۚ وَإِن تَابُوا فَأَعْرِضُوا عَنْهُمْ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ تَوَّابًا رَحِيمًا

This verse addresses the importance of seeking truthful testimony in legal matters.

Surah Al-Muminoon (23:1-3):

قَدْ أَفْلَحَ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ (1) الَّذِينَ هُمْ فِي صَلَاتِهِمْ خَاشِعُونَ (2) وَالَّذِينَ هُمْ عَنِ اللَّغْوِ مُعْرِضُونَ (3)

These verses emphasize the importance of avoiding idle talk and focusing on meaningful pursuits.

I hope this is helpful

The first citation was presented as the 25th verse from chapter 4 from the Quran. This is wrong. The outputted phrase does not exist in the Quran at all. It is a mixture of words from the Quran and elsewhere that are put together in a phrase that does not make sense. It loosely translates to: "And those (men) who commit adultery with someone other than their pairs (wives), bring four witnesses from among you and if they testify (against them), keep them in their homes until Allah grants them repentance. And if they repent, do not meet (talk to) them. Indeed Allah is All-forgiving, Most Merciful.

The correct Quran 4:25 is:

وَمَن لَّمْ يَسْتَطِعْ مِنكُمْ طَوْلًا أَن يَنكِحَ ٱلْمُحْصَنَـٰتِ ٱلْمُؤْمِنَـٰتِ فَمِن مَّا مَلَكَتْ أَيْمَـٰنُكُم مِّن فَتَيَـٰتِكُمُ ٱلْمُؤْمِنَـٰتِ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِإِيمَـٰنِكُم ۚ بَعْضُكُم مِّنۢ بَعْضٍۢ ۚ فَٱنكِحُوهُنَّ بِإِذْنِ أَهْلِهِنَّ وَءَاتُوهُنَّ أُجُورَهُنَّ بِٱلْمَعْرُوفِ مُحْصَنَـٰتٍ غَيْرَ مُسَـٰفِحَـٰتٍۢ وَلَا مُتَّخِذَٰتِ أَخْدَانٍۢ ۚ فَإِذَآ أُحْصِنَّ فَإِنْ أَتَيْنَ بِفَـٰحِشَةٍۢ فَعَلَيْهِنَّ نِصْفُ مَا عَلَى ٱلْمُحْصَنَـٰتِ مِنَ ٱلْعَذَابِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ لِمَنْ خَشِىَ ٱلْعَنَتَ مِنكُمْ ۚ وَأَن تَصْبِرُوا۟ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكُمْ ۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌۭ رَّحِيمٌۭ

The translation is: “But if any of you cannot afford to marry a free believing woman, then ˹let him marry˺ a believing bondwoman possessed by one of you. Allah knows best ˹the state of˺ your faith ˹and theirs˺. You are from one another. So marry them with the permission of their owners, giving them their dowry in fairness, if they are chaste, neither promiscuous nor having secret affairs. If they commit indecency after marriage, they receive half the punishment of free women. This is for those of you who fear falling into sin. But if you are patient, it is better for you. And Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.”

The second verse in the output citing Quran 23:1-3 is correct, but it isn't related to falsehood. It simply describes successful believers who are humble when they pray and do not engage in idle activities.

The presence of wrong Quranic citations alongside correct ones can lead users to believe that the output of LLMs is always true. This fact is more troubling to Muslims because to non-experts or those who do not memorize the entire Quran word for word, it is not always easy to identify the errors in the output of LLMs since the output is a mixture of correct and incorrect references. Speaking of mixing truth with falsehood, ironically, the second most regularly cited verse within the sample studied in the paper was a correct citation of a Quranic verse precisely describing the phenomena. Quran 2:42

وَلَا تَلْبِسُوا۟ ٱلْحَقَّ بِٱلْبَـٰطِلِ وَتَكْتُمُوا۟ ٱلْحَقَّ وَأَنتُمْ تَعْلَمُونَ

which translates to: "And do not mix truth with falsehood nor knowingly hide the truth."

LLMs' Future Improvements 

Based on this short experiment, I found that Google Gemini has not produced errors for the same prompts issued in the paper in 2023. The results were all correct citations with no errors, however, the answers had wrong citations to correct verses in the Quran for different prompts that have the same meaning. It also provided phrases that do not exist in the Quran and mixtures of words that don't all exist in the Quran to begin with. Some of these phrases included syntax errors attributing them to the Quran. 

Although the majority of LLMs' users are hopeful that the errors and hallucinations generated by LLMs can be eliminated as a result of LLMs' improvements overtime, some researchers argue that LLMs' errors and hallucinations will continue to increase, as more and more LLMs' generated content make it to the training datasets (content on the internet), and result in a total collapse of the model.

Conclusions

At the United Nations Summit of the Future in 2024, world leaders adopted the Pact for the Future, which includes the Global Digital Compact (GDC). One of GDC’s central pillars is data governance, marking the first time this issue has been formally placed on the UN’s global agenda, with concrete commitments expected to materialise.​

As a follow-up, the United Nations General Assembly requested the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) to establish a dedicated Multi-Stakeholder Working Group on Data Governance at all levels as relevant for development. This group has been convened to meet for the first time on 1-2 May 2025.

This online event, organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Diplo and the Geneva Internet Platform, will discuss this important milestone. Speakers will provide an overview of the group’s mandate, discuss the main outcomes of its first meeting, and the expected next steps. In particular, they will assess the potential contribution of the WG to the establishment of a community and public-good centred data governance regime. 

Moderator:

• Marilia Maciel, Director of Digital Trade and Economic Security, Diplo

Speakers:

• Renata Avila, CEO, Open Knowledge Foundation
• Linnet Taylor, Professor, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT)

Date: 9 May 2025
Time: 14.00 CEST | 12.00 UTC
Location: Online

The Perma team has landed back in the US after our trip to the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Web Archiving Conference. This year the IIPC met in Oslo at the National Library of Norway, and the conference’s theme was “Towards Best Practices.”

This is a gathering each year of colleagues from around the globe who are working in the web archiving space, ranging from institutions responsible for legal deposits, to researchers working with collections, to people who are building the core tools used for web archiving.

Here are some highlights from the conference that we think our community would find particularly relevant:

Opening Keynote - Libraries, Copyright, and Language Models:

Javier de la Rosa of the National Library of Norway presented on the Mímir Project, an initiative examining the value of copyrighted materials (such as books and newspapers) in training Norwegian LLMs. The Mímir Project offers valuable insights into the role of copyrighted corpora in enhancing model performance on tasks such as sentiment analysis, fairness/truthfulness, reading comprehension, translation, and commonsense reasoning. The findings indicated that copyrighted material improved model performance, largely due to the impact of non-fiction content. This project was important both for the library’s understanding of their own rights when it comes to AI model training and to allow them to advise researchers interested in using web archive collections as data.

Using Generative AI to Interrogate the UK Government Web Archive:

Chris Royds and Tom Storrar of The National Archives (UK) explored the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to explore the UK Government Web Archive using LIL’s very own WARC-GPT and Microsoft’s GraphRAG. Using their corpus of ~22,000 resources, they explored how RAG might help with the retrieval of lost organizational memory among their departments. One challenge they had to address was the necessity of removing individual records to adhere to their takedown policy. Although their initial findings regarding WARC-GPT’s performance aligned with the results of our case study, it was encouraging to see a real-world application of WARC-GPT performing reasonably well with a significantly larger corpus than in our original study, while also being less computationally expensive than GraphRAG. Overall, they concluded that RAG continues to show promise for exploring WARCs.

UKWA Rebuild: The British Library, which suffered a cyberattack in October 2023, described the challenges they faced in the aftermath and how this affected their discovery services and user access. The UK Web Archive, along with the broader technological infrastructure, systems, policies, and processes of the British Library, had to adapt. Additionally, Gil Hoggarth described their “secure by design” framework in the rebuild process, along with their intention to prioritize a cloud-first approach. Interestingly, it was a recent on-site storage backup that prevented the UKWA from more severe data loss.

Insufficiency of Human-Centric Ethical Guidelines in the Age of AI: Considering Implications of Making Legacy Web Content Openly Accessible: Gaja Zornada of the Computer History Museum Slovenia (Računališki muzej) described the ethical challenges and implications of making legacy web content openly accessible and the impact this may have for an individual’s right to be forgotten. Especially in this AI moment where archival content is no longer consumed solely by human researchers, legacy web content can be reconstructed, resurfaced, and reinterpreted by AI tools without appropriate context or distinction from contemporary sources. If consumed in isolation, this can mislead users, making it essential to clearly label and contextualize legacy content, as the information it contains may be outdated or irrelevant.

Lost, but Preserved - A Web Archiving Perspective on the Ephemeral Web:

Sawood Alam of the Internet Archive reframed the link rot discourse to be more hopeful rather than alarmist. Recent studies such as the 2024 Pew Research Center study on link rot often highlight the alarming rate of link rot, but fail to highlight the preservation efforts of web archiving institutions and how much of the web has been rescued and resurrected. The Internet Archive’s research discovered that many URLs from these link rot studies have actually been preserved in a web archive. This dynamic brings a finer point to the goals of web archiving: in what situations are we saving the web for future historical knowledge or to maintain the interconnectivity of URLs? This highlights the differences between projects like Perma.cc and collections-based archives. While there is still more work to be done to combat the challenges in preserving the endangered web, web archiving institutions should aim to foster increased awareness and visibility of the efforts of web archives in saving our digital heritage.

What You See No One Saw: Mat Kelly of Drexel University posed the question—”Can we save the web we see from our perspective?”—emphasizing the difference between what an archival crawler captures and what a user actually experiences. Crawlers capture a clean and agnostic version of the web and essentially preserve a “fake web” which is valid but inconsistent with a web user’s perspective. Their team explored how leveraging perspective-based crawling and re-using browser user profiles to archive web advertisements and personalized content can result in capturing a more realistic experience of the web.

From Pages to People: Tailoring Web Archives for Different Use Cases: Andrea Kocsis of the National Library of Scotland and Leontien Talboom of Cambridge University Libraries presented their work on improving the usability of the UK Web Archive by exploring the different audiences for web archives: readers, computational users, and the digitally curious. While web archives are focused on providing access, it is important to answer the question of for whom we are preserving and not make any assumptions about the designated community. They outlined recommendations such as providing datasheets for web archives for computational users, providing a user interface and training to overcome the digital skill gap of the digitally curious, and prefiltering content by topics and themes for readers of web archives to explore so they don’t need to come to the web archives with a research question already in mind. They also highlighted the need to increase awareness of available web archive resources through outreach events such as exhibits and creative approaches that bridge the online and the offline through digital storytelling, data visualization, and art.

As always, spending time with the international community brought together by IIPC was a pleasure and we look forward to next year in Brussels!

Win free books from the May 2025 batch of Early Reviewer titles! We’ve got 176 books this month, and a grand total of 3,446 copies to give out. Which books are you hoping to snag this month? Come tell us on Talk.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing/email address and make sure they’re correct.

» Request books here!

The deadline to request a copy is Tuesday, May 27th at 6PM EDT.

Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Poland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and more. Make sure to check the message on each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

A monthly round-up of news, upcoming working group meetings and events, and CLIR program updates from the Digital Library Federation. See all past Digests here. 

It’s hard to believe it’s already May. The DLF community is as busy as ever, and we’re excited to share with you a variety of news, meetings, and things to read. We hope you enjoy them and have a wonderful month.

— Team DLF

This month’s news:

• Nominations open: Have ideas about who should be the featured speaker at the 2025 DLF Forum? Submit your thoughts by May 15.
• On the DLF blog: Members of the DLF Digital Accessibility Working Group have authored a blog post, “What you need to know as a library to prepare for ADA Title II rule changes.” Read it now.
• Panel Discussion: OCEAN is hosting “Cultural Heritage/Ethics and Intellectual Property Workshop Part II: Analysing Case Studies,” a case study analysis dedicated to working with legacy collections that contain materials of distinct cultural significance. Friday, May 2 at 12pm ET. Register and learn more here. 
• Workshop: IIIF’s next five-day introductory training will be the week of May 19. No prior knowledge of IIIF is required, and the core sessions should be easily accessible to those with confidence using the Web. By the end of the workshop, participants will have completed a small IIIF project, which they will demo for the group at the final meeting.
• Conference: Registration is open for the 2025 IIIF Annual Conference in Leeds, UK. This year’s conference features two full days of presentations, followed by a day of workshops and other activities. All workshops and tours are included in your registration, but space is limited. The program is available here, and registration is open on ConfTool.
• Recordings Coming Soon: The 2025 IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference in Oslo, which saw 200 attendees from 83 organizations and 33 countries, has officially wrapped! Be on the lookout for conference recordings on their YouTube channel in the coming months.

This month’s open DLF group meetings:

For the most up-to-date schedule of DLF group meetings and events (plus NDSA meetings, conferences, and more), bookmark the DLF Community Calendar. Meeting dates are subject to change. Can’t find meeting call-in information? Email us at info@diglib.org. Reminder: Team DLF working days are Monday through Thursday.

• DLF Born-Digital Access Working Group (BDAWG): Tuesday, 5/6, 2pm ET / 11am PT
• DLF Digital Accessibility Working Group (DAWG): Wednesday, 5/7, 2pm ET / 11am PT
• DLF AIG Cultural Assessment Working Group: Monday, 5/12, 1pm ET/10am PT
• DLF AIG User Experience Working Group: Friday, 5/16, 11am ET / 8am PT
• DLF AIG Metadata Assessment Working Group: Thursday, 5/22, 1:15pm ET / 10:15am PT
• DLF Climate Justice Group: Wednesday, 5/28 12pm ET/9am PT
• DLF Digital Accessibility Policy & Workflows Subgroup: Friday, 5/30, 1pm ET / 10am PT

DLF groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether or not you’re affiliated with a DLF member organization. Learn more about our working groups on our website. Interested in scheduling an upcoming working group call or reviving a past group? Check out the DLF Organizer’s Toolkit. As always, feel free to get in touch at info@diglib.org. 

Get Involved / Connect with Us

Below are some ways to stay connected with us and the digital library community: 

• Subscribe to the DLF Forum newsletter.
• Join, start, or revive a working group and browse their work on the DLF Wiki.
• Subscribe to our community listserv, DLF-Announce.
• Bookmark our Community Calendar.
• Learn more about becoming a DLF member organization. 
• Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X. 
• Contact us at info@diglib.org.

The post DLF Digest: May 2025 appeared first on DLF.

This is the fourteenth conversation of the 100+ Conversations to Inspire Our New Direction (#OKFN100) project.

Starting 2023, we are meeting with more than 100 people to discuss the future of open knowledge, shaped by a diverse set of visions from artists, activists, scholars, archivists, thinkers, policymakers, data scientists, educators, and community leaders from everywhere.

The Open Knowledge Foundation team wants to identify and discuss issues sensitive to our movement and use this effort to constantly shape our actions and business strategies to deliver best what the community expects of us and our network, a pioneering organisation that has been defining the standards of the open movement for two decades.

Another goal is to include the perspectives of people of diverse backgrounds, especially those from marginalised communities, dissident identities, and whose geographic location is outside of the world’s major financial powers.

How can openness accelerate and strengthen the struggles against the complex challenges of our time? This is the key question behind conversations like the one you can read below.

*

This week, we had the chance to talk to information systems engineer Patricio Del Boca, an open technologies expert serving as the Technological Lead of the Open Knowledge Foundation since 2024.

Del Boca has been a human rights activist since the age of 15, when he became involved in the struggle for the disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship. He has been involved with free software and open data communities since their origins. He is an expert in civic tech projects and a CKAN core developer. He is also the co-founder of Open Data Córdoba, with which he continues to collaborate. Working since 2021 for OKFN, recently Del Boca has been promoting our tech vision at global events and platforms such as the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit, the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) Members Meeting and EmpoderaLIVE.

One of his most important recent contributions to the positioning of Open Knowledge has been to develop an initiative we call The Tech We Want. In short, we want to start a collective conversation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting, and focused on solving people’s real problems.

As part of this initiative, we held The Tech We Want Online Summit in October 2024, bringing together the voices of key leaders in the open technology movement and demonstrations from around the world that are already putting these principles into practice. In January, a new iteration of the project was the Retrospective on the Role of Technology in the Super Election Year 2024. And most recently, in March, we hosted the Frictionless Summit, with demos and discussions with the Frictionless community about the future of the project under this new vision.

In this conversation with Lucas Pretti, OKFN’s Communications & Advocacy Director, Del Boca reflects on OKFN’s current tech vision and the road ahead.

We hope you enjoy the read and get inspired.

*

Lucas Pretti: Let’s start with the basics. What is the problem with the software being developed by Big Tech today?

Patricio Del Boca: It is important to distinguish between two things when answering this question. One is the products that Big Tech sells, and the other is the tools that they develop and that influence software development worldwide. I will focus on the latter.

Since the popularisation of the Internet and digital technologies, companies like Google have faced a very specific problem: how to get billions of people to access their websites. Google, for example, had a search engine that wanted to index the entire Internet. Facebook and Twitter have to deal with millions of daily posts, YouTube and Netflix have to store and transmit terabytes of video information, and so on. To solve these problems of scale, these companies started to develop tools and frameworks that ended up being open source.

In the era of big data, these large companies had to develop technologies and ways of working to meet the demand for consumption (and growth) of their platforms. Some examples: microservices, infrastructure as code, indexing engines, APIs or Kubernetes. Unfortunately, this boom in technologies that solved specific problems for this 5% of technology companies had two very negative consequences: it distanced development from the basic architecture of the web (servers communicating via HTTP and exchanging HTML) and it hypnotised the technology community, which began to adopt these tools for all its developments, even though they do not have billions of users and do not face similar challenges.

The software world absorbed these technologies, but without having to solve the same problems. The normal, everyday software that someone has in my local hardware store, my local supermarket or my local council does not have these problems. So if the vast majority of the world’s software doesn’t need the scale of Facebook, Google or Twitter, why should it need the same tools, technologies and ways of working?

That’s where we are now, with very few initiatives or companies that really need or have big data, but have used these tools because it was modern, it was new, it was marketing. Because they didn’t want to miss out on the ‘innovation wave’. I repeat myself: Silicon Valley companies and my city council don’t have the same needs or the same resources, so why should they use the same tools?

All this has led to the current situation and to the point I want to defend: there is over-engineering in the world of digital technologies. 95% of companies do not have the same problems as Facebook, Twitter, Google or Amazon, using the same solutions and the same tools is completely unsustainable. I don’t need a 4×4 to go shopping. An SUV is designed to pull a 3-ton tractor out of the mud. If I use it just to carry shopping bags, I’m overpaying and paying for something that costs a lot more to produce, consumes a lot more and whose potential goes unused: the perfect definition of unsustainable consumption.

Lucas Pretti: It’s funny that you use the SUV analogy, because a few months ago I read the news that the city of Paris held a referendum to ask the citizens if they should multiply the cost of parking SUVs in the city centre. And the people said yes, multiply the taxes for those who use SUVs where they shouldn’t. So I ask: how should we deal with SUV parking in the city centre? So I ask: how should we deal with the over-engineering of software today? With regulation? With taxes?

Patricio Del Boca: I think there are several tools, there are many fronts, there is no single silver bullet to solve this. Regulation is clearly one way, and the state has a role that it is not fulfilling. We need to focus on regulating commercial practices such as pre-sales (which is nothing more than lobbying) and vendor lock-in (because the technology is proprietary, the buyer is tied to the developer). One possible solution is for states to use free software, not only for technological reasons, but also for reasons of sovereignty and security.

But there is also a cultural and technological change that needs to take place, especially in the technology community, where voices are beginning to be heard today talking about these issues.

I always give two points of reference. One is this new project that has recently emerged: HTMX, which is a small library for web development that extends the functionality of HTML. You don’t need a whole complex framework to build most web pages, let’s go back to basics: HTML and a backend is enough. The other reference is Ruby on Rails, a simple framework where a developer can only take care of the backend and the frontend. Ruby on Rails has in its design this idea of the ‘renaissance developer’ who is able to build a product in its entirety. Fortunately, we are slowly (again) creating ecosystems of tools that allow a single person to be efficient and create sustainable solutions.

Technological innovation’ and technological overkill have been top-down because it didn’t start with ‘I’ve got a developer, what can I do with him’, it started in Silicon Valley with ‘I’ve got millions of dollars, what do I want to do? That’s how a lot of the tools have become very expensive and are used to solve the problems of the 1%.

Another front we can attack is hardware. Hardware has come a long way in the last 20 years. A Raspberry Pi alone now has the same processing power as many servers from two decades ago. You no longer need ‘the cloud’ to scale and grow, today’s servers that can be installed locally have enough power for most of the applications we need.

So, in summary, over-engineering can be solved on several fronts: government regulation so that they do not sell smoke to the state, reviewing the capabilities of modern hardware as an option to the cloud, and cultural change in the technology community to produce more sustainable tools.

Lucas Pretti: I was a bit surprised that in the first question, about the problem of mainstream software, you didn’t fall into the open vs. closed dichotomy. I would like to expand on that. Even when we talk to multilateral organisations with a clear public interest, such as the UN or the G20, to give a few examples, it is not obvious that their technological solutions have to be open and free. There is concern and resistance, even from people who are theoretically on the side of power. Why is that? Why should open source be the standard? What are the technical advantages? How do you get around the issues of security, privacy, effectiveness, etc. that seem to create resistance?

Patricio Del Boca: Yes, there is a lot of unfounded resistance, but there is also a historical reality that has favoured the development of private solutions over open solutions. Today it is true that there are private solutions that are better than open ones because they have had more inertia, they have been first to market, they have had more investment and therefore they work better. For some problems, there are only private solutions that work, and we have to accept that. I think this context is the initial source of resistance to open source: it is still in the collective unconscious that free software is less beautiful, more difficult and less intuitive than private software.

Beyond this ‘fame’, more on the technical side, I think the reluctance is also based on the notion of ‘security by secrecy’. That is, that software is more secure because nobody knows about it – which is necessarily true. Keeping something secret does not mean that it is more secure, I would say the opposite. Recently there was a case where an open encryption technology used for banking transactions was hacked. There was a bug, it affected a lot of people, but it was discovered, fixed and modified in a very short time, precisely because it is open. The idea that open software is insecure because everyone knows the source code is wrong, because while there are two eyes trying to loot it, there are 20 other eyes in the open development community trying to make it more secure.

And, of course, proprietary software is the source of what we were talking about earlier, the issue of power and control. It ties the buyer to the vendor and its supply chain. Audits are contracted to certify that the proprietary software is secure, specialised teams trained by this or that company are contracted, and so on. In the end, it’s always going to be a matter of trust, because if you don’t open the code, you’ll never know if it’s really secure. You have to trust someone who says it is secure.

If anything, I think in the last five years the ecosystem has changed a bit. The digital infrastructure of the world today is built on Linux. The servers of most web servers are free, the same goes for Android, and so on. In other words, it has been shown that free software is much more robust than it is often given credit for.

Lucas Pretti: The concept of public software, or public code, is being used a lot nowadays. From there, the notion of public digital infrastructure (DPI) was developed, which was put on the global agenda at the last G20 meeting in India, and which has become the focus of attention of many organisations, starting with our own, the Open Knowledge Foundation. Such a concept does not by design carry the adjective “open”. Do you think all DPI should be open, and why?

Patricio Del Boca: Yes, it should. Firstly, because it is public. If the digital infrastructure is public, then everyone should have the right to see it, understand it, update it, use it and check it. Just like a public square: I have the right to enter and enjoy it.

Then for the sake of transparency. Not only is what the software does transparent, but so is the bidding process. If you have open software, you remove the interest of making you a slave to a closed solution or selling you ‘exclusivity’. If the tool is open, then the best and cheapest user wins. Full stop.

Also because of the innovation issue. With open software, there is a whole ecosystem that has access and can innovate: universities, independent communities, social organisations and also the private sector. We have to get away from this dichotomy that innovation only comes from the private sector. If the only thing that drives us to innovate is money, we have a problem as a society. 

Another reason is cost. Open software allows reuse, which reduces costs. We need to stop reinventing the wheel and share solutions, improve them, etc.

Which brings us to another related reason: sustainability. Private software involves hundreds of developers in dozens of different companies doing the same thing. This wastes resources, ties the buyer (in this case the government) to one company, and is ultimately inefficient in terms of human and natural resources. Open source software is reusable and therefore more sustainable in the long run.

Finally, of course, there are the communities. Open infrastructures create a community ecosystem with enormous benefits, as we discussed earlier. It is more than clear that open source software has 25,000 more benefits than private software in the state.

Lucas Pretti: Elections are a topic you are passionate about. Your most practical experience is at the local level with Open Data Cordoba, such as the alternative vote counting system and other election initiatives. What is your vision for scaling these kinds of open, community-based, bottom-up solutions? Or rather, should they be scaled up? And how?

Patricio Del Boca: Yes, yes, I think they should be scaled. But scale in the sense of reusing solutions, not in the sense of increasing the adoption of the same centralised technology. One of the great advantages of working with elections is that, despite the particularities of each country, they are all more or less the same. At the end of the day, it’s about electing somebody, counting the votes, registering the people who voted and publishing the results. So there is a lot of scalability.

The concept of public digital infrastructure is perfect in that sense, because it focuses on building small interoperable solutions that can be reused and clustered to solve specific local problems. Rather than each community or country developing its own tools, it is much more efficient to share the same modular and interoperable infrastructure, and to evolve the software and protocols with the different experiences and learnings from each place. This is the goal of our project.

I am convinced that communities, and the Open Knowledge Network in particular, are the ideal engines for this. The experience we have had over the last year of holding roundtables in different continents and contexts, unintentionally and unplanned, has shown us that all countries have similar solutions to similar problems. In Italy, a small town in the south of Sicily has the same problem as my province in Cordoba, Argentina. In other words, let’s communicate and collaborate to scale, as I said, in the sense of reusing the open technologies that exist and those that we will create together. To scale is to collaborate.

Lucas Pretti: Since last year, with the development of the Open Data Editor (ODE), we’ve been trying to put all this into practice and, in a way, lead by example, showing that a different approach to technology is possible. How are you and our technology team applying The Tech We Want principles to the creation of this application?

Patricio Del Boca: The Open Data Editor was created with the intention of making the full capabilities of the Frictionless Data project (which consists of a fairly technical collection of standards and specifications for working with open data) available to people without any knowledge of coding or programming languages. There are lots of people out there, activists, civil servants and small social organisations, who don’t need complex software to clean up their spreadsheet data and correct errors. So the first task was to simplify ODE’s architecture as much as possible and make it easy to use, run offline, run operations locally with privacy rather than in the cloud, and provide data training in an accessible way through a free online course.

This year, we are focusing on energising the community around the app and exponentially increasing adoption among the groups we see as key: activists, social organisations and governments. We are already working closely with five pilot organisations from a first cohort, and will soon be launching a call for a second cohort. The emerging use cases for the Open Data Editor are impressive. Take a look at the work of the Observatoire des armaments on the war industry in France and you will understand the impact that a simple and accessible tool like ODE can have, and the difference it makes to a small but strong and committed team.

Lucas Pretti: Let’s summarise: What technologies do we want and what technologies do we need? 

Patricio Del Boca: We want technologies that are accessible. By accessible, I mean open and cheap, whose innovation and development are not tied to large corporations. What’s more, we want them to be sustainable. In other words, the technology we build today won’t need to be rewritten in two years’ time and won’t require entire teams to maintain.

Lucas Pretti: And for whom are we building these technologies?

Patricio Del Boca: We need concrete technologies for people who need them, based on real needs, not on oversized problems. Nothing else.

This text shows a real case of how the Open Data Editor (ODE) impacted the workflow of an organisation working to serve the public good.

Image taken during the street-by-street urban air quality monitoring activity in the municipality of Kikuyu, Kenya, in 2024. Source: YouTube

Organisation: The Demography Project
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Knowledge Area: Environmental Justice
Type of Data: Air Quality

The Demography Project is an independent youth-led non-profit organisation founded in 2022 in Nairobi, Kenya. They leverage affordable & accessible civic technology, citizen science, collective action and grassroots journalism through citizen-generated data and open-government data. The overall goal of their work is to amplify community voices and enhance citizen capacity to participate in advancing accountable governance, participatory democracy, environmental conservation and public awareness.

They do this through different projects, such as Maai Makwa, a water quality and quantity monitoring project; Infrastracker, focused on empowering vulnerable communities with open-source tools and data for climate action; and Bungeni, a parliamentary monitoring project for the County Assemblies of Kenya.

The Challenge

Problem

One of the tasks carried out by The Demography Project team and volunteers is the collection of environmental data to measure the air quality of a given location. This is done in the field, on long walks during which the project team carries various sensors to determine, among other things, the level of pollution, humidity, atmospheric pressure and the presence of various chemical elements such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and many others. 

To make these measurements, they use different devices, manufactured by different companies, with different capabilities – for example, the Plume Labs Flow 2 sensor measures parts per billion (ppb), while the Atmotube Pro measures parts per million (ppm). In addition, none of the sensors provide geolocation data, forcing the project team to collect GPS data separately. 

These different databases, from a total of four sources, generate a large number of spreadsheets as measurements are taken every second. It’s only by harmonising this data and making it ‘talk’ to each other that they can draw conclusions about the air quality measured during a given field trip. In other words, they have to compile all the data into one giant spreadsheet that is virtually impossible for the human eye to check.

They also face a lack of specialised human resources. There are currently 16 people involved with The Demography Project , most of them volunteers. Of these, only two have any technical knowledge of database management, and that in a limited capacity.

Impact

Organising and compiling hundreds of rows of a table of raw technical data (mostly numbers) is a near-impossible task for a human, and it used to take months for the team to reach a minimally adequate level for analysis. They would search endlessly for zeros, empty cells and other inconsistencies. As well as the time and effort involved, there was always the feeling that the data wasn’t accurate enough, which could ultimately compromise the quality of the results and make all the hard work go to waste.

Examples of some of the different datasets the Demography Project team works with.

The Solution

The Demography Project team uses the Open Data Editor (ODE) to look for errors in the gigantic spreadsheets consolidated after data collection in the field. These tables, which compile data from different sources (including two portable air quality monitors, GPS devices, smartphones), have many inconsistencies that are detected in seconds. Once the errors have been identified, they can then correct the missing or incorrect data, increasing the dataset’s quality.

According to the team, ODE is also very useful for understanding how data works in general and the importance of standards.

In the spreadsheet, ODE identified 29 inconsistencies and errors in the dataset.

Above: ODE identified alphabetic elements in two cells from raw data extracted from the portable air quality monitors, which should have been in numeric format.

The ODE metadata panel proved to be a key resource for the team to learn more about how data works.

The Results

• Reduced error resolution time from months to seconds
• Ensuring that the data is good enough to be analysed
• Enabled the team to focus on the data collection in the field
• Identification of data gaps, particularly GPS coordinates, which distort data outputs

From the data analysed from the Street-By-Street Air Quality Monitoring Activity in Kikuyu Municipality, the air quality is relatively safe and within the parameters set by Kenya’s Environmental Management and Co-ordination (Air Quality) Regulations, 2024 and the World Health Organization’s Global Air Quality Guidelines 2021, with an average Air Quality Score of 85, compared to 62 in Kenya’s capital city Nairobi.

As the infographics below show, this is the kind of conclusion and output that Open Data Editor has helped The Demography Project to develop faster, increasing its social and environmental impact. 

Quote

Richard Muraya, Executive Director

“The reason we’re so interested in the Open Data Editor is that it highlights the gaps we have in terms of data collection. Before ODE, it was a challenge to identify where the zeros were or where we didn’t have accurate readings from our monitoring hardware. With ODE, we have a tool that helps us to identify those gaps and ensure that we have some form of coherence in the tabular data from our air quality monitors, phones and action cameras”.

About the Open Data Editor

The Open Data Editor (ODE) is Open Knowledge’s new open source desktop application for nonprofits, data journalists, activists, and public servants, aiming at helping them detect errors in their datasets. It’s a free, open-source tool designed for people working with tabular data (Excel, Google Sheets, CSV) who don’t know how to code or don’t have the programming skills to automatise the data exploration process.

Simple, lightweight, privacy-friendly, and built for real-world challenges like offline work and low-resource settings, ODE is part of Open Knowledge’s initiative The Tech We Want — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used.

And there’s more! ODE comes with a free online course that can help you improve the quality of your datasets, therefore making your life/work easier.

Download Open Data Editor 1.4.0 using the following buttons:

Take the course: Learn how to use ODE

All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.

This page has been online in some form or another since 2023 and is now making its appearance on my dot-com. This page is in perpetual draft. Last updated April, 2025.

Jump to: Jargon translator, Transferable skills

Prepare to leave

There are a lot of logistical and emotional components of job-hunting, applying, interviewing, and changing jobs. That part alone is hard, and it’s plenty to have to do. But also prepare yourself for the inevitable grief of leaving your field, as well as the identity shift that happens when you leave.

Resources:

• Finding your purpose after academia - amazing resource from H. Alpert Abrams
• Vocational awe: the lies we tell ourselves By Fobazi Ettarh
• Quit lit: compendium of posts from people who left academia
• Sabbatical by Becca Quon
• What it took to take the leap by Eira Tansey
• Career change resources by Alexis Logsdon
• What it means to leave by me
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754

What do you want to do?

• What are you good at?
• What do you want to do more of?
• What do you require?
• Do you want a job or a career? How much heart/soul can you put into your work?

Ask yourself if your career actually needs to have a trajectory.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. What does “career success” look like for you? If it looks like climbing a ladder, you are probably not reading this right now.

It doesn’t have to be a forever-job. It can be a for-now job.

It can be really easy to search for the dream job/company that you’ll stay at forever! Sometimes, though, you just need a job to get you started, to pivot into another field or get you experience doing X, Y, or Z. Don’t stress yourself out looking for a perfect forever job.

Find a job you could do, that pays you enough to live, and that gets you the experience you need.

Resource: former librarian Alexis Logsdon wrote an incredibly helpful series of posts on planning your career transition.

Learn how to tell your story

Before you start applying for jobs, think about how you’d answer the question “tell us about yourself” in 1-2 minutes at the start of an interview. Tie your past work and interests to the thing that you want to do next. That is the story that you will tell your interviewers, your network on LinkedIn, and most importantly yourself as you’re moving through the job hunt process.

Resource: How to tell your story and enter the UX field from Michele L’Heureux

Gather the goods

What artifacts do you have that can help you tell your story?

• Things you’ve written: articles, blog posts, policies, strategy documents, memos, project plans
• Presentations you’ve given
• Projects you’ve initiated, led, or contributed significantly to
• Any other artifacts that represent your work.

Do your research

Use your strong research skills to learn how things work outside of academia.

Do informational interviews

Ask friends and friends of friends for informational interviews. People are so very generous! A quick half-hour call will give you a lot of insight into what a person’s job and workplace is like, what kinds of things they’re responsible for, and even the words they use to talk about what they do. Soak it up.

See what others are doing

Dust off your LinkedIn account. Start searching for people who are talking about things you’re interested in. Follow them, and follow who they follow. You don’t have to “connect” with them if you don’t want; you can just follow their posts.

Look for jobs

By looking at job ads you can learn what types of words/phrases people are using to describe certain skills. Refine your search as you find new keywords in job postings.

All job ads are aspirational. You won’t have 100% of the qualifications for every job. If you have half the qualifications, apply.

Resources:

• An Academic’s Guide to Getting a Non-Academic Job
• https://medium.com/@michellehandy94/from-phd-to-product-my-messy-journey-into-industry-f1046a22a754
• From me: Job-hunting in tech after leaving librarianship

Figure out your system

Dive in. Your process will emerge.

I recommend starting a spreadsheet to track each role you’re interested in, whether you applied, the employer, a link to the job, your application status, when you applied, and any other notes you want to make (salary? concerns?)

Where to look for jobs

• Best places to start: LinkedIn and Indeed
• Nonprofit jobs: Idealist.org
• Higher ed jobs: Chronicle of Higher Ed Jobs; job sites for institutions in your area
• Public sector/government jobs:
  • Job sites for your municipality, state, and usajobs.gov
  • Public sector job board on LinkedIn is a great weekly roundup of tech/UX jobs in governments
• Words of Mouth is a weekly email newsletter with job postings across the arts, digital jobs at nonprofits, etc. Also includes fellowships. This list is really tailored for GLAM/academic-adjacent folks.

LinkedIn is, unfortunately, a thing

LinkedIn is weirdly very important outside of higher ed, especially in the private sector.

• Fill out your profile - add a brief bio (remember your story) and add more details about your responsibilities/accomplishments in previous/current work and volunteer experience.
• Model your profile based on what others are doing - lurk and find folks whose profiles look good to you and note how they are using LinkedIn. Make any changes to your profile that feel authentic for you.
• Make/strengthen connections - reach out to folks in your existing network and add new people that you know. LinkedIn is extremely creepy and knows who you know. Just add ‘em.
• Ask for help - either as a post, or through messaging folks. Most folks are very eager to add connections, exchange messages, share links to jobs, offer referrals, and share information about their work.
• Weak social ties are crucial for finding jobs - so don’t be afraid to reach out to acquaintances on LinkedIn.

Apply

Gird your loins

The job market, especially in UX and adjacent fields in 2024, is awful 🙂. No matter what field you’re in, though, be prepared to be ghosted at any point in the application process. Don’t take it personally.

Transferable skills

Your skills are transferable!

Here are some transferable skills I identified for myself:

• Talking with people and building relationships
• Managing projects and stakeholders
• Recruiting, hiring, retaining, rewarding, and managing people
• Facilitating meetings and workshops, and presenting to groups of all sizes
• Writing for different audiences, including communicating “professionally”
• Mapping out, clarifying, and streamlining workflows
• Strategic planning
• Understanding how technologies connect and how the internet works
• Putting theory into practice for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility
• Research: survey design, interviews, usability testing, log analysis, data analysis, (light) statistical analysis
• Writing: reports, policies, blog posts, project plans, academic papers
• Instructional design
• Web design, writing for the web, working with legacy processes and systems

Transferable skills for librarians

• Reference/instruction/outreach librarians
  • Complex search strategies, keywords and advanced query construction; bibliographies; information-seeking across multiple complex databases
  • Event management, publicity, and facilitation
  • Curriculum development, instructional design learning assessments, public speaking
  • Digital content development; learning management platforms
  • Working with SMEs (faculty) to create/manage content
• If you’ve used LibGuides, congrats! You have used a content management system with a variety of content types and complex user roles.
  • If you’ve managed LibGuides you have experience with content governance, information architecture, and (likely) web design.
• Data management librarians
  • Any Python, R, data modeling, data governance, or data security work
  • Working with campus partners to help meet federal mandates

Resources:

• Social Sciences & Humanities to UX Research from Amy Santee
• Interview with Pam Drouin, who moved from librarianship to UX

Jargon translator

Here are a few terms that might help in translating your skills for a new context:

ℹ️ I’d really like to expand this section! Please write me with any additions.

Prep your resume

• Great advice from Alison Green on this. Big note: your resume is a marketing document.
• Your resume should be 1-2 pages
• Make it easily skimmable. No big chunks of text. Numbers where possible.
• Where possible, match the language of the job posting with your resume
• Tailor your resume for each job you apply for
• Tailor your cover letter for each job you apply for
• Keep a few different “flavors” of your resume depending on which types of roles you are applying for, then adjust as needed for each application.
• In writing about what you worked on, focus on measurable accomplishments rather than listing duties.
• Each job description should be shorter than the one before
• No need to go back more than 10 years. “Recent work experience” is good!

Interview

Each interview should be a conversation and a learning opportunity, and a way to practice talking about yourself. An interview shouldn’t be an inquisition, and if it feels like one, that may be a sign to pull yourself out of the applicant pool.

Be prepared to go through multiple rounds of interviews spread out over several weeks. Again, prepare to be ghosted at any time.

Answer questions

Have a few stories at the ready: tell us about a conflict, tell us about an initiative you led from start to finish, tell us about managing up, tell us about working with a difficult client. Think about the projects you have worked on.

What stories do you have to tell about working with stakeholders in an organization, navigating competing priorities or compromising?

Ask questions

Ask a LOT of questions. You want to know what you’re getting into, and employers want someone who is curious and motivated.

Depending on the vibe of the interview, you might ask questions after you answer their questions:

“You asked about managing multiple competing priorities. How are priorities set and communicated here? Who would the person in this role work with to establish a good priority order?”

Here are some of my favorite questions to ask hiring teams:

• I see that this is a (new role

  existing role). What does success look like for the person in this role? Why did the person in this role previously move on?

• How will you work with the person in this role? How do you collaborate and what duties would you like to see this person take on?
• What goals and initiatives does your company have around diversity, equity and inclusion? What are some challenges or opportunities? (If they don’t have a good answer for this, it’s a red flag.)
• What are some growing edges for the organization? What are y’all actively trying to improve right now?
• How do y’all support each other in both completing work and making sure you take care of yourselves outside of work? Do folks take their vacations here?
• What questions am I not asking that I should be? What do you wish you’d known before you started work?

Resource: Carter Baxter has shared a comprehensive list of questions to ask potential employers.

References don’t really matter

A lot of places outside of higher ed and nonprofits don’t care about calling your references. Instead of calling references, they will simply make you go through a 4-6 step interview process!

In my experience, places only call to verify your former employment at an organization - not get a character reference.

Hang in there

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about leaving a specialized role in a field that encourages folks to achieve national recognition as an individual scholar, it’s that I’m not actually that special. But what I do have is the wisdom of seeing how institutions work and understanding what makes those gears turn. That knowledge translates very easily across sectors and organizations.

You are going to get there! Keep going.

Change log

• 2025/04/27 Moved to this URL, added change log, updated markdown formatting

I first met Cliff in 1990. I was on a study trip to the US and Canada, commissioned by the British Library to prepare a report on emerging network trends in libraries, with a special emphasis on the US. It was an early activity associated with UKOLN at the University of Bath, which the BL partly funded (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking, which has since ceased to exist).

The Division of Library Automation at the University of California, under Cliff&aposs leadership, had been a pioneer in networking and shared systems. Melvyl was an important early example of a shared, network system with some scale, and Cliff was an authority on the emerging Z39.50 protocol which was a central part of what I was looking at.

It was my first trip to the US. I was a little nervous, compounded by the fact that my wardrobe was unsuited to the climate and the relaxed Californian working environment. However, I was immediately put at ease by Cliff&aposs gentle, curious welcoming manner. He was very generous with his and his colleagues&apos time, and created a schedule with care and attention.

I observed with interest the collegial working environment he fostered in the office. This was my first introduction to Cliff in person - to his thoughtful conversation and gracious social presence. It was a revelation for me and provided a glimpse into what was to make his contribution to libraries and the research community so special over many years. He combined deep computational knowledge with a complex appreciation of the evolving scholarly and cultural record in a network environment. This was integral to how he saw libraries - as critical and inseperable elements of the infrastructure and practice of research and scholarship.

Later, when the report was published, Cliff reviewed it at length. Characteristically, the review appeared in what we might now call a Diamond access publication, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, an important early electronic journal. I think the positive review may have influenced the release of a second edition of the report by Meckler for a US audience.

He correctly identified some of the traits of my subsequent writing career:

Sometimes, the coverage is a bit encyclopedic, which makes for slightly tedious reading, but such detail is necessary in a comprehensive report.

From my current perch in the US, I was interested to be reminded of this passage from his kind concluding comments.

This is a wonderful book that we should thank Dempsey for writing and the British Library for supporting. (I do find myself thinking, parochially, that it is strange that the first real book on these topics has been written from a European perspective and underwritten by the British Library. The topics covered are terribly important to the library, information science, and networking communities. Why hasn&apost this type of book been written from a U.S. perspective?)

This visit began a long relationship.

Cliff later came to the UK to present in the series of conferences we organized at the University of Bath. I remember a discussion in Bath between Cliff and the affable and inspirational Paul Evan Peters, who was at the time the inaugural leader of the Coalition for Networked Information. They agreed that they would readily pay for a service that managed the transfer of their luggage between destinations, with which they could then occasionally rendezvous. That said, packing was simplified for Cliff as he became identified with a standard outfit of jeans and blue oxford shirt.

From this vantage point, it is difficult to capture the excitement of those early Internet years. There was a magical and formative period, between that early promise and the later Amazoogle enclosure. And the inclusive and generous vision of Paul, Cliff and the early CNI was an important part of that, aiming initially to provide a venue for conversation between libraries, publishers and technologists. While the library element may have come to dominate, it always fostered connections.

It was in Bath also, that we met Cecilia for the first time, which began a long exchange about Irish tea and whiskey and yarn. Cliff&aposs work depended on Cecilia&aposs support in so many ways.

Professional and personal interactions continued as CNI developed a strong working relationship with UKOLN and with Jisc, the national information and networking infrastructure organization, with which I later worked for a while. We organized a series of joint US/UK conferences, which provided an ongoing collaborative venue, and an important input into the extensive project and development work of Jisc in subsequent years.

Cliff was also a contributor to the second Dublin Core meeting which UKOLN jointly organized in Warwick in the UK. I remember reading a transcript of some remarks by Cliff on this event which rendered &aposWarwick&apos as &aposWoolworths.&apos And indeed, &aposdivided by a common language&apos was the title I adopted for a presentation I was invited to give to the fourth Jisc/CNI event about differences between the UK and the US library environments. Again, I remember speaking to Cliff about my remarks, considering on the one hand the incredible volume and variety of institutions in the decentralized US higher education environment, and on the other, the important shared services infrastructure being put in place by Jisc in the UK. We joked about how far away hills seem greener, so that while some of the US delegates envied the shared attention possible through Jisc in the UK, many of the UK delegates envied the scale and capacity of the larger US organizations.

When I was first offered a job in the US I immediately reached out to Cliff for advice. Later, when I occasionally entered into discussions about other jobs, I sometimes sought his guidance. On one memorable (for me) occasion, he strongly advised that I withdraw my interest in a library Dean role: he argued that the library in question did not have great institutional support. He was always candid and direct in this way, even as his delivery remained gentle and considered. I remember I sent him a piece I had written early in the pandemic about likely trends. He gently nudged me away from publishing it, as something that would date badly.

For many people, Cliff was CNI. Although of course he always acknowledged the strong contributions of Joan and of the other members of the team that made it work. When I think about CNI and Cliff&aposs CNI career three things stand out for me.

First, Cliff and his colleagues made CNI an extraordinarily successful venue for scaling learning and innovation across the library community and beyond. As much as through any formal presentations, this was through the congregation and personal networks it facilitated. Like all successful networks, it offered a venue where people could pool their uncertainty, gain confidence in new approaches, connect with like minds, identify potential hires or new job opportunities, and serendipitously connect with people and ideas. This is how norms, ideas, and innovation diffuse. It promotes sharing, mentoring, and career growth. This was valuable in immeasurable ways.

Second, there was Cliff&aposs intellectual contribution. I would occasionally remark that CNI was a brain support mechanism for Cliff, and I was only half-joking. I believe that many members were more than happy to make an investment in CNI in order to provide a community space for Cliff to reflect on directions and to share his thoughts. Colleagues valued his luminously synthetic introductions to the meetings, the publications that immediately patterned your response to particular topics, his remarkably fluent presentations delivered with a few notes, and his generous counsel. His reading was wide, across the very technical, as well as the social and cultural. Much will be said about all of this by others. I will just note here that no matter how often one saw him do it, one was always awestruck by his range, insight and shaping powers.

Finally, Cliff was a bridge from the research library community to other communities and organizations. His effectiveness here depended not only on the knowledge and insight he brought into any conversation, but also on the universal recognition that he was motivated by a desire to lift up all interested parties in support of research and scholarship.

Perhaps the library community doesn&apost have the scale to generate a deep historical perspective. It would be especially interesting to document the web of influence and development in the period in which Cliff was active, which saw research, learning and cultural expression shape and be re-shaped by the evolving material base of the network and the digital.

Cliff has a special place as somebody whose work and writing with the University of California influenced emerging library services, and who transitioned into a role where he selflessly and persistently worked to help a community be a better version of itself.

Work interests meant that I did not go to CNI regularly for several years. I was very pleased when Cliff asked me to deliver the keynote at CNI after my departure from OCLC was announced. It did not turn out to be my best outing; I was trying too much to live up to the occasion and I ended up saying too little because I actually said too much.

Cliff was kind and I was touched by the enthusiasm with which he described how keynote speakers were added to the CNI meeting invitation list. In this way, he suggested in his reserved way, he hoped I would attend future meetings. I will miss the opportunity of being able to relax into such quiet interactions based on long shared history and conversations.

Cecilia&aposs loss is immense. It may be a small comfort to know that Cliff&aposs influence is strong and active in all the lives that he touched.

Note: Feature picture and caption by John Kirriemuir in a 1997 interview with Cliff for Ariadne. Cliff talks about his role at the University of California and his transition to CNI, as well as about various network information topics.

The #TeslaTakedown protests have gone on long enough that it is time to make a public archive of signs. For the latest signs, I've included a link where you can download a PDF to print your own. Please use these if you'd like; if you want to give me something in exchange, just tag me on Mastodon or Bluesky so I know how far these have spread.

Also, Marc Lee from Free Protest Signs reached out on Bluesky to let me know about his website of signs. If you don't like something below, maybe one of his will suit your mood!

All of the ABOVE!

All of the ABOVE! protest sign, first used on 26-Apr-2025

The meanness, the illegality, the stupidity...it is all more than I thought possible and it is certainly not what deserve from our government. And it is not just one of these attributes, but all of them coming from all of this administration's elected, confirmed, and senior leaders.

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign.

Elected Assholes

Elected Assholes protest sign, not used by the author

This crap is well past getting out of hand, and I wanted a sign that reflected that. The government—in my name as one of its citizens—is deporting people without due process? It is bullying foreign leaders in the Oval Office? It is recklessly dismantling medical research, food safety programs, and environmental controls? This doesn't represent my values, nor—I'd wager—the values of most of the country.

The focus group (my family members) weren't a fan of the unnecessary crassness of the sign. I want to so something with the concept of "My GOVERNMENT did WHAT?!?", so I'll probably revisit this.

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign. Or download its more vulgar companion.

Disaster Musk

Disaster Musk protest sign, first used on 12-Apr-2025

A few weeks ago, I saw the picture of a smirking Elon Musk in a New York Times article, and I knew I needed to make use of it somehow. Inspiration struck this week when I remembered the 'Disaster Girl' meme. The picture with a four-year-old girl looking back at the camera as a firefighters battle a house fire with the "devilish smirk" is a perfect fit for what Elon is doing to our federal government.

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign.

Get Angry at Billionaires

Get Angry at Billionaires protest sign, first used on 5-Apr-2025.

Returning to the theme of my first protest sign, I wanted to convey that the people giving us the middle finger as they drive by have more in common with us than they do with the billionaires they are supporting. Or, if you still want to be up in arms with me, then just come stand an hour at the protest and get your free check from George Soros for protesting. (← sarcasm)

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign.

Signals

Signals protest sign, first used on 29-Mar-2025.

This was the week that the news broke about senior government officials using the consumer-grade chat app Signal to discuss warn plans. I went off-script that week with a sign about that political nonsense. It is a play on the phrase "The call is coming from inside the house!" — a play on a famous movie trope where the police tell the person in a home that they have traced the antagonist's call to that home. In this case, the danger to democracy is coming from inside the Whitehouse! Or, at least, that is what I was aiming for.

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign.

Elon MUSKed Up

Elon MUSKed Up, first used on 22-Mar-2025

Back to basics, I thought. People are driving by quickly, so too much text won't be read. So this was the idea:

• Set the context: "Our GOVERNMENT was FINE."
• Deliver the punchline: "Now it is MUSKed UP!"
• Clear call-to-action: "FIRE ELON!" (in a flaming font, nonetheless)

And that seemed to work. This might have been my best sign yet.

Download and print your own 26" by 16" version of this sign.

DEMOCRACY, not MUSKocracy, not TRUMPocracy

DEMOCRACY, not MUSKocracy, not TRUMPocracy protest sign, first used 15-Mar-2025.

This was my second protest sign, and I'm clearly still working on the craft. Although the points of this sign didn't require a blog post to explain, it still had too many words on it. That made it hard to read from cars that were driving by. It might have been okay without the "Kings and Oligarchs are not American" in the middle, but without it I thought it lost its punch. I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about it, so I haven't gone through the process of making it available for download; let me know if you'd like to have a printable version.

Our Fellow Americans

Our Fellow Americans protest sign, first used on 8-Mar-2025.

This is the first sign I made for a #TeslaTakedown, and I should have listened to my family. They suggested that the initial version, without the "How much do you have in common with Elon Musk?" at the bottom, was too confusing. Adding that sentence improved understanding, but now there was too much to read in a protest sign for cars whizzing past. My point was that me and the person driving by giving me a middle finger have far more in common than what either of us have with Elon Musk (and Donald Trump). Even so, I felt like I needed a blog post to fully explain what I meant. I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about this one, too, but if you'd like a printable version please let me know.

Although this was my first sign, it was my second #TeslaTakedown protest. I learned quickly that signs are an important part of the protest spirit, and the more creative the better.

Introduction

The word information has been used so much that it has come to dominate discourse (Day, 2001). […] Vagueness and inconsistency are advantageous for slogans and using “chameleon words” that assume differing colors in different contexts allows flexibility for readers to perceive what they wish. Buckland, M. (2012). What kind of science can information science be? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

I should like to draw an analytical distinction between the notions of “information society” and “informational society,” with similar implications for information/informational economy. The term “information society” emphasizes the role of information in society. But I argue that information, in its broadest sense, e.g. as communication of knowledge, has been critical in all societies […]. In contrast, the term “informational” indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period. My terminology tries to establish a parallel with the distinction between industry and industrial. An industrial society (a usual notion in the sociological tradition) is not just a society where there is industry, but a society where the social and technological forms of industrial organization permeate all spheres of activity, starting with the dominant activities, located in the economic system and in military technology, and reaching the objects and habits of everyday life. My use of the terms “informational society” and “informational economy” attempts a more precise characterization of current transformations beyond the common-sense observation that information and knowledge are important to our societies. Castells, M. (2009). The Rise of the Network Society, With a New Preface : the Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (2nd ed)

I look very briefly at our senses of information itself as it is the context for the discussion about informational disciplines to follow. It is certainly a ‘chameleon’ word. It has become so widely used as to become drained of specificity unless explicitly qualified in particular circumstances.

Raymond Williams’ Keywords does not include an entry for ‘Information,’ which is telling. This influential work gave rise to multiple subsequent collections which aim to update it or adapt it to particular domains. I quote from the entries on ‘information’ in three of these here:

Information as keyword — digital or otherwise — did not exist before the twentieth century. […] Then, unexpectedly, in the 1920s this formerly unmarked and unremarkable concept became a focal point of widespread scientific and mathematical investigation. ‘Information’ by Bernard Geoghegan in Peters, B. (Ed.). (2016). Digital Keywords.

Toward the end of the C20 “information” became a popular prefix to a range of concepts that claimed to identify essential features of an emerging new sort of society. The information explosion, information age, information economy, information revolution, and especially information society became commonplace descriptions (Castells, 1996-8; Webster, 2002). These covered, and tried to conceive, disparate phenomena, perhaps unwarrantedly. The concepts appeared superficially to capture similar phenomena, yet on closer inspection centered often on quite different things. For example, their concern ranged over a general increase in symbols and signs that accelerated from the 1960s (the information explosion); the development of information and communications technologies, especially the Internet (the information superhighway, reputedly coined by US vice-president Al Gore), the increased prominence of information in employment (information scientists, information labor, information professions); the growing significance of tradable information (information economy); and concerns for new forms of inequality (the information divide, the information rich/poor).‘Information’ by Frank Webster in Bennett (2005) New Keywords: a Revised  Vocabulary of Culture and Society.

As burgeoning use of information in preference to related terms encroaches on the word’s surrounding lexical field, questions arise as to how everything from the human genome to celebrity gossip can so readily be referred to as information. ‘Information’ in MacCabe, C., & Yanacek, H. (2018). Keywords for today : a 21st century vocabulary : the keywords project.

Geoghegan notes the relatively recent general use of the word, and is primarily interested in the information-theoretic work of Shannon and others in the mid-20^th century which was important for the development of telegraphy and in subsequent years of computing, cryptography, genetics, network theory and other areas (although was ultimately not very influential in Library Studies or related fields, as Hjørland (2018) points out). The other two excerpts emphasise growing use of the word throughout the latter half of the 20^th Century. Webster (a sociologist who has specialized in information-related topics and has written about public libraries) notes the way in which it became attached to various generally descriptive labels, notably of course in the ‘Information society’ and for our purposes ‘Information science.’

The quotes above underline the strong emergence of information-related issues as a topic of investigation, and as an explanatory framework in different contexts. Given this widespread use, any account of information is also going to be provisional and contextual.

As background here, I sketch a very schematic overview of information history which departs from the W. Boyd Rayward (2014) account which influenced it. 

However, as Castells notes, this “common-sense observation that information and knowledge are important to our societies,” is not in itself very revealing.

This may seem a little hubristic, but I am prompted to insert it here by the common assertion in iSchool materials – accompanied by such phrases as the ‘knowledge economy’ or the ‘information age’ – that the importance of information in our world elevates the work of the iSchool.

However, as Castells notes, this “common-sense observation that information and knowledge are important to our societies,” is not in itself very revealing.

Information has also gone beyond the bounds of any one subject. The chemist or the cultural geographer or the sociologist has an informational perspective. In this context, it seems to me, the promise of the iSchool is not that it has specialist or unique expertise, but that it can bring together a historical perspective and a multidisciplinary focus.

For reasons that should be clear, I do not attempt to define information here. See Bates (2010) for an exhaustive review of definitions, which, more than anything, suggests why a singular view is unlikely.

For convenience, I reference Michael Buckland’s (2017) pragmatic and functional account.  

• Information as thing. Informational artifacts – books, passports, menus. Broadly synonymous with Buckland’s inclusive view of ‘document.’
• Information as process. Becoming informed.
• Information as knowledge. Intangible. Fixed in ‘things.’ Imparted in the informing process.

In their reflective overview of information definitions in IS, Dinneen and Bauner (2017) note that “Buckland was aware that the overall account was likely to disappoint the pickiest of theorists.” While a more conceptual characterization—such as Bateson’s "a difference that makes a difference" or Bates’ "the pattern of organization of matter and energy"—might offer additional nuance or insight, it is less well-suited to my purposes. Dinneen and Bauner (2017) favor the recently influential work of Floridi, which also, incidentally, is highlighted in the important information science textbook, Bawden and Robinson (2022).

I reference it mostly because its somewhat technocratic emphasis is convenient. Much of the emphasis of library studies or information science is indeed on the recorded information that can provide a part of the material base for some of the more abstract or general uses above. And also partly because Buckland is such an interesting and historically influential figure in this discussion (librarian, leading Information Science theorist and practitioner, central player in the iSchool movement at Berkeley (Buckland, 2024)).

I take the pivotal mid- to late mid-twentieth Century as a starting point. As noted above, information was foregrounded in a variety of ways at this time, and terms such as ‘information science’ and ‘information society’ emerged. I refer to this as the short age of documents, a reference to the discourse around the challenge of managing recorded information.

Then, we have the long period before this, in which recorded information was manifest in print or manuscript forms. I refer to this as the long age of literacy and print.

And third, we have the short period after this, which we are now living through. While we can characterize this as a digital or network age, the more interesting point here is that an informational perspective becomes more common, extending to social and political contexts. Modern institutional constructs -- markets or bureaucracies for example -- can be seen in informational terms. I refer to this as the informational age (influenced by Castells’ characterization of the current period).

Furthermore, it is now common to reinterpret the past through an informational lens. Perhaps the most interesting recent example of this is Youvel Noah Harari&aposs ambitious The Nexus, which was published recently to mixed reception. He tends to see any ‘intersubjective reality’ as informational. He takes a long historical view, discussing developments as stages in the emergence of information networks. For example, he discusses the difference between democratic and totalitarian regimes as a difference between self-correcting and closed information networks. He talks about civilizations as combinations of a managerial and operational bureaucracy and a legitimating or imposed mythology, each again very much an informational apparatus. He reinterprets the past in terms of an informational present; here he is, for example, talking about the impact of printing: “print allowed the rapid spread not only of scientific facts but also of religious fantasies, fake news, and conspiracy theories.”

In this period also there is a strong emphasis on information critique, and with the advent of AI, perhaps, as I will suggest, we are seeing the apotheosis of the document.

The long age of literacy and print

The emergence of the document marked an important early transition.  

Writing allowed thought to be externalized, fixing information in a medium that could persist across space and time. In an oral culture, knowledge had to be remembered. Mnemonic techniques and repetition aided memory. It was retained through song, story and ritual.

As Walter Ong and others have argued, the external documentary accumulation of knowledge co-evolved with a profound shift in the structure of thought, knowledge and communication, evident in the development of more abstract and systematic forms of thinking, the emergence of formal learning and scholarship, the development of laws, the codification of expertise, and so on. This intensified after the invention of movable type.  

Libraries are a strongly institutionalized response to the print distribution model, where information or cultural resources were expensive or available in limited ways. 

From then until the Second World War, say, information exchange was dominated by the production and exchange of print. Infrastructures and institutions emerged which helped create, manage and preserve documents, including libraries, archives, scholarly societies and publishing, publishers, commercial distribution mechanisms, and so on.

Libraries are a strongly institutionalized response to the print distribution model, where information or cultural resources were expensive or available in limited ways. Efficient access required the physical proximity of collections to their potential readers, and libraries built local collections to make them conveniently available within their communities. In this way, collection size and transaction volumes became a signifier of quality. Those interested in technical, scholarly, cultural or other documents built their workflow around the library.  

So, while at a material or mechanical level, we see the progressive intensification and amplification of the production and exchange of documents, a greater variety of ways of processing information, and the massive accumulation of recorded knowledge, the more interesting story involves the mutual interaction between this and social and cultural life.

The progressive connectedness and complexity of social contexts entails progressively more communication across time and space, and a corresponding expansion of the external shared documentary accumulation of expertise and knowledge. Libraries are a part of the apparatus for retaining and sharing that documentary record.

The short age of documents

In the mid-20^th Century, the production, circulation, and institutionalization of information expanded significantly, shaped by the ongoing interplay between social structures, technological developments, and organizational demands. The Second World War itself accelerated this, intensifying the need for systematic coordination across scientific, governmental, and industrial domains. There was growth in the scientific and technical literature, while governments and institutions expanded their administrative records, accompanying new forms of bureaucratic surveillance and tracking. Businesses became increasingly reliant on structured data, for decision-making, to optimize workflows, to comply with regulatory frameworks, and so on.

In this way, the volume and variety of documents (again, broadly understood) continued to grow, as did the processes by which they were shared. It is in this period, as noted above, that Information Science emerged, as a response to the challenges of managing this abundance of information in various ways.

Through the sixties and later, there was a focus on the structural changes brought about by “knowledge-intensive production and a post-industrial array of goods and services.” (Lash) This work was informed by the empirical work of Porat and Machlup and others and was given influential synthetic expression as the ‘information society’ or the ‘post-industrial society’ in the work of Daniel Bell. Peter Drucker also popularized the concepts of ‘knowledge work’ and ‘knowledge worker’ during this period.

In successive decades, digital information systems emerged – chemical information, health and legal systems, early knowledge management, and so on.

In this period also there was some modest social institutionalization of Information Science and related areas. The American Documentation Institute (ADI) was founded in 1937, becoming the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) in 1968. It acquired a final ‘t’ for technology in 2000, and finally became the Association for Information Science and Technology in 2013.  The Institute of Information Scientists was formed in the UK in 1968, and merged with the Library Association in 2002 to form CILIP.  IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) was founded in 1960.

The evolving informational age

 Then it looks at how the logic of information flows reterritorialize into new formations of the brand, the platform, the standard, intellectual property and the network. […] The primary qualities of information are flow, disembeddedness, spatial compression, temporal compression, real-time relations. It is not exclusively, but mainly, in this sense that we live in an information age. Lash, Scott (2002). Critique of information.

In his highly influential three volume The Information Age, Castells talks of a network society and an informational society.  I will use this to frame an introduction to the current period, dating from the late 20^th Century.

Contributory factors in this period are the accelerated evolution of communications and computational capacity which has provided the material base for a range of other developments. These include the restructuring and intensification of capitalism brought about by deregulation, privatization, global extension and geopolitical changes; the network flows of money, data and people which have changed how we think about the boundaries of organizations, nations and personal relations; and the ongoing transformation of the media, personal communications, and the means of shaping public opinion.

This environment rests on complex network systems, aggregations of data, and applications which communicate via protocols and APIs. This material base has co-evolved with social organization. For Castells (as for Lash and Harari), a key feature is the organizing power of networks, throughout all aspects of what we do.

For example, network effects have led to several dominant platforms that articulate much of our social, cultural and business activities (the Amazoogle phenomenon). Retail, music and entertainment were transformed. The flow of materials is monitored by tracking systems, and is articulated in complex just-in-time supply chains; mobile communications and mapping services have changed our sense of mobility and delivery; distribution chains, the disposition of goods around retail floors, investment decisions, variable real-time pricing, and many other taken for granted aspects of what we do are driven by the collection, exchange and analysis of data.

From a functional point of view, varieties of &aposInformationalisation&apos are visible at all levels in everyday life: doors open automatically, material money is disappearing; advanced instrumentation for observation and analysis is common in the sciences. Increasingly, our activities yield up data which influences what products are offered to us, the news we see, and so on.

Something as apparently simple as the selfie has interacted with behaviors to affect mental wellness, the travel industry and communication.

It is this sense of qualitative change that prompts Manuel Castells to pose the distinction between the ‘information society’ and the ‘informational society.’ We are now seeing an intensification of some of the informational trends he observes as AI becomes more common.

Castells discusses how the network has facilitated broad coordination of interests, in social movements, popular uprisings, or organized crime, for example. It extends to a global scale, where a network of megacities channels power and innovation. He suggests that there is at once a global integration facilitated by the network, but, at the same time, a growing fragmentation between those connected to the network circuits of power and prosperity and those not connected.

More recently, we also see a counter force to global integration. Rather than frictionless global information flow, we are seeing regimes forming around power blocs, with different policy, control and regulatory regimes. Think of the US, EU, Russia and China.  There has also been some argument that unequal participation in the ‘knowledge economy’ is a factor in emerging political polarization.   

Given this general importance, there has also been an interesting and unsurprising informational development in modern theory. This has come into our field most clearly perhaps in Jurgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere, but think also, for example, of Anthony Giddens’ concept of ‘reflexive modernity’ or Ulich Beck’s ‘risk society.&apos

For Giddens&apos ‘reflexive modernity’ entails the “... the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups” so that “production of systematic knowledge about social life becomes integral to system reproduction.” Modern life rests on the dynamic reassessment of available information and expertise (in construction, engineering, medicine, technology, …), which builds on the accumulated record of science and technology.

I have chosen to reference the social sciences here, as informationalization and social and cultural change are intricately linked. It is also notable how little reference there is to classical information science in this discussion.

The generative turn: the apotheosis of the document

Instead, these AI systems are what we might call cultural technologies, like writing, print, libraries, internet search engines or even language itself. They are new techniques for passing on information from one group of people to another. Asking whether GPT-3 or LaMDA is intelligent or knows about the world is like asking whether the University of California’s library is intelligent or whether a Google search “knows” the answer to your questions. But cultural technologies can be extremely powerful—for good or ill. Alison Gopnik, 2022.

The current form of generative AI emerged as late as 2023. I find Alison Gopnik’s characterization of it as a cultural technology helpful. She places it in a historical context as the latest technique for passing information from one group of people to another, again considering information very broadly. I was interested to see her place libraries in this frame as well.

Effectively, large language models are statistical models derived from vast accumulations of documentary representations of knowledge. In the context of the narrative presented here, the volume and variety of documents is now so great that they are treated as a proxy for knowledge. Proponents of intelligent AI argue that the models, working with both the broad accumulated representation of knowledge in the training collections, and with massive compute, can find a way to not only summarize and generalize from the content of those documents, but also to replicate the minds that created them.

I tend to Gopnik’s skepticism on this question (see Yiu, E., Kosoy, E., & Gopnik, A. (2024) for an extended argument).

Nevertheless, the processing powers of the models make them very effective for some purposes, and the agentic and applications infrastructure being built on top of them promise to make them more so. We do not know yet whether and where developments will plateau, or how adoption varies by tolerance for hallucinations,[1] or where the impact will be most felt.

However, given the key role of documents (information) in managing complex organizations and interactions, some see the reach of AI as extensive. In this way, the informational, reflexive, networked nature of social life is potentially further intensified.

This extensive informationalization is why Harari, for example, is concerned about the potential reach and impact of AI, as the systemic processability of the connective informational tissue of organizations and systems, he argues, renders them vulnerable to manipulation.

This extensive informationalization is why Harari, for example, is concerned about the potential reach and impact of AI, as the systemic processability of the connective informational tissue of organizations and systems, he argues, renders them vulnerable to manipulation.

Of course, the ramifications of AI for libraries and for iSchools are accordingly significant. It intensifies some of the trends we have observed, and -- as with other activities at scale -- has both constructive and problematic elements (to use a phrase of Barrett and Orlikowski’s).

If we think of the informational disciplines having a special interest in recorded information, some immediate issues arise.

• Cultural synthesizers. Synthesized content and context add a new dimension and challenge.
• Iterative and chained interaction. We will interact differently with information objects or bodies of knowledge. Think of how larger publishers or aggregators will provide access to the scholarly literature, for example.
• Social confidence and trust. Our sense of authenticity, identity, authorship will all be redefined, creating issues of trust and verification.
• Policy, law and practice will all evolve unevenly in concert.

Information critique

Our simplest actions or interactions now entail complex informational networks and platforms. Think of what is involved in just texting, sending an email or writing in cloud-based Office 365, whatever about group document preparation, remote experiments, or mapping activity.

Day to day behaviors yield up data which is aggregated at scale and used in various ways to monitor, sell or advertise. Large companies have built vast consolidated infrastructure - we are used to thinking of information as immaterial, however, AI has also emphasized how the cloud has boots of concrete. These companies also wield great cultural and economic power - Spotify does our listening for us, Amazon holds sway over merchants on its site.

These social and cultural ramifications mean that undesirable effects are visible and urgent. Addressing these has become an ongoing research, education and advocacy role for the informational disciplines, among others. There is also greater historical sensitivity, an alertness to the ways in which experiences, memories and knowledges may have been suppressed, distorted or invisible (see Benedict Anderson’s classic discussion of museums, maps and other resources in the emergence of nationalism, for example).

Here is a non-exhaustive list of information issues.

• Inequity. Given the centrality of the network and digital resources, differential access creates inequities.
• Surveillance. There is an increase in direct surveillance and also increased collection of data which drives other aspects of our environment. We are generating data shadows which are operationalized in various ways to influence or inform.
• Market concentration. The winner takes all dynamic of network services has resulted in the dominance of several platforms who wield great economic power and influence.
• Dominant or partial perspectives. Perspectives which are historically dominant, or politically motivated, or which reflect imbalances of power and influence may be over-represented in any resource. The plurality of experiences, memories and knowledges is under-represented in the record.
• Dis- and misinformation/’degraded democratic publics’. Our reliance on flows of information has led to concerted attempts to distort, mislead or defraud. Henry Farrell has argued that there is a more fundamental problem, which is “not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” (Farrell)
• Geopolitical fragmentation. Rather than a global information flow, as noted above, we are seeing regimes forming around power blocs, with different policy, control and regulatory regimes. Think of the US, EU, Russia and China.

Information today – systems of information

Information, then, is at once fugitive and everywhere, chameleon-like.

I noted above how libraries, Information Science, and the iSchool emerged in different phases of the information evolution. And in some ways, they reflect elements of when they emerged.

The library is different from the other two, in that I talk about the library itself as an organization, rather than as a body of knowledge or techniques. Libraries emerged in the first phase described above. Historically, the collection was the core of library identity, as an organized response to accessible distribution in a print world, and to the preservation of knowledge. The library continues as an organized response by cities, universities and others to learning, research and equity of access to the means of creative production. In this way the scope has moved beyond the collection in various ways, as discussed further below. As an organization, the library benefits from education and research in information management topics, but also across a range of other topics (public policy, for example).

Information science emerged, in the second phase, in the mid-20^th Century. In this narrative, its origin story splits from the library as information production grows, requiring new methods of organization and access, and it anticipates elements of today’s information environment. As discussed further below, common to definitions of Information Science is a concern with documents (or recorded information, literatures, and similar).

Although, it doesn’t make sense to lean on it too heavily, one might say that Information Science largely retains an information view of the world, concerned with access to and management of information as a thing (in Buckland’s terms).

In the third phase, information is not only seen as something to be managed or discovered, but as an organizing element of social structure and interaction. It has become an object of study across many disciplines and in social and cultural analysis.

The iSchool has emerged in this third phase and it typically embraces a broad set of informational interests. In some ways it subsumes Information Science interests in a very broad view of information in the modern world.

A large part of typical iSchool portfolio is information systems oriented, at undergraduate and graduate levels, meeting needs for workers with technology, business and social skills. It may be a more applied alternative to computer science. It may also encompass expertise in other informational fields (policy, philosophical/social/cultural, data science, HCI, digital humanities, and so on). The broad disciplinary spread also potentially encompasses social and philosophical perspectives as well as very often a strong information critique emphasis.

Borrowing a suggestive phrase from an article by Black and Schiller (2014), one could say that the iSchool is often interested in both information systems and systems of information, ‘systems that create information through social means.’ 

Of course, the iSchool is not a discipline – it is an evolving academic structure, although, as I have noted, it may be associated with a broad view of Information Science (understood generically not in the classical sense) or Information Sciences. Informatics, a term which emerged in the 1960s (often associated with another term, as in health or social informatics) may also feature.

The focus and disciplinary spread varies across schools.

References

Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism  (revised edition). Verso.

Barrett, M., & Orlikowski, W. (2021). Scale matters: doing practice-based studies of contemporary digital phenomena. MIS Quarterly, 45(1). https://doi.org/10.25300/misq/2021/15434.1.3

Bates, M. J. (2010). Information. In M. J. Bates & M. N. Mack (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd Ed. (Vol. 3). CRC Press. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/information.html

Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. (2022). Introduction to Information Science (Second). Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Introduction-to-Information-Science/Bawden-Robinson/p/book/9781783304950

Beck, U., & Ritter, M. (1992). Risk society : towards a new modernity. Sage Publications.

Bell, D. (1976). The coming of post-industrial society : a venture in social forecasting. Basic Books.

Bennett, T., Grossberg, L., & Morris, M. (Eds.). (2005). New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Wiley-Blackwell.

Black, A., & Schiller, D. (2014). Systems of information: The long view. Library Trends, 63(3), 628–662. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89724

Buckland, M. (2012). What kind of science can information science be? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21656

Buckland, M. (2017). Information and society. The MIT Press.

Buckland, M. (2024). The Berkeley School of Information: A Memoir. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/79v080z7

Castells, M. (2009). The Rise of the Network Society, With a New Preface : the Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (2nd ed). Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dinneen, J. D., & Bauner, C. (2017). Information-not-thing: further problems with and alternatives to the belief that information is physical. CAIS/ACSI `17: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science / l’Association Canadienne Des Sciences de l’Information. https://philarchive.org/archive/DINIFP

Farrell, H. (2025). We’re getting the social media crisis wrong. Programmable Mutter. https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis

Floridi, L. (2011). The Philosophy of Information. Oxford University Press.

Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press.

Gopnik, A. (2022, July 22). What AI still doesn’t know what to do. Alison Gopnik The Wall Street Journal Columns. http://alisongopnik.com/Alison_Gopnik_WSJcolumns.htm#22Jul22

Harari, Y. N. (2024). Nexus : a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hjørland, B. (2018). Library and Information Science (LIS), Part 1. Knowledge organization, 45(3), 232–254. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2018-3-232

Lash, S. (2002). Critique of Information. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217283

MacCabe, C., & Yanacek, H. (2018). Keywords for today : a 21st century vocabulary : the keywords project. Oxford University Press.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. Routledge.

Peters, B. (Ed.). (2016). Digital Keywords. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691167343/digital-keywords

Rayward, W. Boyd. (2014). Information Revolutions, the Information Society, and the Future of the History of Information Science. Library Trends, 62(3), 681–713. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2014.0001

Webster, F. (2014). Theories of the Information Society (4th ed.). Taylor and Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315867854

Williams, R. (2014). Keywords (New Edition). Oxford University Press.

Yiu, E., Kosoy, E., & Gopnik, A. (2024). Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Language and Language-and-Vision Models Cannot (Yet). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(5), 874–883. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231201401

Note: I took the feature image in Cambridge.

[1] It is pity that ‘hallucination’ has become the term used here, as it gives a misleading sense of how the LLMs work.

This text, part of the #ODDStories series, tells a story of Open Data Day‘s grassroots impact directly from the community’s voices.

The Conversatory Open Data and New Technologies to Face the Polycrisis, held on 19 March in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, brought together teachers and researchers from different fields with a common characteristic: working with open data. The event took place at the Faculty of Statistics and Informatics (FEI) of the Universidad Veracruzana (UV). It was attended by professors and students from the Statistics, Data Science Engineering and Computer Science courses offered at the same institution.

The event was inaugurated by Dr Minerva Reyes Felix, FEI’s Academic Secretary, and organised by MCD Lorena Lopez Lozada, leader of the Open Data Project in its eighth edition as organiser.

Reliable open data, useful for managing the polycrisis

Lorena López Lozada explained that “the objective of the event is to share, from different perspectives, the current situation where several global crises are happening at the same time and their combined impact is greater than their individual impact, the so-called polycrisis, and how the use of open data allows us to visualise the social context and support decision-making based on reliable information”.

Each of the panelists shared enriching opinions, as their different fields of study allowed for a multidisciplinary discussion. The debate was chaired by MGC José Fabián Muñoz and was divided into three main questions:

1. What has been your experience in working with open data?
2. What kind of open data can be used to address the polycrisis?
3. What do you recommend for the generation of open data regarding infrastructure, security, reliability, among others?

Experience in working with open data

Nicandro Cruz Ramírez, a professor at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Universidad Veracruzana, began this round of questions. He mentioned that he was fortunate to have open data and to be able to work with it. One example was ecological data, which can be used to analyse climate change and, in this case, the loss of ecological integrity of top predators (large and strong species in the area such as bears, pumas and lions). Creating artificial intelligence models to identify the causes of this problem and assess the impact of future construction projects in biodiverse areas.

In this conversation, Angel Fernando Argüello Ortíz, a professor at FEI, shared examples of how census information has been key to the implementation of projects and the difficulties he has encountered when this information is not freely available. He also expressed that information is power, but that it must be used correctly, as “all power carries a great responsibility, because sometimes it generates benefits, but sometimes it generates disadvantages, so it is important to use it correctly”.

Types of open data to address the polycrisis

Another participant in the discussion was Agustín Fernández Eguiarte, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Change at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who is on a research visit to the UV’s Centre for Earth Sciences (CCT). He mentioned that “it is necessary to have climate, climate change, hydro-meteorological and environmental data, but structured as open fair data in unconditional standards or metadata and integrated in data repositories”. As examples, he has developed an open data repository on climate change and tropical cyclones in the state of Veracruz, which includes an interactive visualisation in addition to the databases; and an open data repository on the Pico de Orizaba.

The information from both will be made available on the Internet for those interested in the topics, “because to face the polycrisis we need reliable data and information, with quality control, to support any policy, action or programme to address climate change,” said the researcher.

Ángel Juan Sánchez García, a lecturer at FEI, said that although it is impossible to solve the world with data, it is possible to have an idea of the problems that are occurring at a global level.  He mentions that in Mexico some sectors do not have a culture of generating data, which makes it difficult to analyse their own areas. This could be linked to human factors (lack of empathy for sharing data) and resistance to analysis due to possible social alarm (touching on real but sensitive issues).

Recommendations for open data production

To conclude this series of questions, each of the participants shared their recommendations for those using or generating open data. We can divide their opinions into five sections:

1. Create a culture of information management. Knowing how to gather information based on project objectives and being willing to share that information and allow others to access and consult it.
2. Collaboration. Pupils and students are encouraged to work in teams. Projects are more practical and easier to carry out when a multidisciplinary team works together.
3. Technological infrastructure. Ensure the quality, security, reliability and other attributes necessary to work with open data, as a lack of these will limit its analysis.
4. Working with other types of data. As Ángel Juan Sánchez García mentions, “we need to venture into other types of non-conventional data”, because in many cases, there is a very rigid idea of what a database is, which limits the variety of analyses that can be carried out.
5. Legislation. One of the participants mentioned the need for legislation on the management and collection of information, despite the existence of legislation. In the case of Mexico, the General Directorate of Access Policies of the Secretariat for Access to Information of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI) prepared a document in 2023, which was presented as a “draft” to the Technical Group of the National Open Data Policy. Subsequently, it was presented to the different feedback spaces that made up the construction of this public policy, proposed within the framework of the Open Mexico Strategy and its corresponding methodology. For its elaboration, the Minimum Criteria and Methodology for the Design and Documentation of Policies for Access to Information, Proactive Transparency and Open Government, approved by the National System of Transparency, Access to Public Information and Protection of Personal Data, and published in the Official Gazette of the Federation on 23 November 2017, were used as a reference. However, this policy has not come to fruition, as INAI has disappeared in the current government administration.

Despite the existence of the Open Data Charter and its principles, governments are not yet committed to having open data in all possible areas of information sharing with citizens.

With the support of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Datopian for the development of the Conversatory, the academic event marked a significant step towards strengthening the promotion and use of open data, as well as the socialisation between students and teachers and researchers, sharing in a healthy environment and also contributing to the integral development of students.

About Open Data Day

Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.

As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. In 2025, a total of 189 events happened all over the world between March 1st and 7th, in 57 countries using 15+ different languages. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.

For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.

In seventh grade, Miss Phillips had me memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So I did. After finishing "Jabberwocky" to start off the year of run naming, it seemed obvious what my next effort would be. I calculated that I could arrange to end it on the day of the Boston Marathon, thus neatly tying the verse with the running. And to top it off, the "18th of April" cited in the poem was exactly 250 years ago on Friday.

"Paul Revere's Ride" was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861.

Listen my children and you shall hear

of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

and of my runs like this one here.

On the eighteenth of April, in seventy-five

Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year,

or when the end of this poem shall arrive.

He said to his friend, "If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night”

They be lost in New Jersey, no turnpike in sight.

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

of the North Church tower as a signal light,—

One, if by land, and two, if by sea;

But if it be 'puter, then ye shall put three.

And I on the opposite shore will be,

ready to ride and spread the alarm

the royalists are coming and they mean to do harm!

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country folk to be up and to arm.

On up the Park Street and down by the pond

to Chester, where merriment and good folk were found.

Then he said, "Good night!" and with muffled oar

Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore

safe from the royalists and and their childish roar.

Just as the moon rose over the bay,

Where swinging wide at her moorings lay

An emperor who would have his way

The Somerset, British man-of-war; A phantom ship

... with each mast and spar

across the moon like a prison bar,

that traitorous rogue will go too far.

And a huge black hulk, that was magnified

by its own reflection in the tide,

For the pacer and the patriot,

there's no place left to hide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street

Wanders and watches with eager ears,

wondering what we can do in these years.

Till in the silence around him he hears

the muster of men at the barrack door,

while the good folk of the country wish back on before.

Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Forgetting their watches, they ran point eight four.

The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet

and the measured tread of the grenadiers,

...already tired of the next few years.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church

By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,

the view kept coming, no need to search

To the belfry-chamber overhead,

"Resist! Resist!" he angrily said

And startled the pigeons from their perch.

On the sombre rafters, that round him made masses

and moving shapes of shade,

seen through hay-air glasses.

By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,

to the highest window in the wall

for in the coming fateful brawl,

he will see the mighty fall.

Where he paused to listen and look down

A moment on the roofs of the town

the sun would soon rise and the breads would be round.

And the moonlight flowing over all.

Crescent and full, they're having a ball.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead

in their night-encampment on the hill

Warning lights blaring red,

this couldn't be a drill.

Wrapped in silence so deep and still

that he could hear,

like a sentinel's tread,

the muskrat's sneer

as he left them for dead.

The watchful night-wind, as it went

creeping along from tent to tent,

And seeming to whisper, "All is well!",

but veterans all, ’twas bad news to tell.

A moment only he feels the spell

of the place and the hour,

A code for unlocking the library’s power.

and the secret dread of the lonely belfry and the dead;

Sixteen falcons thundering overhead

For suddenly all his thoughts are bent

on a shadowy something far away

Put in the water, a drone menace on the quay.

Where the river widens to meet the bay,

three walkers ramble in a state of dismay.

A line of black that bends and floats on the rising tide

like a bridge of boats coming to destroy, despite our votes.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, booted and spurred

with a heavy stride he knew that those soldiers were on the wrong side.

On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.

Now he patted his horse's side,

no yielding today,

he was wholly without fear.

Now gazed at the landscape far and near

Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,

Hoping present horrors would give way to rebirth.

And turned and tightened his saddle girth

But mostly he watched with eager search

Five or six hundred? He wondered the worth.

The belfry-tower of the Old North Church, as it rose

above the graves on the hill,

his fear for his country grows and grows.

Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height,

a somber thought. might is not right.

A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!

He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns;

danger approaches with heighted concerns.

But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight

a second lamp in the belfry burns!

By sea it will be

that good people defeat the tyrant's might.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

a shape in the moonlight,

a bulk in the dark,

a sheet on the mark.

And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark

Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet

Feet flying forward like a harley in heat.

That was all!

And yet, through the gloom and the light,

the fate of a nation was riding that night;

in two years or late, all will be put right.

And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight

Kindled the land into flame with its heat

for justice and doing all that is right.

He has left the village and mounted the steep

And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,

are the values and promises we keep.

Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;

And under the alders, that skirt its edge,

trouble may be coming but still hope resides

Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,

Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

Our trusty band stay true to their pledge.

It was twelve by the village clock

When he crossed the bridge into Medford town,

he heard the crowing of the cock,

running round and roun' the anserine flock

And the barking of the farmer's dog,

Who sniffed a rat come into town

And felt the damp of the river fog,

That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,

when he galloped into Lexington

while everything had gone amok,

way down in Washington

He saw the gilded weathercock swim

in the moonlight as he passed

No time for talk, too late now,

the tyranny would not last.

And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,

gaze at him with a spectral glare

It was two by the village clock,

When he came to the bridge in Concord town.

With a figure of love he took the walk

He heard the bleating of the flock

and the twitter of birds among the trees

the sheep felt a shock

and the twitter said "Oh Please!"

And felt the breath of the morning breeze

blowing over the meadows brown.

Till the running faeries squeeze

colors over cap and gown.

And one was safe and asleep in his bed

Who at the bridge would be first to fall,

Not from the sleet pelting on his head

Nor from fog depressing us all

Who that day would be lying dead,

pierced by a British musket-ball.

Facing a taxing dread,

against a tyrant we must still stand tall.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,

how the British Regulars fired and fled,

They failed the test as shall we all,

if we don't heed the siren call.

How the farmers gave them ball for ball,

From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,

Poor souls trapped in the tyrant's thrall.

Chasing the red-coats down the lane,

Then crossing the fields to emerge again

Confused by the tumult of where and when.

Under the trees at the turn of the road

They’ve trampled good faith,

ignored all the code.

And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;

hoping to save values we hold dear.

And so through the night went his cry of alarm

To every Middlesex village and farm,

by Essex schools in hurried flight.

A cry of defiance and not of fear

Shouting a message so powerful, so clear.

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!

Two hundred fifty years to the day

That echo rings, it won't go away.

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last

The present is tiny, our future is vast.

In the hour of darkness and peril and need

The people will waken and listen to hear

No matter their sex, gender, color race or creed

A message so powerful, so urgent and clear.

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

The crowds of townsfolk who shout and cheer

Those who run today and speed

the midnight message of Paul Revere.

the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way.

Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,”

Salomé Balthus Uwe Hauth, CC BY-SA 4.0

What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'

'The elephant in the room is climate change. Everyone knows it can't be prevented any more,' she said, adding that the 'super rich' could generally be split into two groups on the topic.

'The one group thinks it only affects the poor, the "not-white race", while the others fear that it could get worse but there's no sense in trying to do anything about it so they just enjoy themselves,' she told MailOnline.

'The one half is in despair and the other, dumber, half is celebrating future mass deaths.

Salome elaborated that some of the uber wealthy people fitting into the first group were saying that those in third world countries 'might all die but us in the North, we're fine'.

She said: 'They say that in a democracy you have to sell it, to lie to people and tell them "we didn't know better and didn't think it would get this bad", not admitting that they know.

'Then there's the other group that thinks it might not be so easy, maybe it will also affect us due to unforeseeable chain reactions.

'But they say they can't do anything against the others so they live following the mantra "after us, the deluge".

'They say they will enjoy a few more nice years on earth and know that there's no future. They are very cynical and somehow deeply sad.'

He is right that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway", but that is partly his fault. Even assuming that he's right and AI is capable of magically "solving the problem", the magic solution won't be in place until long after 2027, which is when at the current rate we will pass 1.5C. And everything that the tech giants are doing right now is moving the 1.5C date closer.

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.

Neal et al Fig 1

Figure 1 shows the projected percentage reduction in global GDP from a high emissions future (SSP5-8.5) relative to a lower emissions future (SSP1-2.6), for the three models outlined in section 2.2. Each economic model is run with and without global weather to determine its impact on the projections. Without the inclusion of global weather (blue line), all three models project more mild economic losses with a median loss at 2100 of −28% for the Burke15 model, −4% for the Kahn21 model, and −11% for the Kotz24 model. Projected losses from the latter two models are more optimistic than in the original articles, likely due to the variations in data and exact assumptions made.

The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.

Scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C even if countries hit short-term and long-term climate targets.

Today, the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Heat waves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes are all increasing in scale, frequency and intensity, and the World Health Organization forecasts that climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths each year by the end of this decade from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone. Even so, the impact on human health and the body count attributed to extreme weather remain massively underreported — resulting in a damaging feedback loop of policy inaction. Meanwhile, the very people who might fix that problem, at least in the US, are being fired en masse amid the Trump administration’s war on science.

Source

Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”
...
Bleak as warming projections are, a planet where governments and businesses fight to the death for their own profitable share of a hotter, more chaotic planet is bleaker still. The only thing worse than a right wing that doesn’t take climate change seriously might be one that does, and can muster support from both sides of the aisle to put “America First” in a warming, warring world.

Nvidia's path forward is clear: its compute platforms are only going to get bigger, denser, hotter and more power hungry from here on out. As a calorie deprived Huang put it during his press Q&A last week, the practical limit for a rack is however much power you can feed it.

"A datacenter is now 250 megawatts. That's kind of the limit per rack. I think the rest of it is just details," Huang said. "If you said that a datacenter is a gigawatt, and I would say a gigawatt per rack sounds like a good limit."

The NVL72 is a rackscale design inspired heavily by the hyperscalers with DC bus bars, power sleds, and networking out the front. And at 120kW of liquid cooled compute, deploying more than a few of these things in existing facilities gets problematic in a hurry. And this is only going to get even more difficult once Nvidia's 600kW monster racks make their debut in late 2027.

This is where those "AI factories" Huang keeps rattling on about come into play — purpose built datacenters designed in collaboration with partners like Schneider Electric to cope with the power and thermal demands of AI.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, affectionately known as a16z, is looking for investors to put a fresh $20 billion into AI startups. [Reuters]

For perspective, that’s more than all US venture capital funding in the first three months of 2025, which was $17 billion. [PitchBook]

This means that a16z think there’s at least this much money sloshing about, sufficiently desperate for a return.

PitchBook says a16z is talking up its links to the Trump administration to try to recruit investors — the pitch is to get on the inside of the trading! This may imply a less than robustly and strictly rule-of-law investment environment.

The owners of a recently demolished coal-fired power plant announced the site will become a data center powered by the largest natural gas plant in the country.

The Homer City Generating Station in Indiana County was decommissioned in 2023 and parts of it were imploded last month. It had been at one time the largest coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania.

The plant’s owners, Homer City Redevelopment, announced the site will become a 3,200-acre data center campus for artificial intelligence and other computing needs

Taken together, the measures represent a sweeping attempt to ensure coal remains part of the US electricity mix, despite its higher greenhouse gas emissions and frequently greater cost when compared to natural gas or solar power.

The effort also underscores Trump’s commitment to tapping America’s coal resources as a source of both electricity to run data centers and heat to forge steel. The president and administration officials have made clear boosting coal-fired power is a priority, one they see as intertwined with national security and the US standing in a global competition to dominate the artificial intelligence industry. 

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating data centres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and are building many more, an investigation by SourceMaterial and The Guardian has found.

With US President Donald Trump pledging to support them, the three technology giants are planning hundreds of data centres in the US and across the globe, with a potentially huge impact on populations already living with water scarcity.

“The question of water is going to become crucial,” said Lorena Jaume-Palasí, founder of The Ethical Tech Society. “Resilience from a resource perspective is going to be very difficult for those communities.”

Efforts by Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, to mitigate its water use have sparked opposition from inside the company, SourceMaterial’s investigation found, with one of its own sustainability experts warning that its plans are “not ethical”.

Amazon’s three proposed data centres in Aragon, northern Spain—each next to an existing Amazon data centre—are licensed to use an estimated 755,720 cubic metres of water a year, enough to irrigate more than 200 hectares (500 acres) of corn, one of the region’s main crops.

In practice, the water usage will be even higher as that figure doesn’t take into account water used in generating electricity to power the new installations, said Aaron Wemhoff, an energy efficiency specialist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

Between them, Amazon’s planned Aragon data centres will use more electricity than the entire region currently consumes. Meanwhile, Amazon in December asked the regional government for permission to increase water consumption at its three existing data centres by 48 per cent.

Opponents have accused the company of being undemocratic by trying to rush through its application over the Christmas period. More water is needed because “climate change will lead to an increase in global temperatures and the frequency of extreme weather events, including heat waves”, Amazon wrote in its application.

NVIDIA, which has given CoreWeave priority access to its chips. As CoreWeave’s own S-1 notes, it was “the first cloud provider to make NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-based instances generally available,” and “among the first cloud providers to deploy high-performance infrastructure with NVIDIA H100, H200, and GH200.”

CoreWeave owns over 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs across 32 data centers, supported by more than 260MW of active power

In my years writing this newsletter I have come across few companies as rotten as CoreWeave — an "AI cloud provider" that sells GPU compute to AI companies looking to run or train their models.

CoreWeave had intended to go public last week, with an initial valuation of $35bn. While it’s hardly a recognizable name — like, say, OpenAI, or Microsoft, or Nvidia — this company is worth observing, if not for the fact that it’s arguably the first major IPO that we’ve seen from the current generative AI hype bubble, and undoubtedly the biggest.

The initial public offering of AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave, initially targeting a $2.7bn raise at $47-55 per share, was slashed to $1.5bn at $40 per share. Even then, the deal barely limped across the finish line, thanks to a last-minute $250mn “anchor” order from Nvidia. The offering reportedly ended up with just three investors holding 50 per cent of the stock, and it seems to have required some stabilisation from lead bank Morgan Stanley to avoid a first-day drop. Hardly a textbook success.

Imagine a caravan maker. It sells caravans to a caravan park that only buys one type of caravan. The caravan park leases much of its land from another caravan park. The first caravan park has two big customers. One of the big customers is the caravan maker. The other big customer is the caravan maker’s biggest customer. The biggest customer of the second caravan park is the first caravan park.

Sorry, not caravans. GPUs.

You can only throw so much money at a problem.

This, more or less, is the line being taken by AI researchers in a recent survey. Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.
"The vast investments in scaling, unaccompanied by any comparable efforts to understand what was going on, always seemed to me to be misplaced," Stuart Russel, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who helped organize the report, told NewScientist. "I think that, about a year ago, it started to become obvious to everyone that the benefits of scaling in the conventional sense had plateaued."

AI continues to improve – at least according to benchmarks. But the promised benefits have largely yet to materialize while models are increasing in size and becoming more computationally demanding, and greenhouse gas emissions from AI training continue to rise.

These are some of the takeaways from the AI Index Report 2025 [PDF], a lengthy and in-depth publication from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) that covers development, investment, adoption, governance and even global attitudes towards artificial intelligence, giving a snapshot of the current state of play.
...
However, HAI highlights the enormous level of investment still being pumped into the sector, with global corporate AI investment reaching $252.3 billion in 2024, up 26 percent for the year. Most of this is in the US, which hit $109.1 billion, nearly 12 times higher than China's $9.3 billion and 24 times the UK's $4.5 billion, it says.

Despite all this investment, "most companies that report financial impacts from using AI within a business function estimate the benefits as being at low levels," the report writes.

It says that 49 percent of organizations using AI in service operations reported cost savings, followed by supply chain management (43 percent) and software engineering (41 percent), but in most cases, the cost savings are less than 10 percent.

When it comes to revenue gains, 71 percent of respondents using AI in marketing and sales reported gains, while 63 percent in supply chain management and 57 percent in service operations, but the most common level of revenue increase is less than 5 percent.

Meanwhile, despite the modest returns, the HAI report warns that the amount of compute used to train top-notch AI models is doubling approximately every 5 months, the size of datasets required for LLM training is doubling every eight months, and the energy consumed for training is doubling annually.

This is leading to rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from AI training, the report finds. It says that early AI models such as AlexNet over a decade ago caused only modest CO₂ emissions of 0.01 tons, while GPT-4 (2023) was responsible for emitting 5,184 tons, and Llama 3.1 405B (2024) pumping out 8,930 tons. This compares with about 18 tons of carbon a year the average American emits, it claims.

The premise that AI could be indefinitely improved by scaling was always on shaky ground. Case in point, the tech sector's recent existential crisis precipitated by the Chinese startup DeepSeek, whose AI model could go toe-to-toe with the West's flagship, multibillion-dollar chatbots at purportedly a fraction of the training cost and power.

Of course, the writing had been on the wall before that. In November last year, reports indicated that OpenAI researchers discovered that the upcoming version of its GPT large language model displayed significantly less improvement, and in some cases, no improvements at all than previous versions did over their predecessors.

According to OpenAI’s internal tests, o3 and o4-mini, which are so-called reasoning models, hallucinate more often than the company’s previous reasoning models — o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini — as well as OpenAI’s traditional, “non-reasoning” models, such as GPT-4o.

Perhaps more concerning, the ChatGPT maker doesn’t really know why it’s happening.

In its technical report for o3 and o4-mini, OpenAI writes that “more research is needed” to understand why hallucinations are getting worse as it scales up reasoning models. O3 and o4-mini perform better in some areas, including tasks related to coding and math. But because they “make more claims overall,” they’re often led to make “more accurate claims as well as more inaccurate/hallucinated claims,” per the report.

OpenAI found that o3 hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, the company’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a model’s knowledge about people. That’s roughly double the hallucination rate of OpenAI’s previous reasoning models, o1 and o3-mini, which scored 16% and 14.8%, respectively. O4-mini did even worse on PersonQA — hallucinating 48% of the time.

It’s increasingly common in AI circles to refer to the “DeepSeek moment,” but calling it a moment fundamentally misunderstands its significance. DeepSeek didn’t just have a moment. It’s now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger—and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.

For example, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek’s R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.

Now, researchers at Microsoft's General Artificial Intelligence group have released a new neural network model that works with just three distinct weight values: -1, 0, or 1. Building on top of previous work Microsoft Research published in 2023, the new model's "ternary" architecture reduces overall complexity and "substantial advantages in computational efficiency," the researchers write, allowing it to run effectively on a simple desktop CPU. And despite the massive reduction in weight precision, the researchers claim that the model "can achieve performance comparable to leading open-weight, full-precision models of similar size across a wide range of tasks."

ChatGPT came out in 2022, and the Chinese government declared AI infrastructure a national priority. Over 500 new data centres were announced in 2023 and 2024. Private investors went all-in.

Demand for the data centres turns out not to be there. Around 80% are not actually in use. [MIT Technology Review]

The business model was to rent GPUs. DeepSeek knifed that, much as it did OpenAI. There’s now a lot of cheap GPU in China. Data centre projects are having trouble finding new investment.

The Chinese data centre boom was a real estate deal — many investors pivoted straight from real estate to AI.

Having lived through the early days of the internet frenzy, Fabrice Coquio, senior veep at Digital Realty, which bills itself as the world's largest provider of cloud and carrier-neutral datacenter, colocation and interconnection services, is perhaps better placed than most to venture an opinion. Is there a bubble?

"I have been in this industry for 25 years, so I've seen some ups and downs. At the moment, definitely that's on the very bullish side, particularly because of what people believe will be required for AI," he tells The Register.

Grabbing a box of Kleenex tissues, he quips that back at the turn of the millennium, if investors were told the internet was inside they would have rushed to buy it. "Today I am telling you there is AI inside. So buy it."

"Is there a bubble? Potentially? I see the risk, because when some of the traditional investments in real estate – like housing, logistics and so on – are not that important, people are looking to invest their amazing capacity of available funds in new segments, and they say, 'Oh, why not datacenters?'"

He adds: "In the UK, in France, in Germany, you've got people coming from nowhere having no experiences… that have no idea about what AI and datacenters are really and still investing in them.

"It's the expression of a typical bubble. At the same time, is the driver of AI a big thing? Yes… [with] AI [there] is a sense of incredible productivity for companies and then for individuals. And this might change drastically the way we work, we operate, and we deliver something in a more efficient way.

Nonetheless, if Microsoft's commitment to still spending tens of billions of dollars on data centers is any indication, brute force scaling is still going to be the favored MO for the titans of the industry — while it'll be left to the scrappier startups to scrounge for ways to do more with less.

The IEA’s models project that data centres will use 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030, roughly equivalent to the current annual electricity consumption of Japan. By comparison, data centres consumed 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of the world’s total electricity consumption (see ‘Global electricity growth’).

The projections focus mostly on data centres in general, which also run computing tasks other than AI — although the agency estimated the proportion of data-centre servers devoted to AI. They found that such servers accounted for 24% of server electricity demand and 15% of total data-centre energy demand in 2024.

Source

Alex de Vries, a researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam and the founder of Digiconomist, who was not involved with the report, thinks this is an underestimate. The report “is a bit vague when it comes to AI specifically”, he says.

Even with these uncertainties, “we should be mindful about how much energy is ultimately being consumed by all these data centres”, says de Vries. “Regardless of the exact number, we’re talking several percentage of our global electricity consumption.”

Source

There are reasonable arguments to suggest that AI tools may eventually help reduce emissions, as the IEA report underscores. But what we know for sure is that they’re driving up energy demand and emissions today—especially in the regional pockets where data centers are clustering.

So far, these facilities, which generally run around the clock, are substantially powered through natural-gas turbines, which produce significant levels of planet-warming emissions. Electricity demands are rising so fast that developers are proposing to build new gas plants and convert retired coal plants to supply the buzzy industry.

Putting aside the hype and bluster, OpenAI — as with all generative AI model developers — loses money on every single prompt and output. Its products do not scale like traditional software, in that the more users it gets, the more expensive its services are to run because its models are so compute-intensive.

For example, ChatGPT having 400 million weekly active users is not the same thing as a traditional app like Instagram or Facebook having that many users. The cost of serving a regular user of an app like Instagram is significantly smaller, because these are, effectively, websites with connecting APIs, images, videos and user interactions. These platforms aren’t innately compute-heavy, at least to the same extent as generative AI, and so you don’t require the same level of infrastructure to support the same amount of people.

Conversely, generative AI requires expensive-to-buy and expensive-to-run GPUs, both for inference and training the models themselves. The GPUs must be run at full tilt for both inference and training models, which shortens their lifespan, while also consuming ungodly amounts of energy. And surrounding that GPU is the rest of the computer, which is usually highly-specced, and thus, expensive.

OpenAI, as I've written before, is effectively the entire generative AI industry, with its nearest competitor being less than five percent of its 500 million weekly active users.

Source

Even in a hysterical bubble where everybody is agreeing that this is the future, OpenAI currently requires more money and more compute than is reasonable to acquire. Nobody has ever raised as much as OpenAI needs to, and based on the sheer amount of difficulty that SoftBank is having in raising the funds to meet the lower tranche ($10bn) of its commitment, it may simply not be possible for this company to continue.

Even with extremely preferential payment terms — months-long deferred payments, for example — at some point somebody is going to need to get paid.

I will give Sam Altman credit. He's found many partners to shoulder the burden of the rotten economics of OpenAI, with Microsoft, Oracle, Crusoe and CoreWeave handling the up-front costs of building the infrastructure, SoftBank finding the investors for its monstrous round, and the tech media mostly handling his marketing for him.

He is, however, over-leveraged. OpenAI has never been forced to stand on its own two feet or focus on efficiency, and I believe the constant enabling of its ugly, nonsensical burnrate has doomed this company. OpenAI has acted like it’ll always have more money and compute, and that people will always believe its bullshit, mostly because up until recently everybody has.

OpenAI cannot "make things cheaper" at this point, because the money has always been there to make things more expensive, as has the compute to make larger language models that burn billions of dollars a year. This company is not built to reduce its footprint in any way, nor is it built for a future in which it wouldn't have access to, as I've said before, infinite resources.

I can see OpenAI’s failure having a similar systemic effect. While there is a vast difference between OpenAI’s involvement in people’s lives compared to the millions of subprime loans issued to real people, the stock market’s dependence on the value of the Magnificent 7 stocks (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, NVIDIA and Tesla), and in turn the Magnificent 7’s reliance on the stability of the AI boom narrative still threatens material harm to millions of people, and that’s before the ensuing layoffs.

One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

There are an awful lot of AI newsletters out there, but the two which kept appearing in my X ads were Superhuman AI run by Zain Kahn, and Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown. Both claim to have more than a million subscribers — an impressive figure, given the FT as of February had 1.6mn subscribers across its newsletters.

If you actually read the AI newsletters, it becomes harder to see why anyone’s staying signed up. They offer a simulacrum of tech reporting, with deeper insights or scepticism stripped out and replaced with techno-euphoria. Often they resemble the kind of press release summaries ChatGPT could have written.

Yet AI companies apparently see enough upside to put money into these endeavours. In a 2023 interview, Zayn claimed that advertising spots on Superhuman pull in “six figures a month”. It currently costs $1,899 for a 150-character write-up as a featured tool in the newsletter.
...
“These are basically content slop on the internet and adding very little upside on content value,” a data scientist at one of the Magnificent Seven told me. “It’s a new version of the Indian ‘news’ regurgitation portals which have gamified the SEO and SEM [search engine optimisation and marketing] playbook.”

But newsletters are only the cream of the crop of slopaganda. X now teems with AI influencers willing to promote AI products for minimal sums (the lowest pricing I got was $40 a retweet). Most appear to be from Bangladesh or India, with a smattering of accounts claiming to be based in Australia or Europe. In apparent contravention of X’s paid partnerships policy, none disclose when they’re getting paid to promote content.
...
In its own way, slopaganda exposes that the AI’s emblem is not the Shoggoth but the Ouroboros. It’s a circle of AI firms, VCs backing those firms, talking shops made up of employees of those firms, and the long tail is the hangers-on, content creators, newsletter writers and ‘marketing experts’ willing to say anything for cash.

In February, stock analysts TD Cowen spotted that Microsoft had cancelled leases for new data centres — 200 megawatts in the US, and one gigawatt of planned leases around the world.

Microsoft denied everything. But TD Cowen kept investigating and found another two gigawatts of cancelled leases in the US and Europe. [Bloomberg, archive]

Bloomberg has now confirmed that Microsoft has halted new data centres in Indonesia, the UK, Australia and the US. [Bloomberg, archive]

The Cambridge, UK site was specifically designed to host Nvidia GPU clusters. Microsoft also pulled out of the new Docklands Data Centre in Canary Wharf, London.

In Wisconsin, US, Microsoft had already spent $262 million on construction — but then just pulled the plug.

Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft told CNBC that instead of being “the absolute frontier,” Microsoft now prefers AI models that are “three to six months behind.” [CNBC]

Google has taken up some of Microsoft’s abandoned deals in Europe. OpenAI took over Microsoft’s contract with CoreWeave. [Reuters]

As a result, based on TD Cowen's analysis, Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.
...
In plain English, Microsoft, which arguably has more data than anybody else about the health of the generative AI industry and its potential for growth, has decided that it needs to dramatically slow down its expansion. Expansion which, to hammer the point home, is absolutely necessary for generative AI to continue evolving and expanding.

While there is a pullback in Microsoft's data center leasing, it’s seen a "commensurate rise in demand from Oracle related to The Stargate Project" — a relatively new partnership of "up to $500 billion" to build massive new data centers for AI, led by SoftBank, and OpenAI, with investment from Oracle and MGX, a $100 billion investment fund backed by the United Arab Emirates.

For example, 66% of the electricity used at Google datacenters was matched with renewable energy on an hourly basis in 2021. With historic growth rates, this is likely closer to 70% today. Our LCAs indicate that with 70-75% renewable energy, Scope 3 accounts for close to half of datacenter carbon emissions. Therefore, Scope 3 emissions and embodied carbon are important factors both currently and in the near future.

The Redmond IT giant says that its CO2 emissions are up 29.1 percent from the 2020 baseline, and this is largely due to indirect emissions (Scope 3) from the construction and provisioning of more datacenters to meet customer demand for cloud services.

These figures come from Microsoft's 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report [PDF], which covers the corp's FY2023 ended June 30, 2023. This encompasses a period when Microsoft started ramping up AI support following the explosion of interest in OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Source

Source

Vicky and David will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program. Vicky will focus on the Program's initial goals and how they evolved as the landscape of academic communication changed. David will focus on the Program's technology, how it evolved, and how this history reveals a set of seductive, persistent but impractical ideas.

Introduction (Vicky)

Original Logo

• Don't cost me any money.
• Don't get me into trouble.
• Do what you want

Background (Vicky)

Current Logo

Now, consider a library acquiring information in an electronic format. Such information is almost never, today, sold to a library (under the doctrine of first sale); rather, it is licensed to the library that acquires it, with the terms under which the acquiring library can utilize the information defined by a contract typically far more restrictive than copyright law. The licensing contract typically includes statements that define the user community permitted to utilize the electronic information as well as terms that define the specific uses that this user community may make of the licensed electronic information. These terms typically do not reflect any consideration of public policy decisions such as fair use, and in fact the licensing organization may well be liable for what its patrons do with the licensed information.

Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections
Page 30 (our emphasis)^[0]

1. First, the U.S. LOCKSS Docs Network. The Government Publishing Office (GPO), produces and distributes government documents. In the paper world, the Federal Depository Library Program distributed documents to over 1,000 libraries across the nation. To recall documents, the government had to contact the librarians and ask them to withdraw the materials. It was a transparent process.
   

   Sample Withdrawn GPO Documents Courtesy of James R. Jacobs, Stanford

   This is a sample of withdrawn Federal documents.
   
   Online, there were no censorship guardrails. In 2008 a small group of librarians formed the U. S. Docs LOCKSS network. This program is a digital instantiation of the U.S. Federal Depository Library Program. In partnership with the Government Publishing Office, participating libraries have recreated the distributed, transparent, censor resistant nature of the depository paper system.
   
   
   This is a sample of volumes released this February to the U.S.Docs LOCKSS network
2. Second, the Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network. It consists of 11 academic libraries that use Archive-It (an Internet Archive service) to collect all Canadian federal documents. The collected documents are then moved from the Internet Archive into a local LOCKSS network for distributed safekeeping.
3. Third, the End of Term Web Archive
   
   End of Term Web Archive Partners
   

   • Common Crawl Foundation
   • Environmental Data & Governance Initiative
   • Internet Archive
   • Stanford University Libraries
   • University of North Texas Libraries
   • Webrecorder
   This partnership captures U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. With this last administrative change, thousands of federal web pages and datasets have been taken offline. Federal web sites hold information important to every corner of a university. The End of Term Archive is an extraordinarily important resource. Oddly only two universities partner with Archive-It to do this work: Stanford and the University of North Texas.
4. Last, there are many efforts to capture US data sets. The Data Rescue Project serves as a clearing house.
   

   Data Rescue Project

   The community recently relearned a lesson history failed to teach. Digital preservation's biggest threat is insider attack. In recent months an unknown number of critical government databases are gone, or altered. The antidote to insider attack is multiple copies under multiple stewards. In LOCKSS language, let’s make it easy to find some of the copies, but hard to find all the copies.

12th December 1999

Technology Design (David)

• to model for the Web the way libraries worked on paper,
• to somehow do so within the constraints of contract law and copyright,
• to ensure the system cost was negligible compared to subscription costs.

• It would allow libraries to collect material to which they subscribed from the Web.
• It would allow libraries' readers to access material they had collected.
• It would allow them to preserve their collections against the multiple frailties of digital information.
• It would allow libraries to cooperate, the analog of inter-library loan and copy.

Collect

Access

Preserve

• Disks are not 100% reliable in the short term and are 0% reliable over library timescales. Over time, content in the cache would get corrupted or lost.
• Because libraries were under budget pressure and short of IT resources, the hardware of the LOCKSS box had to be cheap, thus not specially reliable.
• Content in the cache would be seen by humans only in exceptional circumstances, so detecting corruption or loss could not depend upon humans.

Cooperate

Technology Lessons (David)

Format Migration

Internet Archive 10/29/96

Source

Dynamic Content

1st US Web page

Decentralization

Acquire lots of copies. Scatter them around the world so that it is easy to find some of them and hard to find all of them. Lend or copy your copies when other librarians need them.

• Although we always paid a lot of attention to the security of LOCKSS boxes, we understood that a software mono-culture was vulnerable to software supply chain attacks. But it turned out that the things that a LOCKSS box needed to do other than handling the protocol were quite complex, so despite our best efforts we ended up with a software monoculture.
• We hoped that by using the BSD open-source license we would create a diverse community of developers, but we over-estimated the expertise and the resources of the library community, so Stanford provided the overwhelming majority of the programming effort.
• Don Waters was clear that grant funding could not provide the long-term sustainability needed for digital preservation. So he provided a matching grant to fund the transition to being funded by the system's users. This also transitioned the system to being permissioned, as a way to ensure the users paid.
• Although many small and open-access publishers were happy to allow LOCKSS to preserve their content, the oligopoly publishers never were. Eventually they funded a completely closed network of huge systems at major libraries around the world called CLOCKSS. This is merely the biggest of a number of closed, private LOCKSS networks that were established to serve specific genres of content, such as government documents.

Archival Media (David)

Archival Data

Hype

Source & Source

"drive the size of a teacup"

Market Size

Source

Timescales

Customers

Source

The Cloud

Source

Threats

Source

Questions

Source

Footnotes

0. Links to Lynch's Office of Technology Assessment report have been replaced by links to the Wayback Machine's copy collected by the End Of Term Crawl. The original was hosted at the Dept. of Education's ERIC website. The Department is currently at risk of being shut down.
1. In 2006 Vicky predicted that, without collection stewardship, libraries and Starbucks would become indistinguishable. Here is a real Starbucks ad, with one minor addition.
   
   
   
   
   Four years later this prediction came true; Starbucks populated its WiFi networks with a wide range of otherwise pay-walled content such as the Wall Street Journal.
2. Library budgets have struggled with journal costs for close on a century, if not longer!
3. That is, from a legal framework of the "first sale" doctrine and copyright, to one of contract law and copyright.
4. The deployment of IPv6, introduced in December 1995, shows that network protocols are extraordinarily difficult to evolve, because of the need for timely updates to many independent implementations. Format obsolescence implies backwards incompatibility; this is close to impossible in network protocols because it would partition the network. As I discussed in 2012's Formats Through Time, the first two decades of the Web showed that Web formats essentially don't go obsolete.
5. This evanescence comes in two forms, link rot, when links no longer resolve, and content drift, when they resolve to different content.
6. People's experience of the reliability of their personal data storage is misleading. Reliable, affordable long-term storage at Web scale is an interesting engineering problem.
7. The irony of this was that format migration was a technique of which Rothenberg’s article disapproved:
   

   Finally, [format migration] suffers from a fatal flaw. ... Shifts of this kind make it difficult or impossible to translate old documents into new standard forms.

8. The first US Web page has been resuscitated by the Stanford Library.
9. At least the journals we archived were not malicious; they had actual content that was the same for everybody. That different readers saw different ads was of interest only to students of advertising. But the opportunity to confine readers in a tailored bubble has turned out to be profitable but disastrous.
10. Van Jacobson and a team at PARC started a long-term project called Content-Centric Network and gave a 2006 Google Tech Talk about it. In 2013's Moving vs. Copying I described the difference thus:
    
    • The goal of IP and the layers above is to move data. There is an assumption that, in the normal case, the bits vanish from the sender once they have been transported, and also from any intervening nodes.
    • The goal of CCN is to copy data. A successful CCN request creates a locally accessible copy of some remote content. It says nothing about whether in the process other (cached) copies are created, or whether the content is deleted at the source. None of that is any concern of the CCN node making the request, they are configuration details of the underlying network. While it has its copy, the CCN node can satisfy requests from other nodes for that content, it is a peer-to-peer network.
    Basing networking on the copy-ability of bits rather than the transmissibility of bits makes a huge simplification. In particular, it means that, unlike in IP-based networks but like in BitTorrent, caches (and thus digital preservation) just work. In CCN all replicas of the same content have the same name as the original; which of them satisfies a request is determined by the CCN network's routing at request time. If the content changes, so does its name. In CCN, the analogs of routers in an IP network are caches, holding recently accessed content and supplying it on request. Some of them are archives, caches that are never flushed like our vision for LOCKSS boxes. Just like routers, unless something goes wrong they are invisible.

11. Subsystem	Bitcoin	Ethereum
    Mining	5	3
    Client	1	1
    Developer	5	2
    Exchange	5	5
    Node	3	4
    Owner	456	72

    The Nakamoto coefficient is the number of units in a subsystem you need to control 51% of that subsystem. Because decentralization applies at each layer of a system's stack, it is necessary to measure each of the subsystems individually. In 2017's Quantifying Decentralization Srinivasan and Lee identified a set of subsystems for public blockchains, and measured them using their proposed "Nakamoto Coefficient". Their table of the contemporary Nakamoto coefficients for Bitcoin and Ethereum makes the case that they were only minimally decentralized.
    
    
    

    Source

    There is an even bigger problem for Ethereum since the blockchain switched to Proof-of-Stake. The software that validators run is close to a mono-culture. Two of the minor players have recently suffered bugs that took them off-line, as Sam Kessler reports in Bug That Took Down 8% of Ethereum's Validators Sparks Worries About Even Bigger Outage:
    

    A bug in Ethereum's Nethermind client software – used by validators of the blockchain to interact with the network – knocked out a chunk of the chain's key operators on Sunday.
    ...
    Nethermind powers around 8% of the validators that operate Ethereum, and this weekend's bug was critical enough to pull those validators offline. ... the Nethermind incident followed a similar outage earlier in January that impacted Besu, the client software behind around 5% of Ethereum's validators.
    ...
    Around 85% of Ethereum's validators are currently powered by Geth, and the recent outages to smaller execution clients have renewed concerns that Geth's dominant market position could pose grave consequences if there were ever issues with its programming.
    ...
    Cygaar cited data from the website execution-diversity.info noting that popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance and Kraken all rely on Geth to run their staking services. "Users who are staked in protocols that run Geth would lose their ETH" in the event of a critical issue," Cygaar wrote.

    Remember "no-one ever gets fired for buying IBM"? At the Ethereum layer, it is "no-one ever gets fired for using Geth" because, if there was ever a big problem with Geth, the blame would be so widely shared.
12. Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, pointed out in The Meaning of Decentralization:

    In the case of blockchain protocols, the mathematical and economic reasoning behind the safety of the consensus often relies crucially on the uncoordinated choice model, or the assumption that the game consists of many small actors that make decisions independently. ... However, can we really say that the uncoordinated choice model is realistic when 90% of the Bitcoin network’s mining power is well-coordinated enough to show up together at the same conference?

    What Buterin is saying is that because decentralized systems in the real world are not composed of "many small actors that make decisions independently", there is nothing to stop the small number of large actors colluding, and thus acting as a centralized system.

13. By Pkirlin CC BY-SA 3.0 Source

    How long should the archived data last? The Long Now Foundation is building the Clock of the Long Now, intended to keep time for 10,000 years:
    

    Ten thousand years is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism.

    They would like to accompany it with a 10,000-year archive. That is at least two orders of magnitude longer than I am talking about here. We are only just over three-quarters of a century from the first stored-program computer, so designing a digital archive for a century is a very ambitious goal. Note that the design of the Clock of the Long Now is as much social as technical. It is designed to motivate infrequent but continual pilgrimages:
    

    On days when visitors are there to wind it, the calculated melody is transmitted to the chimes, and if you are there at noon, the bells start ringing their unique one-time-only tune. The 10 chimes are optimized for the acoustics of the shaft space, and they are big.
    
    Finally, way out of breath, you arrive at the primary chamber. Here is the face of the Clock. A disk about 8 feet in diameter artfully displays the natural cycles of astronomical time, the pace of the stars and the planets, and the galactic time of the Earth’s procession. If you peer deep into the Clock’s workings you can also see the time of day.
    
    But in order to get the correct time, you need to “ask” the clock. When you first come upon the dials the time it displays is an older time given to the last person to visit. If no one has visited in a while, say, since 8 months and 3 days ago, it will show the time it was then. To save energy, the Clock will not move its dials unless they are turned, that is, powered, by a visitor. The Clock calculates the correct time, but will only display the correct time if you wind up its display wheel.

14. It is noteworthy that in 2023 Optical Archival (OD-3), the most recent archive-only medium, was canceled for lack of a large enough market. It was a 1TB optical disk, an upgrade from Blu-Ray.
15. No medium is perfect. They all have a specified Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate (UBER) rate. For example, typical disk UBERs are 10^-15. A petabyte is 8*10¹⁵ bits, so if the drive is within its specified performance you can expect up to 8 errors when reading a petabyte. The specified UBER is an upper limit, you will normally see far fewer. The UBER for LT09 tape is 10^-20, so unrecoverable errors on a new tape are very unlikely. But not impossible, and the rate goes up steeply with tape wear.
    
    The property that classifies a medium as quasi-immortal is not that its reliability is greater than regular media to start with, although as with tape it may be. It is rather that its reliability decays more slowly than that of regular media. Thus archival systems need to use erasure coding to mitigate both UBER data loss and media failures such as disk crashes and tape wear-out.

A group of data journalists from Nepal take part in an Open Data Editor training session. Photo: OKNP

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) is happy to announce the release of Open Data Editor (ODE) 1.4.0, the latest version of our new desktop application for data practitioners to detect errors in tables.

ODE is an easy-to-use, open-source alternative to proprietary data wrangling tools, designed for accessibility and learning – no coding skills required. It finds common spreadsheet errors before you start your analysis, runs on any machine, works offline, respects your privacy, and keeps you in full control of your data, with no vendor lock-in. It also comes with a free online course that can help you make your datasets better, therefore making your life/work easier.

In the short time since the first stable release in December 2024, the application has already had a significant impact among civil society organisations, activists, data journalists and public servants in all parts of the world. Read more about the impact and some use cases here.

Installation

If you have the Open Data Editor’s previous versions installed on your computer, please note that the update will not be done automatically. You will need to download it again using the links in the buttons below.

Take the course: Learn how to use ODE

What’s New

The new main screen (this one above from the macOS version) now allows infinite scrolling, among other improvements

ODE has been migrated to a different architecture, which significantly improves the user experience and adds features that have been identified as essential in the various feedback sessions and pilots we have been running over the last few months.

New Architecture: Built on PySide6 (a simpler framework), it facilitates a more agile work around improvements and changes.

Infinite Scroll: We removed pagination. Now you don’t have to click to move to the next page and explore data in full. The new version incorporates infinite scroll to help you navigate your tables.

Easier Download: We made communication improvements to help you download ODE without going through GitHub. The ODE now has a brand new landing page with everything you need to know to use the app.

Built-in Error Correction: You can now correct errors directly from the Errors Report panel, while in the past this feature just offered an overview of all errors grouped by categories.

Direct Error Detection: Now files are read and validated directly when you click on them. This increases the speed with which you can detect errors in your tables (but can cause a slower experience when working on big files).

Clearer View: The main Datatable View is now an accurate representation of the file contents, and column names are no longer a mix of data and metadata as before.

Features to simplify your work

The Open Data Editor isn’t another complex data tool – it’s your shortcut to better data and improved data literacy.

Here are a few tasks that ODE 1.4.0 can help you with:

Detect errors in spreadsheets in a matter of seconds

Check if the data formats in your columns are correct

Learn data skills with an intuitive tool

Here is how organisations across the world are using ODE:

Observatoire des armements is working with defence spending data

The Demography Project is focusing on water, air quality and electoral data

Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya Initiative (BHKi) is working with genomic data and metadata

City of Zagreb is tackling the challenges of working with infrastructure data

Open Knowledge Nepal is working with local governments and their infrastructure data

Learn more

2025: A New Phase for the Open Data Editor

After a complete overhaul of the app’s objectives last year, the tool has been in a new phase of development since the beginning of 2025. Our goal this year is to improve accessibility and enhance digital literacy through no-code tools like ODE.

That’s why we are simplifying its architecture, improving the way metadata and errors are communicated, and intensifying pilots and socialisation activities to encourage ODE’s adoption among people and groups without coding skills. 

Improvements in the artificial intelligence integration will be another key focus for this year: our team will seek to replace the current model, based on OpenAI, with an open, local model with open source LLMs. 

What’s Next

The new version 1.4.0 represents a major milestone in improving the Open Data Editor experience and performance. But, of course, we still have a long way to go to enable anyone, regardless of their educational background, to improve the quality of their data and therefore improve their data literacy.

Here are some issues that will be addressed in the following releases:

Metadata Panel: We realise that this feature isn’t intuitive enough for people without coding skills. Many people reported being afraid to change the metadata parameters out of unfamiliarity – something the app still doesn’t help with. In the next few months, we will combine this feedback with a complete UX assessment by an external consultant.

Publishing Feature: Publishing data after it has been cleaned is a powerful feature of ODE, but it still doesn’t work fully. For now it’s only possible to publish data on GitHub, and we’ll be working over the next few months to enable publishing on data portal software such as Zenodo and CKAN.

More Feedback: Following our The Tech We Want vision, we want to develop technology that works for people and is good enough to solve real-world problems. With the 1.4.0 version now released, our team will now step back from our desks to listen again to people and organisation’s needs in a new phase of user research.

In addition to these main areas, we will also work on solving the issues listed in the project roadmap.

If you have any questions or want any additional information about ODE, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.

Funding

All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.

Earlier this month, Jessy at Library Shenanigans posted some charming onomatopetic instructions for circ workers performing checkins at a freshly-automated library in the 1990s. The “Doot-doot” and “Deedle-deedle-dee” are delightful. They may have been a little annoying. But what struck me about the post is that they solve a problem I’ve been aware of for a good 15+ years. And they did so a good decade before I first recall encountering it.

The Problem: Popups, Barcodes, and Returns

Many library systems use popups to indicate various important item-level conditions that should be addressed after checkin. Maybe a book should be routed to a new location. Maybe it needs to go to the bindery. Maybe it’s on hold for someone. You clear it by clicking a button or pressing the “Enter/Return” key.

But while in an ideal world you’d be giving the screen full attention when checking in, that just doesn’t happen. Circ desks are busy places. Library back rooms are busy places.

The act of scanning a barcode also triggers the “Return” keyboard action.¹ Scanning a barcode isn’t just the equivalent of typing it in, it’s the equivalent of typing it in and pressing your Return/Enter key to submit it to the system.

Checkin enough materials with enough going on around you and the following scenario will happen:

You scan an item. A popup appears on your screen with important information. You are distracted by something. You scan the next item without checking. The system does not process the barcode. It processes the Return. It dismisses the message.

The result is: Your first item is checked in but you haven’t acted on the note. Your second item is not checked in because all it did was clear the popup. Issues with both items only show up later on when a supposedly-routed item never returns or a patron complains that they returned the second item.

I first recall becoming aware of this issue while working at Hyattsville’s public library 17 years ago, using Geac PLUS. I don’t know if I just didn’t do enough checkin at Newark (I was a page and did checkin only when they were backed up) or was just too young to notice it. Fortunately, some of the time you catch it by looking at the screen and noticing that the item in your hand isn’t in the list of checkins. Or the next thing it needs has triggered a print action and you hear the receipt printer spit out a routing slip.

The Solution

That printer noise is the one reliable notification I’ve ever experienced. But the mid-90s system whose documentation is shared in Library Shenanigans had it on lock:

• Deedle-deedle-dee? Holding shelf
• Beep-beep-beep? Belongs to another library
• Doot-doot? Temporary item, set aside to be handled.

Those aren’t the only reasons I’ve experienced popups, but that covers quite a few of them!

The Question: Where Did it Go?

The whole thing was on my mind because when I was doing my research interviews last year, several folks brought it up as a flaw in the system. It’s not my job during those interviews to explain something like “oh this is shared with much older GUI systems.” But while I know it’s not an Alma issue, they’re also not wrong that it’s a problem in the system!²

So why don’t more of us have this?

Was it specific to a scanner vendor and system?

Was it too annoying? Did it disappear in the era of the GUI desktop client?

Are there still ways to set it up?

If I still had a site with comments, I’d ask people if their library has managed to do anything like this. If you have, hit me up via my contact page or on social media because I would love to hear about it!

This week I migrated my virtual server from Digital Ocean, where I pay in USD, to a host in Australia, where the punishing and ever-worse currency exchange rate doesn't make monthly bills a lottery.

This is the third or fourth time I've gone through a server migration, so it's a little less daunting than it has been in the past, but every time there is a new, exciting problem to tackle. I'm not a professional system administrator so things that might seem basic to others can be quite challenging for me.

This post is about one of those – migrating my self-hosted Forgejo git repository . Forgejo actually has very good documentation, which is less typical than we might hope in FOSS projects. The guide to installation is quite thorough and explains what each step is doing and why it is needed. The guide to upgrading is also pretty good, and includes a section on how to make a backup – they even created a CLI command to do this: forgejo dump. Unfortunately, how to restore from the backup is left as an exercise for the reader.

At some point in the future someone else is going to want to migrate their Forgejo install from one server to another, and not know how to do it. This blog post is for that person so they don't need to go through as much trial and error as I did. Let's be real – that person is probably me again, two years in the future.

Assumptions and caveats

This guide assumes:

• you are running Forgejo on a Linux server and want to migrate it to another Linux server
• you are using the binary rather than Docker
• you are using sqlite as your database
• you have root access to both servers

Your backup and new file structures may be slightly different, depending on which version you are moving to and from. This is what worked for me.

Step 1: make a backup

On your "old" server, first make a backup of forgejo. Forgejo provides instructions for this but there are a few assumptions made, and they caught me out.

To run a backup, you can use forgejo dump. However there some conditions required to make this work properly.

First of all, if you followed the official the installation instructions you will be running forgejo with the git user, and that user will not have a password and not be able to use sudo. That makes it difficult to run forgejo commands as directly as you might expect. To run a clean dump we need to:

1. run the command as the git user with sudo -u git forgejo command --argument
2. run dump from a directory where the git user has write access (the fact you're using sudo won't override this requirement)
3. explicitly declare both the config location and the working-path
4. nominate a tmp directory that git has permission to write to
5. declare your database type

The default temporary file location is /tmp, which probably is owned by root, so you can create a directory to use instead:

sudo -u git mkdir /home/git/tmp

Then move into the git home directory so your git user can save the export file:

cd /home/git

Now you should be able to run a dump with a command like this:

sudo -u git forgejo dump -c /etc/forgejo/app.ini -w /var/lib/forgejo/ -t /home/git/tmp -d sqlite3

You can find out more about what these flags do with:

sudo -u git forgejo dump --help

You should now have a file called something like forgejo-dump-1744939469.zip.

Step 2: move your backup

You may have your own system worked out for transfering files between your old and new server. If you haven't worked this out yet and your files are not enormous, an easy way to do it is to use scp with your local machine as an intermediary.

To do this successfully, you need a user with the same name on all three machines, with permission to read and write all the files you're moving. On your old server, move the zip file out of the git user's directory and into your main user's home directory, then change the ownership:

sudo cp forgejo-dump-1744939469.zip /home/hugh/
sudo chown hugh:hugh /home/hugh/forgejo-dump-1744939469.zip