Helen Keller struggled to write the story of her life as an adult. Knowing it had to go through her close associates, she tried to balance her radical politics with broad appeals for support for blind people, omit the role of her “Teacher”‘s marital woes in her household turmoil, and weigh her words carefully on her failed attempts (reported in the press) to elope with a lover when her family objected to her marrying. Her Midstream becomes public domain in 42 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
The Tech We Want Summit took place between 17 and 18 October 2024 – in total, 43 speakers from 23 countries interacted with 700+ registered people about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting, and focused on solving people’s real problems.
In this series of posts, OKFN brings you the documentation of each session, opening the content generated during these two intense days of reflection and joint work accessible and open.
Above is the video and below is a summary of the topics discussed in:
With the skills that the panellists have, it would be easier to work for the mainstream tech industry and just go with the flow. But they’ve all chosen a different path: making software that makes sense. In this conversation, we’ll share the trajectories of some open, free/libre, and alternative technologies, and discuss how to tip the scales in our favour amidst a solutionist discourse in an ultra-specialised industry.
The discussions focus on building sustainable, community-driven technology, the importance of open source hardware and software, and overcoming challenges such as the affordability of technical talent and the sustainability of open source initiatives. Key themes include the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, the role of education in software freedom, and the different challenges faced in different regions. Panellists also emphasise the need for community support, innovative funding models, and continued efforts to realise the tech we want that meets local and global needs.
Last week, we had the opportunity to participate in the Annual Members Meeting of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) in Singapore. The meeting is a space for all members of the Alliance to get together once a year to discuss agendas, updates, next steps and participate in discussions about the future of Digital Public Goods. It was also great to formally welcome new members, such as Open Future and the Government of Uruguay, and spend some time with our friends of Creative Commons with whom we shared some panels and interventions.
We had a pretty busy week, participating in several panels and workshops:
DPGs are a Prerequisite to Solve Climate Change
With Creative Commons (CC) we shared how open knowledge is critical for addressing climate change. The session also introduced the Open Goes COP initiative, promoting open data and DPGs in climate discussions.
Fully Open Public Interest AI with Open Data
Together with Open Future, Creative Commons, and ITS-Rio, we discussed the role of Public and Openness in the current context of AI development.
Latin American Lunch
We had an energetic meal with attendees from eight different Latin American countries. We discussed how to advance DPGs in the region and how we can collaborate to tackle specific challenges in the regional context.
Privacy Best Practices for DPGs
With the DPGA team, we facilitated a workshop to gather feedback on the initiative to improve indicator 7 of the standard on Privacy Best Practices. It was a vibrant conversation about properly handling sensitive data in maintaining our DPGs.
The event was full of interesting discussions and topics that for the sake of length we are not going to cover today. However, we want to highlight two main remarks of the event: Call for Collaborations and Owning What We Buy.
Call For Collaborations
We are excited that the Alliance is promoting four Calls for Collaborations that are quite aligned with OKFN’s mission. They are yet to be announced but we can summarise them as follows:
Call for governments and organisations to incorporate open-source first principles as part of how they implement and fund digitalisation processes.
Call for DPGs that can make identifying, preparing, and using existing open data at scale easier.
Call for 250 million USD to finance DPGs that enable the implementation of safe, inclusive and interoperable DPI can be supported until 2030. Regarding this call in particular, we at OKFN think it is potentially limiting and biased towards the universe of solutions around the limited DPI definition (IDs, Payments and Data Exchange) leaving other critical infrastructure behind. Also, it is still to see how this funding will come, from which entities and under which conditions.
Call for high-quality earth observation DPGs to help diverse groups of stakeholders monitor, mitigate and adapt to climate change and its impacts.
Owning What We Buy
In one of our panels, Cable Green, Director of Open Education at Creative Commons, shared an interesting phrase: “Buy what you need, Own what you buy, Share what you own.” This idea caught the attention of the event and was used by the CEO of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, Liv Nordhaug, in the Closing Plenary. It’s a very powerful synthesising phrase that relates directly to The Tech We Want vision that we’ve been developing at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If put into practice, it could contribute to our collective efforts to organise an alternative stack of technologies that are more useful, simpler, more durable and focused on solving people’s real problems.
All in all, and in conclusion, we are more than happy to see the spirit of the Commons on the main stage and at the centre of the conversations around Digital Public Goods.
The fundamental problem of autonomous vehicles sharing roads is that until you get to Level 5, you have a hand-off problem. The closer you get to Level 5, the worse the hand-off problem.
Simply put, if you give a human brain the option to perform other tasks than the one at hand, it will do so. No law, no amount of training, and no insistence by the manufacturer of an automobile will alter this fact. It's human nature, immalleable. So until and unless Tesla can robustly and credibly promise an autopilot that will imagine every threat a human could imagine, and can use the same level of caution as the best human driver would use, then the world will be better off without this feature.
Follow me below the fold for an update on the hand-off problem.
The 737 MAX crashes were a specific, especially difficult, case of the hand-off problem. It wasn't that the automation recognized a situation it couldn't cope with and initiated a hand-off to the humans. It was that the automation was wrong about the situation and the pilots had to decide to override it:
In testing performed in a simulator, Boeing test pilots recreated the conditions aboard Lion Air Flight 610 when it went down in the Java Sea in October, killing 189 people. The tests showed that the crew of the 737 MAX 8 would have only had 40 seconds to respond to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System’s (MCAS’s) attempts to correct a stall that wasn’t happening before the aircraft went into an unrecoverable dive, according to a report by The New York Times.
While the test pilots were able to correct the issue with the flip of three switches, their training on the systems far exceeded that of the Lion Air crew—and that of the similarly doomed Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed earlier this month. The Lion Air crew was heard on cockpit voice recorders checking flight manuals in an attempt to diagnose what was going on moments before they died.
"In the crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 landing in San Francisco in 2013, investigators determined that a contributing factor was the pilots’ over-reliance on automated systems which led to an erosion in their flying skills. The investigation of the fatal flight of an Air France Airbus A330 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009 led to the conclusion that the complexity of the fly-by-wire airplane befuddled the pilots.
The 737 Max probes suggest another variation on the conundrum: Technology intended to protect against pilot error trapped the pilots. Helpless in the cockpit, they were unable to do as Captain Sully did and save the day."
The study was conducted on model year 2018–2022 vehicles, and focused on crashes between 2017 and 2022 that resulted in occupant fatalities. Tesla vehicles have a fatal crash rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven, according to the study; Kia is second with a rate of 5.5, and Buick rounds out the top three with a 4.8 rate. The average fatal crash rate for all cars in the United States is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven.
How is this possible when "Autopilot" is standard on Teslas? The analyst behind the study explains:
So, why are Teslas — and many other ostensibly safe cars on the list — involved in so many fatal crashes? “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer said in the report. “A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”
Precisely. It seems very likely that, lulled by the experience of being cocooned in high-tech safety systems, the drivers were not focused or alert, ready to take over from the automation in a split second when danger threatened.
The hardboiled detective genre arose in Black Mask magazine. Once considered disposable, its pulp issues are now hard to find. Dashiell Hammett‘s first two novels there, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, gained staying power when revised versions came out as books in 1929.
Hammett’s Sam Spade debuted in The Maltese Falcon, published in 5 installments in Black Mask ending in the January 1930 issue. That issue went on sale in 1929, so it’ll all be public domain in 43 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Research libraries are changing rapidly, responding to institutional priorities and reputation management needs, including growing support for managing a wide range of “inside-out” collections for global audiences. This creates new challenges, opportunities, and risks for library leaders and workers at all levels, as library work evolves.
The OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) convened members on 10 September 2024 to consider the ways libraries are changing, and the need for library teams to adapt and upskill—in other words, “futureproof”—their work. Helen Williams, Metadata Manager, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), shared insights from her experience facilitating positive change at her institution. Thirty-six librarians from 30 institutions in the UK, US, and Canada participated in the discussion.
Futureproofing is a term that describes efforts to make a product, system, or role unlikely to become obsolete in the future. When considering the work of her metadata team, Helen concluded that “. . . if we just kept doing what we were doing, within a few years’ time we would not have a lot to do.”
“. . . if we just kept doing what we were doing, within a few years’ time we would not have a lot to do.”
Helen Williams, LSE
Changes in both the scholarly communications and metadata ecosystems, and in collection development more broadly, mean that metadata teams in many institutions need to diversify their portfolio beyond metadata for print and electronic library collections. It’s not just about examining and changing work activities. A critical part of futureproofing library teams is communicating the transferability of core skills like metadata management and increasing their visibility so that stakeholders will understand and support teams in their evolving roles.
External catalysts of change
Helen described several factors impacting libraries, and in particular, her metadata team:
Alignment with institutional strategy. LSE’s 2030 strategy, published in 2021, has three priorities focused around education, research, and developing LSE for everyone. More than ever, research libraries, and their component teams, must align with the goals of their parent institution, particularly in support of education, research, and impact.
Structural changes within the library. The LSE metadata team was previously part of the library’s Content and Discovery Group, charged with the management of scholarly content. This changed in 2020, when the metadata team became part of the Digital Scholarship and Innovation group, which offered a broader remit to develop digital services and explore new ways of supporting research, learning, and teaching in a digital environment.
The pandemic’s acceleration of the digital shift in the workplace. When the coronavirus pandemic arrived in early 2020, Helen estimated that about 50% of her team’s work was spent on tasks that could only be completed on campus. This instantly became impossible, forcing a rapid pivot to work that could be completed off-site. Her team needed to do work that was visible, valuable, and in support of institutional goals.
Evolving metadata trends and practices. Recognizing changing library practices, the team familiarized themselves with developments like linked data, persistent identifiers, and metadata as a service, and considered how to initiate change in these areas, using OCLC Research publications likeTransitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata as a guide.
In addition to Helen’s list, our group discussion identified yet another:
Resource scarcity. Resource constraints and even budget cuts can also catalyze change, as institutions must make difficult decisions about what to prioritize, and equally important, what to stop doing.
Changing library collections means changing library work
Changing library collections practices are also a critical driver of change for library teams. The pandemic accelerated the shift to ebooks from print, requiring less cataloging by metadata teams. And there has also been a steady shift from the previously dominant model of “outside-in” collections, where materials like books and journals are licensed or purchased from external sources and made available to local users. Instead, they have moved toward a new “inside-out” paradigm, which prioritizes the sharing of unique institutional materials (e.g., research and learning materials, researcher profiles, and digitized special collections) with external audiences. Inside-out collections have emerged as an important differentiator for libraries and their parent institutions (see previous OCLC research that documents these changing collections directions).
Increasing emphasis on research support
The LSE metadata team has responded to this collections reorientation, as it has shifted from primarily managing print and electronic collections to also actively supporting institutional research, teaching, and learning in a digital environment. This means greater collaboration with the Open Research Services team, working in partnership to manage research outputs and researcher identities, including:
Research outputs metadata. Metadata librarians increasingly support metadata creation for a broad range of institutional research outputs, enabling greater FAIRness and discoverability on the network. This work usually requires working in close collaboration with new partners working in open research roles.
Persistent identifiers. The LSE metadata team has assumed responsibility for the management of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for the library and campus, giving PIDs a stable institutional home. They have also worked with other library and campus units to support ORCID integration with the Current Research Information System (CRIS).
Institutional reputation management. LSE has experimented with Wikidata as a method for making institutional outputs, such as theses and dissertations, more broadly discoverable to global audiences. As a result, LSE has partnered with the University of York to co-publish a Wikidata Thesis Toolkit, to help other institutions do likewise.
Maintaining can create resource challenges
Even as research libraries have increased focus on inside-out collections, outside-in collections must still be maintained, increasingly in partnership with other libraries in new collective collection efforts where multiple libraries collaborate to manage and share their collections as a unified resource. Collective collection efforts can create a renewed focus on print collections and their metadata, particularly due to the need to identify rare and unique items that would be candidates for retention commitments. One discussion participant at a large UK institution described how this effort has surfaced concerns about the quality and completeness of legacy catalog records, their inadequacy to support retention decisions, and the need to invest in metadata remediation to make the records fit for this new purpose.
This example highlights a core challenge for libraries and librarians: How do they adapt and upskill to support new initiatives while also maintaining legacy activities?
This is a crucial question because pursuing collective collection efforts requires considerable time, not only to address catalog metadata, but also to consider the stewardship of each physical object. Should it be on open shelves? Should it be shared with other UK institutions (and beyond)? Should it be digitized? As discussion participants acknowledged, this work is also largely invisible and underappreciated, as it may not be seen as aligning directly to core institutional priorities.
Helen offered several strategies and tactics that she has applied at LSE to help her team adapt its work, value proposition, and collaborations, but are relevant to library teams everywhere:
Articulate alignment with institutional goals. Helen leveraged a “purpose tree” (also called a “goal tree”) model which clearly defined the team’s mission, vision, and strategy, in alignment with LSE strategic priorities. Not only did this document outline a strategic direction for her unit, but it also articulated the value proposition of the metadata team to the library and campus. The purpose tree was used to increase awareness of individual contributions and to foster enthusiasm for the shared mission.
Make the invisible visible. Transparency and visibility were crucial for building trust within the team and showcasing the value of metadata expertise to the broader institution. Helen shared the purpose tree with others in the library, receiving positive feedback from colleagues who appreciated the insights into the metadata team’s work and value proposition. This is also an example of developing greater “social interoperability“ with other units.
Monitor global trends to inform skills development. Staying abreast of developments in the library, the institution, the global metadata environment, and higher education was essential for identifying areas for skill development and adaptation. For example, recognizing a shift in metadata work that requires the ability to bulk edit large sets of metadata, or to automate routine tasks, the metadata team joined the Library’s Data Shapers Community of Practice, sharing expertise with, and learning from, colleagues. Through this group they organized training on OpenRefine and SPARQL, investigated Python training options, and explored AI tools.
Embrace a culture of experimentation. Helen encouraged her team to actively seek opportunities to step outside their comfort zones and experiment with new areas of work. This involved seizing opportunities to engage in new initiatives, both within and beyond the library. As part of this effort, the team cultivated and optimized new efficiencies in current areas of work to release capacity for new initiatives.
Reposition the team as a collaborative partner. Helen strategically repositioned the metadata team as a collaborative partner, extending their reach and influence beyond traditional roles. She worked to transform existing relationships with other library teams from service provider to true collaborative partnerships as well as proactively conducting a stakeholder analysis to identify potential collaborators and intersections with metadata work across the library. Through these efforts, the metadata team was able to expand their portfolio and demonstrate the transferability of their skills to a wider audience. They assumed management of persistent identifiers for the library, engaged in collaborative cross-library working groups, and are exploring how to provide computational access to collections metadata in machine and human readable formats.
Extend the library beyond the library. Research libraries are increasingly engaged in the university research enterprise, frequently in collaboration with other campus stakeholders. As a result, library expertise and capacities are being combined with those of other campus units, metaphorically extending the library beyond the library in new ways. For example, at LSE, the metadata team engaged in institutional projects that support institutional reputation management, such as supporting the global reach and impact of the widely respected LSE Blogs, and contributing to a website project for the campus. These collaborations increased the team’s visibility and demonstrated the value of metadata expertise in diverse contexts. Extending the library beyond the library is the topic of a current OCLC research project.
Futureproofing is everyone’s job
Participants had a lively discussion about the need for leadership at all levels of the organization, concluding that adaptation is everyone’s responsibility:
Senior leaders must recognize the changing landscape and support experimentation and adaptation. This includes providing resources and support for a culture of experimentation and learning.
Individuals and teams must demonstrate a willingness to adapt, experiment, and develop new skills, which can also mean working in new knowledge domains and with new partners. This effort is rewarded with a much wider remit and skill set.
I’m curious about how you, your team, and/or your library is responding to change and futureproofing library roles. Please share a comment or send me an email.
This report maps the current threats and opportunities facing the open movement, based on the ongoing work of the organisations behind the Common(s) Cause event, which took place in Katowice, Poland; as a pre-conference event for Wikimania 2024 on 6 August, 2024.
One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing.
Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures.
The event gathered over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom travelled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organisations who were represented at the event.
Participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organisations working closely together.
The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organisations’ strategies, the socio-technological zeitgeist, and current policy opportunities, such as:
(Re)defining openness in a new technological era.
Creation of a shared advocacy strategy and enhanced regional and thematic cooperation across the organisations.
Developing and testing governance approaches for our digital commons.
Advancing openness and sustainability for the technology, data, content, and governance of Digital Public Infrastructure.
This report is a starting point and serves as an invitation to the wider open community to join these causes as well as to formulate their own, which could then be backed by other organisations. The next step in this process will be disseminating its findings, hopefully resulting in further backing and refinement of the causes and additional feedback from the wider community, which this small convening could not fully represent.
In October I attended the Fantastic Futures conference in Canberra. Fantastic Futures is organised by AI4LAM, and brings together people from archives, libraries and museums to talk about how they are, or could be, using machine learning and other "AI" tools in their work.
When I arrived – indeed even when I booked to attend – I was feeling pretty jaded with AI. It has, of course, been the unavoidable topic of the last two years. But when I the headline speakers were announced, I felt reassured. These are people I respect and in some cases know. They are thoughtful people deeply concerned about ongoing injustices and colonialism. There were certainly people speaking at and attending the conference who are enthusiasts and see the only ethical problem with AI being simply to ensure everyone has access to the tools. But the vibe of the conference was summed up in a phrase that started to bounce around the various talks: "Slow AI". This was particularly ironic given that several presentations were about projects with very tight externally-imposed deadlines for delivering something. But nearly everyone – including the people working on those projects – seemed to committed to doing things right rather than merely fast.
Peter-Lucas Jones and Kathy Reid set the tone at the very beginning, with a nuanced and thoughful conversation about the promise, dangers and weaknesses of automated speech-to-text (and to a lesser extent, text-to-speech) systems – with a particular focus on OpenAI's Whisper model. Peter-Lucas Jones leads Te Hiku Media, a Māori owned company that started as a community radio station but now seems to be an intriguing cross between a media company, software startup, language preservation organisation, and activist centre. Kathy has researched the diversity (or lack thereof) in language model training data. She showed some interesting data showing the same strong bias we see in many cultural products - the median voice in the training data is a 21-year old Ohio man, and the further from that one is, the more errors will be made when transcribing and interpreting. Peter-Lucas gave us an astounding example of this when he said that models coming out of Silicon Valley – by their own admission – were only 50% accurate for translating Te Reo Māori into English. This was the trigger for Te Hiki to start building their own models.
I was planning to do a brief write up of some of the sessions, but what I came away with from the conference wasn't really a list of interesting projects to find out more about. What I got was a new sense of the questions GLAM workers should ask about AI.
Grant Heinrich from the National Film and Sound Archive (who hosted the conference) told us about their "Bowerbird" project, attempting to build a speech recognition model based on Whisper but specific to the Australian accent. It sounds like they didn't really manage to do that, but they did train it to recognise Australian place names and other particular Australianisms. NFSA holds thirty linear years of audio, of which twenty linear years is accessible for automated transcription. They are working to do this in a way that allows them to do named entity recognition. This would allow transcriptions to, for example, record when Paul Keating is speaking about Wollongong. Someone interested in either of those named entities can then search across the collection and find the exact time Paul Keating mentioned Wollongong in the clip. This is the kind of thing that could be done entirely manually, but ...twenty linear years is a lot of audio, and NFSA's funding has been, let us say, "inconsistent" over the years.
I had a conversation with some people in the breaks about navigating the ethics of all this. Are there ethical uses of AI? Is there a point at which all the problematic issues are balanced out by the benefits – and who gets to decide that? Does it make a difference if the thing we want to do would in practical terms be impossible without the use of AI, not merely a bit less efficient? As well as the NFSA project, another example of this that I think is more problematic (though still an interesting experiment) is a trial the National Library of Australia have run. The NLA holds a large quantity of images with essentially no descriptive metadata. That is, they may have metadata about who the artist or photographer is, and perhaps the name of the image if it has one, but not a description of the image itself. This is extremely limiting from a discovery point of view, since it's difficult to do an effective search along the lines of "show me every image that includes a steam train". NLA is experimenting with a possible solution to this by running image-to-text tools over a small "representative" set of images. This generated text description is then used with CLIP to create embeddings that can then be used to map a much larger sample (201,000) of images to enable "similar to" discovery. This is obviously not nearly as accurate is it would be to manually create descriptions of very image and then run a more traditional full text search over those descriptions. But it's also not very realistic to think that the NLA will ever have the resources to create hundreds of thousands of detailed descriptions of these images. Does the benefit of being able to cheaply find images that are possibly similar to the search term outweigh the fact that OpenAI is a kleptomaniac imperialist company run by unscrupulous charlatans? Should we accept that fully cataloguing this material in a more complete and accurate way is not considered worthy of public funding? If nothing else, this project prompts us to ask such questions.
What is machine vision good for?
OpenAI's CLIP came up in a few other contexts, and I think might point to some answers. Peter Leonard from Stanford University asserted that CLIP is not all that good at straightforward categorisation, but can be very effective in identifying images that have some abstract concept in common. So classifying images in terms of the exact subject is something machine vision can struggle with. But returning a bunch of images that are "wistful", or express "anticipation" turns out to be something they're quite good at. Leonard demonstrated with a clever example, showing us the results of a search over a collection of Scandinavian oil paintings for the term "비빔밥". Unsurprisingly there are no images of Korean rice dishes with mixed toppings, nor indeed any descriptions written in Korean script within the collection. But the search returned a group of images that noticeably had something in common. This is the uncanny AI Weirdness that Janelle Shane has leaned into in her work. Machines see the world differently to humans, often struggling to do things we find so basic as to be almost automatic, yet able in other contexts to perform feats that seem impossible.
Computational linguist Emily Bender (of Stochastic Parrots fame) wrote a couple of weeks ago:
Setting things up so that you get "the answer" to your question cuts off the user's ability to do the sense-making that is critical to information literacy. That sense-making includes refining the question, understanding how different sources speak to the question, and locating each source within the information landscape.
Her brief post neatly sums up many of my concerns about how the utility of AI has been framed in public discourse, and particularly when it comes to information-seeking. Using machine vision and tools like CLIP to do the same things "more efficiently" isn't merely a dubious proposal given the limitations of the models. It also feels to me like a misunderstanding of what these tools offer us. After two days of hearing what various GLAM institutions are doing with AI, and talking to people in the breaks, it became clearer to me that the reason I've been so depressed about "AI" is that Silicon Valley boosters and university Vice Chancellors have profoundly limited imaginations. Nobody speaking at Fantastic Futures thought the machines are going to take our jobs. They all had a clear sense of the very real limitations of these technologies, and the dangers of embracing them uncritically. Yet there was also a feeling that machine learning and language models open up a range of new possibilities for GLAM.
Collection discovery: ¿Por qué no los dos?
Thinking about the NLA and Stanford experiments, it seems to me that these are demonstrating completely new capabilities for search and discovery. Perhaps it's too much of a stretch, but we might now bring in something Kirsten Thorpe often speaks about: The language of interacting with GLAM collections is the language of colonisation. GLAM catalogue interfaces often invite us to "explore" and "discover" the collections. How do we start to think about better language than "discovery"? Bender might have an answer, with her language of "sense making". What would happen if instead of trying to use AI to do the same things "more efficiently", GLAM institutions used them to enhance existing paradigms with new ways of making sense of our collections? Commercial search tools have interests that push them towards presenting "answers". The frustration that many people feel towards Google and other search tools is not just that the web is now full of AI slop and The Algorithm seems to prefer it. It's also that what we in libraries call "known term" or, in the context of publications, "known title" searching is completely broken in present-day web search. Sometimes you don't want to search "related terms" – you want exactly the thing you searched for, with exactly the spelling you used.
In GLAMs we can and should refuse to choose between these types of sense-making within our collections. People should be able to ask of our collections "Do you have this exact thing?", and "Show me everything about this category of X without any other kind of X" and "what do you have that has this vibe?". Traditional cataloguing and classification is extremely powerful for identifying everything in a collection that fits a certain category, and centuries of experience and tooling have given us very sophisticated ways to draw fine distinctions and disambiguate terms. In an age of "people who liked X also liked Y", and web search engines that reinforce power laws of popularity, it's sometimes easy to forget this. But there are limits and trade-offs. Traditional cataloguing can't nail down a vibe in any meaningful way. Consider a concept like "emu". A typical GLAM cataloguing system, based on controlled vocabularies and conceptual hierarchies, might return a bunch of search results specifically about the flightless bird, uses of its feathers and eggs, and perhaps something about The Emu War, when the Royal Australian Artillery was forced to retreat in the face of a stronger force. But in many Dreaming stories, as recounted by Tyson Yunkaporta, Emu represents a narcissistic streak in our natures, making trouble and refusing to work with others. Perhaps if our cataloguing standards were based on Indigenous Australian worldviews it's possible these attributes would be reflected in a search for "emu", but given the right training data, might a CLIP-type AI model come up with similar kinds of associations?
The ability for AI tools to surface associations and correlations from their training data is one of the most powerful things about them. But it's also the most troublesome. The very same phenomenon that allows us to search an art collection by mood also tells US parole officers that Black prisoners are more likely to re-offend, recruiters that women are less likely to succeed in the role, and made it impossible for Safiya Umoja Noble to find anything that wasn't porn when she googled for fun things for "black girls" to do.
When you train your model on racist inputs, it's hardly surprising that they produce racist outputs. One way to try to deal with this is to paper over the cracks and hope nobody notices, like Google did in their notorious "Woke Nazis" incident. This is a losing proposition: you can't balance out the patterns the machine sees by trying to anticipate them and alter the output ahead of time. Indeed, I would argue that this is only even an issue because Google and others are operating on the model Emily Bender warned about. If you think there is only ever one "answer", one Truth, and the purpose of your tool is to provide it, then such absurdities are guaranteed.
I was surprised to hear both Kristen Thorpe (Jumbunna Institute, UTS) and Honiana Love (Ngā Taonga) express hope that using AI in creating GLAM metadata may help reduce bias and support Indigenous cultural re-invigoration. But thinking about it more afterwards, perhaps this is what they were getting at. If instead of "discovering" answers, we think about what we do as helping users take a "sense-making" journey, then we open up new ways to use machines to help us to think and see. And if – for good reason – you don't trust what an institution like a state archive is telling you explicitly, it might make sense to ask what less obvious patterns appear in the archive.
Machine vision doesn't simply show us the same thing faster. More than anything else, it shows us the seams, flaws and inadvertent correlations in the data we feed it. It shows us what was always there, but we didn't see. Sometimes that's because the connection was too subtle for us. Sometimes it's because we didn't want to see it. Either way it seems to me that using this as an additional way to understand GLAM collections can be useful. Not because it will make anything more efficient, or even reveal hidden truths, but rather because it shows us another way to understand what our collections say, and perhaps what they do not.
Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog. I put that on my calendar about 6 months ago when I realized how close to 20 years I was and then promptly forgot about it until last night when I realized it was already mid-November. 20 years feels like something to celebrate, especially when I think about how few people I blogged with in 2004 are still posting (according to this post, blogging was already on the wane in 2009, and that was nothing compared to where we are now). I don’t write nearly as much as I did when I started (holy crap, 302 posts in a year, Meredith? Get a life!), and there have been many times when I’ve wondered if I should just stop blogging altogether, but every once in a while I’ll get really revved up about a topic and will be grateful that I still have this space. Other than when I was on the tenure track, I’ve never felt the need to publish in fancy peer-reviewed publications (though I have written for some); this space suits me fine.
When I started this blog, I had been married for three months and was about a month away from graduating from library school. I was really passionate about the profession and was driving my husband nuts talking about library stuff all the time, so a blog seemed like a good space to share my ideas, keep current, and do what I love, which is writing. And I’m so grateful to have had this space to work out my often jumbled thoughts ever since. Since then, I got what really was a dream job after a long and soul-killing job hunt. Then, in the span of what felt like both the longest and shortest five years ever, I got a book deal and wrote Social Software in Libraries(2006-7), got an American Libraries column (2007), started teaching for San Jose State (2008), started traveling around the world giving talks (2007-2012), and had a baby (2009). I look back on those years and it feels both like a whirlwind and like I was living a particularly charmed life. Yes, I worked my ass off and basically made librarianship my life in an incredibly unsustainable way, but a lot of people do that and don’t have all the things fall in their laps that did for me. I think a lot of it was being at the right place at the right time (when old media, library associations, and library schools were trying to become more “web 2.0”) and being loudly and unapologetically myself. It was quite the ride and I recognize the good fortune I had to experience it.
I feel like my next 14 years were years of slow dismantling. I became antsy to climb the career ladder at a job I loved and left for a job at a toxic workplace that made me question my worth as a librarian and as a human being. I was fortunate to find my current job at PCC, which I’ve been at for over a decade now, which was (and still is in many ways) a dream. And, in an environment in which I both had tenure and felt safe, I was able to start separating out what I did because I loved it and what I did because I thought it was necessary to climb a ladder or to feel worthy. In those years, I struggled with work/life balance (especially as a mother and while negotiating the tenure track in my previous job) and experienced a mid-career crisis/burnout. I’ve still published, presented, served on committees, and taught, but far, far less than I used to, and only when it was about things I was passionate about (like building a culture of assessment, accessible online education, privacy, DEI, slow librarianship, embedding library instruction, etc.). I even gave up writing for American Libraries because I felt like I’d had enough (too much?) of the spotlight and wanted to see the publication give other folks a chance. During the pandemic, I finally recognized after 20 years of suffering with debilitating migraines that I had a real disability, advocated for accommodations, and then was promptly further disabled by COVID and an autoimmune disease. Fortunately, all that came at a time when I’d de-centered work and de-coupled it from my sense of worth and was able to properly prioritize my health.
When my son and my husband surprised me with a 10 year blogaversary cake. I’d love to say the 5 year old decorated it, but…
Today, I’m going through old posts and reflecting on what I’m most proud of in my work here. With over 900 posts, I obviously didn’t look at everything. I focused on posts I remember loving and those that got a lot of comments (would you believe my blog used to regularly get 20-75 comments on a single post???). Believe me, there were plenty of posts that made me cringe (oversharing, being a self-righteous jerk, being suffused with vocational awe, etc.), plenty that made me want to give my former self a hug or tell her “you don’t need to keep proving yourself!”, but I still see a lot to feel proud of, even from my early years in the field.
I’m proud of my writing about teaching, which has been the heart of my work for nearly 20 years. Here are just a few that I can still look and not feel embarrassed about:
I’m proud of my writing about slow librarianship, starting with this 2019 series (which was before I even called what I was writing about slow librarianship):
Here are the other posts I’m particularly proud of that are about (or are closely related to) slow librarianship. If you’re interested in learning more about slow librarianship, these are good posts to look at:
I don’t know how much longer I’ll be writing this blog. I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this 20 years in and I’ll be retired in another 20 years and will be happy to fully disengage from librarianship when I do. I guess I can promise that as long as I have something to say, something I feel passionately about, I’ll probably write about it here. And I vow never to write things just to fill the space or because I’m scared of losing readers; everything I write will be suffused with the same care I have put into my recent posts.
This blogaversary also coincides with the deactivation of my X/Twitter account, which I plan to do this week. I’ve been on there since April 2007 and it’s also a huge chronicle of my adult life. I downloaded an archive of my feed and I read things about my son’s early years that I had totally forgotten about. I’ve always hadmixed feelingsabout Twitter, but I stayed for far longer than I thought I ever would. You can find me on Bluesky now as librarianmer. And if you’re a newsletter fan, know that you can also subscribe to get this blog in your Inbox.
I grew up in a house where there wasn’t a lot of joy or positive recognition, so in response, I’ve always been a big over-celebrator of everything. I will look for any excuse to celebrate someone or something and to show my gratitude. And frankly, isn’t that how it should be? As I’ve said before, gratitude is an endlessly renewable resource. So I’ll be eating cake with my family to celebrate the only thing I’ve stuck with for 20 years other than my marriage. And I hope you can find things in your own life to celebrate. Your exercise streak. A project you just finished. Your tenure at a job or on a committee. Something you built or made as a hobby. Finishing that really hard video game. Making it through the week. Seriously. Everyone deserves a celebration! And if you can’t think of anything to celebrate, just know that I’m grateful for you, reader. You who take the time to read my words, even sometimes when my posts are way too long. Even when you don’t make yourself known to me through comments or by sharing on social media, I’m grateful that you’re here.
Warner’s very first Looney Tunes cartoon, “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub”, used it too. Its 1930 copyright wasn’t renewed, and since this song and others featured in it were published in 1929 or earlier, everything in it should be public domain in 45 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Arthur Freed and Nacio Scott Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain” appears to have first been performed in 1928 in the stage show Hollywood Music Box Revue. Copyrighted in 1929, the song reached movie audiences in The Hollywood Revue, and was also heard in many later shows. Gene Kelly memorably sang it dancing through puddles and heavy showers in the 1952 movie of the same name, set around the time the song was first released. In 46 days, we can sing it in the public domain. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
As Jacob Loshin writes, magicians rely on a distinctive type of intellectual property– their tricks and the secrets of how to do them– that’s usually protected not by copyright or patent, but by informal but strongly enforced community norms.
Harry Blackstone‘s 1929 Secrets of Magic, written for lay audiences, doesn’t give away his profession’s signature effects, but explains more basic techniques and tricks. It does rely on a copyright, one that vanishes in 47 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Like open access research, discussion of open education and open educational resources (OER) usually focusses on the social justice aspects and licensing technicalities. OER is promoted as good for students because they don't have to pay for textbooks, and good for academics because the license allows them to "remix" and adjust the books. This is all true, but the reality for most academics is that they feel overwhelmed by workload and if they care about education they care most about the effectiveness of the resources for helping students understand the concepts they want to teach. If it's free to read that's nice, and if it's "free as in speech" then they're not really sure why that matters. It's not that academics don't care about social justice or saving students money. But the primary goal for teaching-focussed educators is achieving educational outcomes, not being idealogically pure.
We've spent a couple of years grappling with how to make OER publishing attractive, and after a lot of consultation and listening, realised that focussing on the benefits to students was where we were going wrong. Students don't decide which textbook is assigned, they just have to use whatever their subject coordinator decides. Once we start thinking about the benefits of open education to educators, a whole bunch of opportunities appear. Openly-licensed teaching and learning resources are more flexible and adaptable than commercially-licensed texts, and educators can customise them to the curriculum rather than forcing the curriculum to align with a given text. Without commercial pressures, authors are free to publish something niche, or experimental. And OERs are a tangible object educators can point to when it comes time to demonstrate their contribution to education beyond student grades or the highly-flawed student satisfaction surveys. Crucially, we've seen that publishing open textbooks changes educators – they think about their work differently and have a more expansive view of education, impact, and collaboration. We would argue that they become better educators.
The key, in essence, is to stop talking about open resources and start talking about open education. More specifically: what is the educator's biggest teaching challenge, and can we use an open education approach to help them resolve that challenge?
This results in higher quality teaching, the OERs are still free to read, and we're aligning the way we describe the benefits with how teaching-focussed academics are rewarded and recognised by their institutions and peers.
We're still learning, but today in the spirit of open we're sharing our thinking and what we've learned, along with a rubric we'll be using to assess future proposals for our OE program. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works out.
Dorothy L. Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime was a selection of the then-still-new Book of the Month Club in 1929. It includes stories of detection, mystery and horror spanning over 2000 years, and opens with an extended essay by Sayers on the development and art of those genres that’s often been reprinted. Rights issues made this edition’s selections differ a bit from a differently-titled British edition, but both versions will definitely be public domain in the US in 48 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
This post is part of a growing series on the Library Beyond the Library.
Libraries are increasingly engaged in partnerships with other units across campus to contribute to institutional needs in research support. In many cases, this means the establishment of new operational structures that extend beyond internal library hierarchies and allow libraries—and their partners—to synergistically support institutional priorities.
The Montana State University Research Alliance centralizes multiple research support units within the library, fostering collaboration and streamlining research support for the entire campus. Launched in 2023, this initiative eliminates the need for researchers to navigate a complex network of disparate resources. The shared space encourages deeper collaboration between units, enhances referral processes, and creates new connections.
The Research Alliance has increased awareness of library services and solidified the library’s role as a central hub for research support at MSU.
On 2 October 2024, the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) hosted a webinar featuring Research Alliance partners. In this webinar, the partners offered candid reflections on the challenges and rewards of this innovative model after one year. The webinar recording offers details about the five stakeholder units’ perspectives on the creation of the Research Alliance. Their shared experiences may be of value to institutions considering a similar effort.
The MSU Research Alliance unites five campus units under a single roof to streamline and enhance research support:
Office of Research Development
Center for Faculty Excellence
Undergraduate Research
Research Cyberinfrastructure
Research Optimization, Analytics, and Data Services (ROADS) within the MSU Library
These units collectively support faculty, researchers, and students through the full research life cycle. Services include proposal development, data management and visualization, publication assistance, data sharing, and research analytics.
Professional staff from each unit are now co-located on the third floor of the MSU Library in a flexible space designed for consultations, workshops, and events. This co-location and unified branding increase visibility and create a seamless, integrated support system, reducing the need for users to navigate previously dispersed services.
Space configuration of the multi-unit Research Alliance on the 3rd floor of the Montana State University Renne Library
The recent webinar featured perspectives from each of the Alliance’s stakeholder groups, with presentations by:
Jason Clark, Head of ROADS, MSU Library
Coltran Hophan-Nichols, Director of Systems and Research Computing
Nicole Motzer, Director, Office of Research Development
Chatanika “Nika” Stoop, Assistant Director, Center for Faculty Excellence
Anna Tuttle, Director, Undergraduate Scholars Program
Origin story
The idea for the Research Alliance originated nearly a decade ago with former University Librarian Kenning Arlitsch, who envisioned the library as a central hub for research support.
Realizing this vision required years of patient effort—socializing the idea, identifying partners, building relationships, securing buy-in from those partners, and eventually gaining institutional support and funding from the provost. This effort exemplifies what we call “social interoperability,” the building and maintaining of collaborative relationships across units to enable project success and user adoption.
OCLC Research Library Partnership affiliates have, as a benefit of membership, the opportunity to consult directly with RLP program officers, and I met with Jason Clark and others several times in 2023 to provide an external perspective on their effort. Jason noted in an earlier blog post, that “Conversations with Rebecca crystallized our thinking about the Research Alliance partnership and helped us clearly define the MSU Library’s role. Moreover, her [social interoperability] workshop with the Alliance partners helped ground our work together, got us thinking about shared services and projects, and set us on our current path to a successful opening of the Research Alliance. . . .”
To make space for the Research Alliance, the library reallocated a student study area, appointing library faculty and staff as organizational leads to establish the Research Alliance’s home. This move raised valid concerns about potential impacts on library space and autonomy. However, the library’s leadership saw it as a bold step to cement its role as the physical and strategic center of research support.
Why the creation of a research hub matters
At most research institutions, research support services are scattered across campus, making it harder for students and researchers to find and use what they need. The Research Alliance addresses this by centralizing support.
MSU’s initiative also aligns with its strategic priorities as an R1 (very high research activity) institution. The university aims to strengthen its scholarly reputation and increase research impact. It also seeks to deliver high-impact teaching and is committed to providing undergraduates with early research opportunities.
Benefits, challenges, and lessons learned
The webinar presenters openly reflected back on their first year of operations, offering insights that other institutions may leverage.
Benefits
Increased visibility and awareness of services: Co-location has increased awareness and use of campus services by researchers and students.
Centralized research support: Researchers no longer have to navigate multiple units spread across campus to find the research support services they need. Staff can make real-time connections with experts nearby, helping researchers take advantage of all the resources available.
Enhanced collaboration: Co-location has fostered informal relationship-building, helping staff gain deeper knowledge of each unit’s expertise. This leads to more informed referrals and improved service for faculty and students.
Competitive advantage: Improved convenience and access to research support services supports MSU’s competitiveness in a global research landscape.
Increased visibility for the library: The library is now physically and operationally positioned at the center of the research support activities at MSU.
Challenges
Space constraints: MSU’s expanding campus creates ongoing space challenges. While the multipurpose design of the Research Alliance space is inviting, events and meetings sometimes disrupt staff and users.
Leadership churn: Key leaders left MSU during the implementation of the Research Alliance, creating a temporary leadership gap that resulted in uncertainty and slowed progress.
Decision-making structure: While institutional hierarchies and reporting lines remain unchanged, the Alliance still lacks a formal decision-making framework for its confederated units. Work is underway to develop a rubric for equitable and effective decision-making.
Lessons learned
Articulating shared goals. While each unit has its own mission and goals, members of the Alliance have found that they need an apparatus for coordinating and asserting their shared vision and goals. They have facilitated this work through a strategic planning retreat and regular meetings.
Intentionality: Intentional engagement is key to maximizing the Alliance’s benefits. Not all team members can be co-located due to limited library space, which means some individuals are separated from their main unit. Regardless of where their desk permanently resides, it’s important to stay connected with their home unit, in addition to connecting with others in the Alliance space. For example, while Coltran Hophan-Nichols’s principal office remains off-campus, he holds weekly office hours and workshops at the Alliance and remains in the space afterward to work. This practice strengthens cross-unit relationships and fosters collaboration. Fun and informal events, like a Great British Baking Show bakeoff, have further strengthened both professional and social ties.
Synergies
Proximity has helped Research Alliance units collaborate in new ways that benefit each unit and the campus as a whole.
For instance, the Library’s ROADS unit and the Office of Research Development jointly created a partnership database to capture, track, and promote faculty engagement. This tool helps connect new faculty with potential collaborators across campus.
The Office of Research Development and the Center for Faculty Excellence have also co-hosted two grant writing bootcamps. Their close proximity and deeper awareness of campus services now streamline referrals, helping researchers access the resources and expertise needed for competitive proposals.
Situating the library as a hub for research support
By hosting the Research Alliance, the MSU Library has strategically positioned itself at the center of research support—both physically and in terms of its perceived role on campus.
By physically positioning the library as the hub of research support, the library powerfully asserts its central role in supporting institutional priorities.
Jason Clark highlighted this shift, noting, “The visibility, the interactions, the people moving into our space who haven’t really been a part of library visits–this is an understated benefit. The movement of administrators, new faculty, and established faculty into the library . . . is novel and important. These are stakeholders actually moving into our space.”
This shift is significant because many faculty may not have physically visited the library for years, particularly if they no longer use physical collections. As a result, they may not have perceived the library as a valuable contributor and stakeholder in research. Today, faculty come to the library not just for collections, but for research support—physically embodying the evolving, largely virtual role libraries play in research.
The Research Alliance exemplifies what we call “the library beyond the library,” a concept describing how library expertise and capacities are being combined with those from other campus units, often through transformative new collaborative structures. These partnerships extend the library’s role beyond traditional collections management, communicating a more complex value proposition to stakeholders who may be unfamiliar with how library skills align with institutional priorities. The Research Alliance visibly demonstrates and embodies the continued value and central role of the library in supporting institutional research.
Looking ahead
This initiative has improved research support at Montana State, breaking down silos and helping researchers connect with services that can boost their productivity. The team’s optimism is truly inspiring. As one member said, “I love us”—a powerful affirmation of the success of this cross-unit partnership.
What’s most exciting to me is how this effort has demonstrated the library’s value proposition to a host of campus stakeholders. By physically positioning the library as the hub of research support, the library powerfully asserts its central role in supporting institutional priorities. This has enhanced the library’s visibility among campus stakeholders, aligning its value proposition more closely with institutional priorities.
The update work for MarcEdit 7.7 has been completed and posted.
MarcEdit 7.7 has been posted to the website. Additionally, on the download page, you’ll find access to the MarcEdit 7 VPAT. Information about the update:
The Tech We Want Summit took place between 17 and 18 October 2024 – in total, 43 speakers from 23 countries interacted with 700+ registered people about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting, and focused on solving people’s real problems.
In this series of posts, OKFN brings you the documentation of each session, opening the content generated during these two intense days of reflection and joint work accessible and open.
Above is the video and below is a summary of the topics discussed in:
Eco, green, or simply sustainable technologies have several implicit meanings: long life, affordable maintenance, skilled people, resource-friendly, economical to use, renewable, regenerative, etc. In this panel, thinkers, practitioners and promoters of different aspects of software sustainability will discuss if and how it is possible to achieve a development model for people and the planet. Is there a way out of the disaster versus greenwashing narratives?
Lucas Pretti – Communications & Advocacy Director, OKFN [moderator]
Summary
This panel explored the multifaceted issue of achieving sustainability in technology. The lively discussion touched on several critical issues:
The inherent violence of the internet infrastructure: Fieke Jansen emphasised that the current internet infrastructure is built on a foundation of exploitation and violence, and called for a shift from the technocapitalist mindset of Silicon Valley to a more reparative and redistributive approach.
Energy efficiency vs. true sustainability: Christoph Becker explained that simply improving energy efficiency is not enough. He argued for sustainable technology that is simple, repairable and supports community and local economies – essentially the “bicycle” of the tech world.
The role of government and policy: Several contributions highlighted the central role of government intervention in regulating and guiding sustainable technology development. From enforcing end-of-life optimisation for hardware to investing in renewable technologies, the role of the state is indispensable.
Open source and the commons: The panel highlighted the importance of open source projects as a means of reducing waste, fostering community-driven innovation, and creating sustainable, collaborative technology solutions.
Indigenous knowledge and pluralism: Paz Peña and Lucas Pretti made a compelling case for integrating indigenous knowledge systems and plural perspectives into technology design and policy-making. Indigenous lands, which make up 6% of the Earth’s surface but contain 85% of its biodiversity, offer crucial lessons in sustainable living.
Technodiversity and anti-monopoly measures: Speakers called for a move away from tech monopolies towards the promotion of technodiversity. Supporting a variety of smaller, community-driven projects can provide more resilient and contextually appropriate technological solutions.
Practical tools and youth engagement: Shweata Hedge shared insights from the #semanticClimate project, which transforms static reports into dynamic, machine-readable formats, making climate knowledge more accessible and actionable. She also highlighted the importance of engaging youth in these initiatives to build a sustainable community for conservation and innovation.
Ultimately, the panel converged on the urgent need for systemic change – moving away from the unsustainable practices of the current technocapitalist framework towards a more equitable, just and sustainable technological future. This will require collective activism, policy intervention and a fundamental rethinking of what ‘development’ means in the context of a finite planet.
Thimble Theatre was a 10-year-old comic with waning readership when its lead character Castor Oyl hired a wisecracking sailor to crew a ship he’d bought. Popeye left after their ocean voyage ended, but audience appeal brought him back after a few weeks away. He wasn’t fully developed in 1929, lacking spinach and not yet Olive Oyl’s beau, but would soon be star of the strip and of an ongoing multimedia franchise. In 49 days, his earliest adventures will be public domain. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
On May 2nd, 2016 I had the pleasure of speaking to York University Libraries as part of their Library Futures Series. This is what I said all those years ago.
The following post is one in a regular series on issues of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, compiled by a team of OCLC contributors.
2024 International Conference of Indigenous Archives Library and Museums
In the United States, November is celebrated as Native American Heritage Month. The International Conference of Indigenous Archives Library and Museums is traditionally held in November, hosted by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM). This week, conference goers will meet in Palm Springs, California for a conference that incorporates workshops, tours and cultural events alongside conference sessions and awards.
I have been fortunate to attend the ATALM conference in the past and have learned so much at this very rich gathering. I look forward to hearing about the outcomes of sessions that intersect with library and archival practice. In addition to the session that I referenced in the last IDEAs post, I’ll mention a few other tantalizing sessions I’m interested in: Library of Congress Indigenous Headings Project and Community Engagement; Revising Metadata Standards: Library of Congress Task Group Listening Session; Allies in a Shared Vision: State Library Support for Tribal Libraries; and Indigenizing Archival Training: Reflecting on New Models for Training/Archival Principles; and Strengthening Library Liaison Relationships + Elevating Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Contributed by Merrilee Proffitt.
IDEAs in Library Resources & Technical Services special issue
The October 2024 (Volume 68, Number 4) issue of Library Resources & Technical Services is devoted entirely to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. As the editors Rachel E. Scott (Associate Dean for Information Assets at Illinois State University, OCLC symbol: IAI) and Michael Fernandez (Head of Technical Services at Boston University Libraries, OCLC symbol: BOS) write, these issues have preoccupied librarians for some time and get to the core of all aspects of library work and the philosophy that undergirds libraries themselves: “As is often the case, the impacts may not be immediately evident within technical services work, but there are numerous avenues for technical services workers to foreground principles of IDEA and adapt a mindset for advocacy.” Reflective of this preoccupation, the editors did not even need to call for proposals because IDEA – however one may refer to or express the notion – has become a library priority. In this LRTS issue, you will find useful and timely pieces on book challenges, textbook affordability, inclusivity, the treatment of name changes, discoverability of LGBTQ+ resources, and a host of other topics.
For over sixty years, LRTS was the official journal of ALA’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). In 2020, it became the publication of ALA’s newly formed Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures division. Since then, LRTS has moved from a subscription model to open access, which is itself a manifestation of IDEA practices. In the wake of the 2024 election in the United States, ALA President Cindy Hohl has noted that ALA will continue to defend library values: “We know that many of our members are concerned that the election results portend attacks on libraries, library workers, and readers. Whatever happens, ALA will stand up for all Americans’ freedom to read—and we will need everyone who loves libraries to stand with us.” Inclusion, diversity, equity, and access will remain central to what libraries are and do. Contributed by Jay Weitz.
Neuroinclusive program provides future librarians with tools to succeed
Johanna M. Jacobsen Kiciman and Alaina C. Bull continue their discussion of their redeveloped learning employment program for MLIS students at the University of Washington-Tacoma (OCLC Symbol: WAU). In “Apprenticeships, MLIS Students, and Neurodiversity: Centering the Humanity of Student Workers, Part 2” (College & Research Libraries News, Volume 85, Number 10, November 2024), the authors discuss how they incorporated reflective practices into the program like finishing meetings by asking, “What do you need from us to make what you’re working on go smoothly?” These reflective practices are neuroinclusive because they teach the students self-reflection and advocating for their own needs. The authors note how their program prepares future librarians to deal with burnout, creating future professional success: “We deeply believe that other institutions should be doing this kind of work. We deeply believe that what you are doing in this sort of apprenticeship program is creating healthy colleagues who you will work with in the future, and who will impact your own well-being in a job environment.” The article is a continuation of Part 1, which appeared in the October 2024 issue of College & Research Libraries News and was covered in the 15 October edition of Advancing IDEAs.
This article is a wonderful demonstration of how neuroinclusivity benefits everyone. The library has more motivated and skilled student workers, the supervisors understand better how to help the students be more successful, and the library profession gains new members who better understand how to prevent burnout. Most importantly, the student workers felt included and empowered. One student said of the positive impact of the program, “Working with [Alaina and Johanna] was the first time where I felt that my neurodivergence wasn’t just tolerated, but actually understood and even embraced. Instead of masking constantly, I was able to work more comfortably (and, as a result, better).” Contributed by Kate James.
In the 1920s, Robert and Helen Lynd conducted a study of white residents of Muncie, Indiana. Their 1929 book reporting on the social dynamics of the town’s “working class” and “business class” became a surprise best-seller, inspired many followup studies, analyses, and retrospectives, and did much to shape how many educated Americans viewed “middle America”. The Lynds’ Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture joins the public domain in 50 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.)
For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and work someplace where the language is something other than English. I've studied French in school and I've studied a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. And Swedish. But I'd never had the opportunity to live in another language, to get comfortable enough to have casual conversations and say the things I want to say.
Two years ago (2022) my Aunt Siv planned an 80th birthday celebration for herself, inviting the whole family to join her for a party in Lappland (northern Sweden). Coming out of two long pandemic years, we were eager to go and travel. There was still a lot of uncertainty about Covid, and with the invasion of Ukraine adding to the feeling that the trip might or might not happen, we booked refundable tickets for a vacation in Sweden.
Swedish was my first language! My parents both grew up in Sweden, but met and married in Ohio. My mom's teenaged sister Siv came over to help my mom with the baby (me) so there was a lot of Swedish in the house. When I started going to nursery school I quickly learned English, and began refusing to speak Swedish. By the time I got to kindergarten, I had completely forgotten all of my Swedish language. But traces remained. After college I decided I should learn Swedish and I took a class in Stockholm. Learning Swedish was completely different from learning French in school, because I could hear in my head if it was right. After one day of class, I could speak 2 sentences of perfect Swedish. I confidently went into a shop, used my 2 perfect sentences, and got into deep trouble because I had no clue what the answers meant. I had a good accent without much trying. This has been very helpful, because when swedes hear a foreigner try to speak Swedish, they immediately switch to English, making it rather difficult for the foreigner to learn. Not me. Swedish people are amazed that I seem to be able to speak good Swedish.
I wanted to improve my Swedish, so I wanted a little longer in Sweden than the rest of the family, and our planning took its final shape when my wife said "Eric, you should just stay! For years you been saying you want to live somewhere in another language, and now the internet lets you work from where ever you want!" So all of a sudden I was going to spend four weeks in Stockholm on my own without much of a plan. I was scared. How would I meet people? Sure, I could sit in my AirBnB and work as a digital nomad, but what would be the point?
Running was one of the answers. There was a half-marathon to run, RUNmaröloppet, that would take me out to an island in Stockholm's archipelago. I had identified a running club, Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm, that seemed sociable, as they meet at a bar on Tuesdays and have beers afterward. Both of these turned out to be awesome. And so I started running away from home.
Running with a group is universal and local at the same time. No matter where you run you can have the same conversations with whoever's running next to you. "Are you training for a race?" "My legs are so stiff." "I'm recovering from an IT-band strain." "My name is Eric, have we run together before?" But every route you run is different in its own beautiful way, and the group helps newcomers (and often the regulars!) to avoid getting lost. By the end of the run, the group has shared an indelible experience and there aren't strangers anymore.
RUNmaröloppet was a blast. You have to take a boat to the island. The course is quite technical in places and is also the most beautiful race I've ever run. I did it again this year, and finished 5th in my age group, despite a lingering knee injury that force me to use walk-run again. Full disclosure: I also finished DFL (Dead F-in Last) out of 282 runners, and was never so happy with a finish.
Mikkeller Running Club Stockholm meets every Tuesday on the lively urban island of Södermalm. Good people, good beer, 5K, 7K and longer routes. The 5K is at a "cozy" pace and welcomes runners of all paces. (Linguistic note: back home we call it "sexy" pace. Maybe this has deep sociological meaning. Or maybe it's the conversion from km to mi.)
In Stockholm I discovered this thing called ParkRun. These people have taken "running away from home" to extremes. ParkRun started somewhere in England and has spread around the world like a pandemic. They have special t-shirts to commemorate milestones such as a runner's 100th ParkRun. I've now run the ParkRun in Stockholm's Haga Park 6 times. It's a timed 5K run. At every run there are people from all over the world - last week I met a couple from Sheffield who had hopped off their cruise ship and took a taxi to the ParkRun so they could add Sweden to their list of ParkRun countries. Some of them even try to run ParkRun places starting with every letter of the alphabet! I love how crazy runners can be.
My Stockholm 2022 sojourn was topped off by a 10K race around Södermalm called "Midnattsloppet". Midnattsloppet is sort of a night-time EuroPop Bay-to-Breakers. 22,000 runners in the 10K, another 17K in the 5K. There was a musical act every kilometer to fire up the runners but only two water stations on that pretty warm night. At the top of the first big hill, there was a choir of ~20 blonde women singing “Waterloo” which I thought a poor choice given the pre-ABBA history of Waterloo. The faster waves of runners got “We are the Champions”. At the start, runners were prompted to sing a song which apparently is the anthem of the Hammarby Football Club, written by a guy who must have been the guitarist for a Swedish Spinal Tap. Apparently he caused a scandal by wearing a "69" T-shirt on Swedish television and sadly died at a young age. On Midnattsloppet night you can walk into any bar in Stockholm in a shirt dripping with sweat and the bouncer will say "Good Jobb!". (I verified this.)
I now have a pair of ruby red New Balance 1080 version 12s. (NOT v13!) My running gait is such that there's a flat wear spot where my feet click together. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. )
At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 miles over 12 months. "I hope I never do that again!" I told a running friend. It seemed appropriate that my very last running song from shuffle was Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom"; founding member Adam Schlesinger had died of Covid. For months of that pandemic year, there wasn't much to do except work on my computer and run. It was boring, but at the same time I loved it. In retrospect, the parks needn't have closed (or later in the year, required masks while running through). Remember how we veered around other people just enjoying fresh air? In that year, running was one thing that made sense. But never have I celebrated the new year as joyously I did on the eve of 2021. Vaccines were on the way, the guy who suggested drinking bleach was heading to Florida, and I had a map of Montclair to fill in.
I've called Montclair, the New Jersey town where I live, "a running resort". It has beautiful parks, long, flat tree-lined streets without much traffic, short steep streets for hill work, well maintained tracks, a wonderful running store, and at least 3 running clubs. During pandemic, everyone seemed to be out running. Even my wife, who for many years would tell me "I don't understand how you can run so much", started running so much. At Christmas our son gave us both street maps of Montclair to put on the fridge so we could record our running wanderings.
So, come 2021 the three of us said goodbye to the boring routine of running favorite routes. Montclair has 363 streets, and a couple of named alleys so we could have done a street a day for a year if we had wanted to. But it was more fun to construct routes that crossed off several streets ata time. While I was at it, I could make strava art or spell words. Most of my running masterpieces were ex post cursus pareidolia. Occasionally I spelled out words. Here's "love" (in memory of a running friend's partner).
The neighboring town of Glen Ridge came quickly on July 18, as I had done well over half on the way to Montclair streets. Near me, Glen Ridge is only 2 and a half blocks wide! I took a peek at the Frank Lloyd Wright house on a street I'd not been on before!
With five months left I started on Bloomfield, the next town east. Bloomfield is cut in half by the Garden State Parkway, the source of the "which exit?" joke about New Jersey, and I focused on the half near to me. I got to know Clark's Pond. My streets running helped me set my half marathon PR, in the lovely town of Corning, New York.
I know of other streets running completists - it seems there's even an app to help you do it. Author Laura Carney wrote about it in her book "My Father's List" My friend Chris has continued to add towns and cities to his list and has only 9 streets left to finish ALL OF ESSEX COUNTY. Update: He finished! and was written up by nj.com!
2021: 1,268.3 miles, 223 hours 36minutes, 40,653 ft vertical. I ran to 1,700 different songs. Last running song of the year (on shuffle): Joy Division's "No Love Lost":
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. )
Steve Jobs gave me back my music. Thanks Steve!
I got my first iPod a bit more than 20 years ago. It was a 3rd generation iPod, the first version with an all-touch control. I loved that I could play my Bruce, my Courtney, my Heads and my Alanis at an appropriate volume without bothering any of my classical-music-only family. Looking back on it, there was a period of about five years when I didn't regularly listen to music. I had stopped commuting to work by car, and though commuting was no fun, it had kept me in touch with my music. No wonder those 5 years were such a difficult period of my life!
Today, my running and my music are entwined. My latest (and last 😢) iPod already has some retro cred. It's a 6th generation iPod Nano. I listen to to my music on 90% of my runs and 90% of my listening is on my runs. I use shuffle mode so that over the course of a year of running, I'll listen to 2/3 of my ~2500 song library. In 2023, I listened to 1,723 songs. That's a lot of running!
Yes, I keep track. I have a system to maintain a 150 song playlist for running. I periodically replace all the songs I've heard in the most recent 2 months (unless I've listened to the song less than 5 times - you need at least that many plays to become acquainted with a song!) This is one of the ways I channel certain of my quirkier programmerish tendencies so that I project as a relatively normal person. Or at least I try.
Last November, I decided to do something new (for me). I made a running playlist! Carefully selected to have the right cadence and to inspire the run! It was ordered to have to have particular songs play at appropriate points of the Ashenfelter 8K on Thanksgiving morning. It started with "Born to Run" and ended with either "Save it for Later", "Breathless" or "It's The End Of The World As We Know It", depending on my finishing time. It worked OK. I finished with Exene. I had never run with a playlist before.
Last year, I started to extract a line from the music I had listened to during my run to use as the Strava title for the run. Through September 3, I would choose a line from a Springsteen song (he had to take a health timeout after that). For my New Year's resolution, I promised to credit the song and the artist in my run descriptions as well.
I find now that with many songs, they remind me of the place where I was running when I listened to them. And running in certain places now reminds me of particular songs. I'm training the neural network in my head. I prefer to think of it as creating a web of connections, invisible strings, you might say, that enrich my experience of life. In other words, I'm creating art. And if you follow my Strava, the connections you make to my runs and my songs become part of this little collective art project. Thanks!
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. )
It wasn't the 10 seconds that made me into a runner.
I started running races again 20 years ago, in 2004. It was a 10K sponsored by my town's YMCA. I had run an occasional race in grad school to join my housemates; and I continued to run a couple of miles pretty regularly to add some exercise to my mostly sitting-at-a-computer lifestyle. I gradually added 10Ks - the local "turkey-trot" because the course went almost by my house - and then a "cherry-blossom" run, through beautiful Branch Brook Park. But I was not yet a real runner - tennis was my main sport.
In 2016, things changed. My wife was traveling a lot for work, and one son was away at college, and I found myself needing more social interaction. I saw that my local Y was offering a training program for their annual 10K, and I thought I would try it out. I had never trained for a race, ever. The closest thing to training I had ever done was the soccer team in high school. But there was a HUGE sacrifice involved - the class started at 8AM on Saturdays, and I was notorious for sleeping past noon on Saturdays! Surprise, surprise, I loved it. It was fun to have people to run with. I'm on the silent side, and it was a pleasure to be with people who were comfortable with the somewhat taciturn real me.
I trained really hard with that group. I did longer runs than I'd ever done, and it felt great. So by race day, I felt sure that I would smash my PR (not counting the races in my 20's!). I was counting on cutting a couple of minutes off my time. And I did it! But only by a measly 10 seconds. I was so disappointed.
But somehow I had become a runner! It was running with a group that made me a runner. I began to seek out running groups and became somewhat of a running social butterfly.
Fast-forward to five weeks ago, when I was doing a 10-miler with a group of running friends (A 10 miler for me, they were doing longer runs in training for a marathon). I had told them of my decision to do New York this fall, and they were soooo supportive. I signed up for a half marathon to be held on April 27th - many of my friends were training for the associated full marathon. The last 2 miles were really rough for me (maybe because my shoes were newish??) and I staggered home. That afternoon I could hardly walk and I realized I had strained my right knee. Running was suddenly excruciatingly painful.
By the next day I could get down the stairs and walk with a limp, but running was impossible. The next weekend, I was able to do a slow jog with some pain, so I decided to stick to walking, which was mostly pain-free. I saw a PT who advised me to build up slowly and get plenty of rest. It was working until the next weekend, when I was hurrying to catch a train and unthinkingly took a double step in Penn Station and re-sprained the knee. It was worse than before and I had only 3 weeks until the half marathon!
The past three weeks have been the hardest thing I've had to deal with in my running "career". I've had a calf strain, T-band strains, back strains, sore quads, inter-tarsal neuromas and COVID get in the way of running, but this was the worst. Because of my impatience.
Run-walk (and my running buddies) were what saved me. I slowly worked my way from 2 miles at a 0.05-to-0.25 mile run-to-walk ratio up to 4 miles at 0.2-to-0.05 mile run-to-walk, with 2 days of rest between each session. I started my half marathon with a plan to run 2 mimutes and walk 30 seconds until the knee told me to stop the running bits. I was hoping for a 3 hour half.
The knee never complained (the rest of the body complained, but I'm used to that!!) I finished with the very respectable time of 2:31:28, faster than 2 of my previous 11 half marathons. One of my friends took a video of me staggering over the finish.
I'm very sure I don't look like that in real life.
Here's our group picture, marathoners and half-marathoners. Together, we're real runners.
After this weekend, my biggest half marathon challenge to date, I have more confidence than ever that I'll be able to do the New York Marathon in November - in one piece - with Team Amref.
We're gonna get to that place where we really wanna go and we'll walk in the sun
It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes. We had waited through the morning (five hours for me) as our faster friends drifted away excitedly and cannons sounded the starts of earlier waves. There was a determined silence as each of us thought ahead to our 2024 New York City Marathon.
A few meters to my right I saw a woman wearing a large pink button proclaiming her status as a "Birthday Girl". Her shirt had the name "HEATHER" across the front. I shouted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEATHER!", and she turned to look at me, a bit startled. I walked over and we chatted a bit. She was from the UK, and was running New York to celebrate turning 50. I told her she was going to have fun, and that the crowd would be calling to her the whole way. "Really?" she said. "Hey, this is New York", I reassured her. "You don't have to know someone 10 years before you can talk to them on a first name basis!"
Then, over to the side of the corral, I saw another woman, wearing a BIRTHDAY GIRL shirt. "Heather, you must go over and wish her happy birthday!" Heather hesitated, but I said "Aw come on!" and led her through the crowd to the other birthday girl. The two marathon twins hugged, and everything felt right with the world. I looked around and the crowd seemed a bit anxious waiting. I shouted "Hey everyone! We have two birthday girls running with us! Let's sing Happy Birthday!"
And so I led a happy chorus of more than a thousand runners in a joyful rendition of "Happy Birthday". Miraculous. My whole day was like that. From start to end, the crowd was shouting my name. They got riled up when I acknowledged them, sometimes chanting "ERIC, ERIC, ERIC" as I gave them high fives.
I had decided to run the 2024 New York City Marathon about ten months earlier. A friend heard me talk about running and suggested that I get a fundraising entry through the charity he was involved with. At that point I had just run my 11th Half Marathon but never a marathon. A marathon seemed an unnecessary stretch for me and my creaky legs. But I decided in an instant. Two days later I told a running friend, Janell, and a few others about my decision. I knew I couldn't back out after that.
still looking good at mile 9
The first 10 miles of the race flew by as I ran at a pace that was faster than I expected (I was doing a 3:1 run:walk). Axel and Karen were there rooting for me at mile 9 with my Fleet Feet friends and then again around mile 12. The crowd on 1st Avenue at mile 16 made me forget that I had never raced that far. More running friends were waiting at mile 18 where it really helped. At mile 21 my 3:1 cycle became 2:1, and at mile 23 it was 1:1. On Fifth Avenue it seemed like everyone I knew was there cheering me on. The bearded prophet with "The End is Near" on a sign could have been a hallucination. Coming out of the Bronx I had switched to my running playlist, and in the Park I started "singing" the lyrics out loud: "It's the End of the World and We Know It!". I wasn't feeling that fine and I switched to 100% brisk walk.
Re-entering the park for the last half mile, I was determined to finish it running. BIG MISTAKE! I cramped up immediately and could barely stagger on. But after a few minutes, my legs consented to a sloooow walk and finally relented on a brisk finish. Then a second miracle occurred. I knew I had friends who were volunteering at the finish line, but to see and hug them all was a blessing I had not expected. And to get the medal from my friend Janell!
Back of the medal with braille text "TCS New York City Marathon"
Thank you to everyone who donated to my fundraiser for Amref Health Africa. Thank you to Karen and Axel for getting me home with my cramping legs. Thank you to the coaches, runners and PTs who helped my get through the training. Thank you to all the spectators and to the volunteers who got me from the start to the finish, and thank you to the zombies that trudged with me for the long long long walk out of the park.
“If you look at Hemingway’s prose and the writing he did about war, it was as radical in its time as anything we have seen since,” wrote critic Gail Caldwell, quoted by Thomas Putnam in 2006 in a piece about Hemingway’s wartime experience and writing. But the prose did not come as simply as it may look. For A Farewell to Arms, his best-known war novel, Hemingway wrote at least 47 versions of the ending. The version he published in 1929 becomes public domain in 51 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Please join me in welcoming the three newly elected Coordinating Committee members: Kari May, Margo Padilla, and Sylvia Umana. Their terms begin January 1, 2025 and run through December 31, 2027.
Kari May
Kari is a full-time digital preservationist for the University of Pittsburgh Library System. She became one of the university’s NDSA representatives and a member of the Excellence (Innovation) Awards Working Group (EAWG) in 2019. In 2023, Kari became a Co-Chair for the EAWG and has sought to increase transparency and ensure equity and inclusion in all aspects of EAWG processes by initiating new activities and encouraging more standardization in completing and documenting the awards cycle. Kari has also been a member of the NDSA DigiPres Planning Committee (PC) for 2022 and the 2023 Storage Survey Working Group and is currently a member of the Events Strategy Working Group. Her work with other professional organizations includes Co-Chair of the 2025 BPE Program Committee, member of DLF PC 2020-2024, member of LD4 PC 2022, Digital Preservation Coalition Digital Preservation Awards guest Judge 2022, and member of SAA Collection Management Steering Committee 2023-2025.
Kari feels that digital stewardship challenges continue to expand and require professionals to provide creative solutions supported by limited resources. Working with the Coordinating Committee would offer an opportunity to encourage valuable connections throughout the field of digital stewardship and offer strategies to foster collaboration to maximize benefits for all.
Margo Padilla
Margo Padilla is the Digital Preservation Librarian at New York University where she unifies strategies and processes across the Division of Libraries to facilitate the preservation of digital resources. Prior to NYU, she was the Digital Archivist at the New-York Historical Society where she led the development of infrastructure for collecting, preserving, and providing access to born-digital collections. Margo recently served as a member of the National Best Practices for Archival Accessioning Working Group born-digital accessioning and digital preservation subgroup, and previously participated in Collective Responsibility: National Forum on Labor Practices for Grant-Funded Digital Positions.
Margo received her MLIS with a concentration in Management, Digitization, and Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Records from San José State University and her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Margo is interested in furthering the conversation on reliance on contingent labor in cultural heritage organizations, as well as advancing digital preservation best practices that can be realistically implemented by differently resourced institutions. She brings active engagement to committee work and believes the value of NDSA membership is derived from the collective dedication of the digital preservation community, as exemplified by the Interest and Working Groups.
Sylvia Umana
Sylvia is a dedicated Digital Collections Librarian at the Namibia University of Science and Technology Library with a deep passion for her role in preserving and managing digital assets. She holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Namibia in 2020, where her area of research focused on the digital preservation of institutional repositories. In her role as the digital collections’ librarian, Sylvia worked on various digitization projects including collaborations with the National Archives of Namibia and Desert Research Foundation of Namibia. She is committed to advancing her knowledge on active digital preservation, and thus continues to explore as she aims to actively implement these in her organization.
With a strong commitment to safeguarding digital collections for future generations, she is eager to expand her expertise and contribute to the evolving field of digital preservation and information management especially in developing countries such as Namibia. Her enthusiasm for learning and her attention to detail drive her mission to ensure the longevity and accessibility of valuable digital resources.
We are also grateful to all of the very talented, qualified candidates who participated in this election.
We are indebted to our outgoing Coordinating Committee members, We gratefully thank our outgoing Coordinating Committee members, Stacey Erdman, Jenny Mitcham, and Hannah Wang, for their dedicated and thoughtful leadership, service, and contributions. To sustain a vibrant, robust community of practice, we rely on and deeply value the contributions of all members, including those who took part in voting.
Mignon G. Eberhart published more than 50 books over a 60-year career, and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1971. Her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, introduces nurse Sarah Keate and her detective boyfriend Lance O’Leary, as they puzzle out what’s behind mysterious deaths in a hospital ward. A 2023 Time magazine panel named it one of the 100 best mystery and thriller books of all time. It joins the public domain in 52 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
By 1929, Arthur Conan Doyle had retired Sherlock Holmes, and his stories had more fantastical elements than Holmes would have put up with. The title story of The Maracot Deep and Other Stories involves encounters with supernatural beings in Atlantis. “The Disintegration Machine”, another story in the collection, and his last featuring Professor Challenger, deals with an invention not unlike Star Trek‘s later transporter. The book joins the public domain in 53 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Warner Brothers’ full-color 1929 musical film On With the Show featured Ethel Waters singing “Am I Blue?”, a song so pervasive that it was also in 3 other films that year. Singers that have since covered this standard include Billie Holiday, Eddie Cochran, Ray Charles, Cher, Bette Midler, and Linda Ronstadt. It’s also been in later films like To Have and Have Not, Funny Lady, and The Cotton Club. The song and the movie it debuted in join the public domain in 54 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Today Nvidia replaced Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a market cap of about $3.6T, about the same as Apple, as against Intel's market cap about 33 times less.
That is a long way from Curtis Priem's kitchen table, a $2.5M A-round from Sutter Hill and Sequoia, and the NV1.
“Cause and effect assume history marches forward, but history is not an
army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away
a stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one
person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a
few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass
movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the
same outrage or the same ideal, and the change comes upon us like a
change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that
they begin in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on
your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is
better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the
opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”
In 1929, just two years after The Jazz Singer introduced synchronized sound to theaters nationwide, The Broadway Melody was released as a full-length movie musical with synchronized sound nearly throughout. One sequence was even in Technicolor.
The movie won the first best-picture Oscar awarded to a sound film. Despite its fame and technical innovation, we won’t see it in its full glory when it joins the public domain in 55 days: the Technicolor version is now lost. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
Ons onderzoeksrapport over Verbetering van de vindbaarheid van Open Access voor gebruikers van academische bibliotheken is recent gepubliceerd. Het is een onderzoek naar strategieën om wetenschappelijke, peer-review open access (OA)-publicaties beter vindbaar te maken voor bibliotheekgebruikers. De bevindingen zijn gebaseerd op onderzoek door zeven academische instellingen binnen Nederland. We hebben bibliotheekpersoneel geïnterviewd over hun inspanningen rondom de vindbaarheid van OA en bibliotheekgebruikers bevraagd over hun ervaringen met OA. De synthese van deze bevindingen biedt nieuwe inzichten in de mogelijkheden om OA-vindbaarheid te verbeteren.
Van OA-beschikbaarheid naar vindbaarheid: de kloof overbruggen
Deze kloof kwam voor het eerst aan het licht door bevindingen uit de OCLC Global Council-enquête van 2018-2019 over open content in bibliotheken wereldwijd. De resultaten lieten een disbalans zien binnen de investeringen van academische bibliotheken: er werd meer moeite gestoken in eerder gesloten content te openen dan in het promoten van de vindbaarheid van open content. Toch gaven de meeste respondenten aan dat dit voor hen net zo belangrijk was. Ook opmerkelijk was de bijna unanieme mening dat OCLC een ondersteunende rol speelde in het vindbaar maken van open content van bibliotheken. Een bevestiging van het belang van de rol van OCLC in het open access-ecosysteem.
Een reeks kennisdelingsconsultaties van de Nederlandse academische bibliotheekgemeenschap in 2021 bevestigde deze kloof. Ook kwam hieruit het belang naar voren om de rol van OA in het zoekgedrag van gebruikers beter te begrijpen. Als gevolg hiervan besloten UKB, SHB en OCLC een onderzoek uit te voeren om te onderzoeken hoe de verwachtingen en gedragingen van academische studenten, docenten, onderzoekers en hoogleraren bibliotheken kunnen helpen bij hun inspanningen met betrekking tot verbetering van OA-vindbaarheid. Tot zover het begin van het Open Access Discovery-project.
Het ontstaan van het OA-ontdekkingslandschap en de rol die bibliotheken hierin spelen
Het geïnterviewde bibliotheekpersoneel beschreef de opkomst van een complex landschap om OA-publicaties vindbaar te maken. Nieuwe spelers wilden hun terrein afbakenen, terwijl bibliothecarissen deden wat zij het beste vonden, maar OA-publicaties pasten niet in hun traditionele processen. Er waren geen richtlijnen, best practices of benchmarks voor het toevoegen van OA-publicaties aan hun collecties en het integreren ervan in gebruikersworkflows. Nationale samenwerkingen en nieuwe processen zijn in eerste instantie opgezet om metadata te creëren en bloot te leggen voor institutioneel gepubliceerde OA-publicaties. Echter had het bibliotheekpersoneel te maken met uitdagingen op het gebied van ontsluiten van publicaties en de kwaliteit van metadata.
De geïnterviewden waren niet overtuigd dat hun inspanningen verschil maakten voor hun gebruikers, maar ons rapport laat zien dat dit wel zo is.
Hoewel zij terecht geloofden dat de bibliotheek niet de eerste plaats was waar gebruikers zochten, stond de zoekpagina van de bibliotheek in de top drie van meest gezochte systemen. De antwoorden van gebruikers schetsen een enigszins verwarrend beeld van de rol die OA speelt in hun ontdekkingstocht. Respondenten vonden OA-publicaties niet erg makkelijk te vinden of toegankelijk. Ook gaf bijna de helft aan niet veel te weten over OA. De meeste respondenten vertrouwden echter wel op OA-alternatieven wanneer zij moeilijk toegang kregen tot de volledige tekst. Hoewel OA niet hun eerste keuze was, beïnvloedde de groeiende hoeveelheid OA-publicaties hun zoek-, toegangs- en gebruiksprocessen. Deze bevindingen leidden tot de volgende ontdekking in het rapport:
“De voorlichtings- en instructieactiviteiten van het bibliotheekpersoneel waren voornamelijk gericht op het vergroten van het bewustzijn van gebruikers over OA-publicaties. Gebruikers hadden extra instructie nodig over het ontdekken, evalueren en gebruiken van deze nieuwe publicaties.”
Introductie van het rapport aan de Nederlandse bibliotheekgemeenschap
Met genoegen en trots presenteerden Ixchel Faniel en ik het eindrapport, met bevindingen en belangrijkste conclusies, aan UKB- en SHB-vertegenwoordigers op de OCLC Contactdag op 8 oktober 2024 in Amersfoort, Nederland. De Contactdag is een jaarlijkse bijeenkomst van Nederlandse en Vlaamse professionals uit academische en openbare bibliotheken die geïnteresseerd zijn brancheontwikkelingen en in de strategische richting en productontwikkeling van OCLC. Het is tevens een plek waar zij praktijken en innovatieve projectresultaten delen.
Bij de introductie van het OA-ontdekkingsrapport deelde ik de belangrijkste conclusie voor de Nederlandse bibliotheekgemeenschap als volgt:
“Als je je afvraagt of de investering van je bibliotheek in OA-vindbaarheid de moeite waard is, is het antwoord volmondig JA!”
De omslag van het rapport—een foto van een Nederlands polderlandschap—is een knipoog naar de Nederlandse setting van ons onderzoek. Het is ook als een vergelijking met het harde werk dat nodig is om OA-publicaties vindbaar te maken. Een polder wordt gecreëerd door het graven van sloten en het bouwen van dammen en dijken om stukken laagland van water te ontdoen. Zoals ik het publiek vertelde, vergelijkbaar als bij de polder: “er is nog veel werk te doen. OA is nog onontgonnen terrein dat verkend en gecultiveerd moet worden. We kunnen het ons niet veroorloven om achterover te leunen en toe te kijken!”
Volgende stappen: slimmer samenwerken
Tijdens de middagsessie van de OCLC Contactdag bespraken de deelnemers de bevindingen, uitdagingen, kansen en vervolgstappen in break-outgroepen. Velen herkenden de dilemma’s rondom OA-ontdekkingen, zoals weergegeven in het rapport. Ze waren ook geïnteresseerd in de bevindingen om strategieën te ontwikkelen voor het verbeteren van de vindbaarheid van OA.
Een terugkerend thema was de noodzaak tot samenwerking. Deelnemers bespraken de mogelijke voordelen van samenwerking bij het selecteren van OA-titels per vakgebied en het vergroten van het bewustzijn van gebruikers over OA-bronnen. Ze wilden ervaringen delen over het blootleggen van institutionele metadata, samenwerken bij het verzamelen van metadata, en partnerschappen aangaan met OCLC om de kwaliteit van metadata te verbeteren. Ook werd gesproken over grotere betrokkenheid, op de campus en nationaal, met recente Diamond OA-publicatie-initiatieven om te pleiten voor ontdekkingsmetadata die goed werken voor zowel bibliotheekworkflows als gebruikersbehoeften. Deze ideeën illustreren de noodzaak van samenwerking tussen belanghebbenden, van OA-publicatie tot vindbaarheid. Deze sluiten dan ook goed aan bij de laatste woorden van ons rapport:
“Om de vindbaarheid van OA-publicaties echt te verbeteren, moeten alle betrokkenen de behoeften van anderen binnen de keten in overweging nemen.”
Lees het rapport voor meer informatie over het overbruggen van de kloof tussen de beschikbaarheid en de vindbaarheid van OA-publicaties. https://oc.lc/oa-discovery
William Golding called the bipolar Catholic author Graham Greene “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety”. Both Greene’s thrillers and his more serious novels are suffused with concerns of politics and religion, flawed institutions, characters who betray others and their own consciences, and grace and redemption in unexpected places.
LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with author Andrea Jo DeWerd, who, in addition to her career in publishing and as an independent book marketer, recently saw her debut novel, What We Sacrifice for Magic, released by Alcove Press. DeWerd worked for more than a decade in the marketing and publicity departments of a number of Big 5 publishers, including Crown, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and most recently, the Harvest imprint of HarperCollins. In 2022 she launched her own marketing and publishing consulting agency, the future of agency LLC. Her authorial debut, published in late September, is a fantastical coming-of-age story following three generations of Minnesota witches during the 1960s. DeWerd sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about this new book.
How did the idea for What We Sacrifice for Magic first come to you, and how did the story develop? Did your heroine Elisabeth come first? Was it always a multi-generational family story in your mind, always a witchy tale?
I was trying to write a very different book about the American Dream, and my own family’s experience with it. My grandfather’s family were Dutch immigrants in Minnesota. My great-grandfather and his cousin operated several feed mills and fish hatcheries. The next generation, my grandfather and his brothers, all became doctors. I was fascinated by this story, and by what happens after the American Dream is achieved—what happens to the next generation? But it was too close to home for me to write in the years after my grandfather passed away.
What We Sacrifice for Magic grew out of the question: what were the women doing while the men were building their empire? I started to imagine a world in which the men ostensibly held the power, but beneath the surface, it was really the women pulling the strings; a world in which the women could be running a full-on witchcraft operation out of the side door of the kitchen while the men were off fighting their wars and building their supposed influence.
Elisabeth’s voice came to me first. I started to hear her voice, and the first thing I knew about her was that she was ruled by water. From there, I explored how she would’ve come to be that way, who would’ve taught her about her power, and Magda, her grandmother, her teacher, emerged pretty quickly.
Your book addresses themes of familial history, obligation and conflict, and the individual’s struggle to both belong to and be independent of the family circle. How does the witchy element in your story add to or complicate those themes? How different would your story be if the Watry-Ridder women weren’t witches?
In many books with magic, the magic acts as the deus ex machina that lifts the characters out of their unfortunate situations. Magic breaks oppressive forces in many ways. For Elisabeth, magic is what is holding her back, her burden. Aside from that magical burden, Elisabeth would still need her coming-of-age journey. I believe that even without magic, Elisabeth would’ve always felt separate from her family. She needed to learn who she is on her own, away from the reputation of her family and the name she was born to.
Without magic, this story becomes a much more familiar one. Anyone who has ever dealt with the pressures of a family business knows what it feels like to be torn between wanting to forge your own path and getting pulled back into the family responsibility. Adult children who take care of their aging parents know that tug-of-war as well. I think we all feel family pressure in some way or another in our lives, and beneath the magic, that is what I wanted to explore in this book.
What We Sacrifice for Magic is set in your own home state of Minnesota, and opens in 1968. What significance do the setting and time period have to your story?
The setting came to me first. Elisabeth, ruled by water, was always going to be from a small lakeside town in Minnesota. The town of Friedrich was inspired by my own beloved Spicer, Minnesota, where my family has had a cabin on Green Lake since 1938. The lake felt so integral to this story and this community that the Watry-Ridder family serves.
Moreso, this family had to come from a place that was rural enough for them to fly under the radar, a pastoral community that just accepted their local eccentrics, and even came to depend on them. I was also fascinated by the sort of gossip that happens in a small town. In a closeknit community, it’s impossible to walk down the street without everybody knowing everything about you, who you’re dating, etc. I wanted to see Elisabeth and her younger sister, Mary, engage with that gossip, and it certainly shapes them as they’re growing up in Friedrich with the sometimes unwanted attention.
More broadly, 1968 was a time when many young women were starting to have more choices in their education and the opportunity for careers outside of the home, in many parts due to contraception. Those choices were not available to Elisabeth—she is stuck in this small town, tied to her community, as she watches her high school classmates going off to their next chapters.
What influence has your career in publishing and book marketing had on your storytelling? Have you been inspired by any of the authors whose books you have promoted?
I started writing this book when I was working full-time as a book marketer at Random House. I had been a creative writing minor in college, but I wasn’t really writing in my first 8 years in New York while I was in grad school and volunteering and focused on other things. I was inspired to start writing again in earnest when I would be in meetings with these amazing authors like Catherine Banner and Emma Cline, who were both a few years younger than me. I thought if they found time to do it, why couldn’t I? On the flip side, I was working with Helen Simonson at the time, who said that she didn’t really get to start writing until her kids were grown and out of the house, and I thought, “I’m single, I don’t have kids, what am I waiting for?”
I was also greatly inspired by Laura Lynne Jackson’s books The Light Between Us and Signs. Her first-person account of how close we are to the spirits on the other side very much influenced my own personal spiritual beliefs, some of which are woven into Elisabeth’s outlook and her experiences with her guide from the other side, Great-Grandma Dorothy, and the energy healing work that the family does.
Tell us about your writing process. Do you have a particular place you prefer to write, a specific way of mapping out your story? Did you know from the beginning what the conclusion would be?
I wrote at least 50% of this book long-hand in a journal. I write in the morning in bed before the rest of the world comes crashing in, i.e. before I look at my phone or email. My phone stays in the kitchen until after I’m done writing for the day. Once I got further into the story, though, I switched to drafting on my laptop when I was really building momentum.
I don’t believe you have to write every day. I have a day job! I write maybe a few days a week, and this book came together 100 words at a time. I would write a single paragraph in the morning before hopping in the shower and heading into Random House. My writing group talks often about setting realistic goals because the minute you set a lofty goal and miss that first day of “write every day,” it makes it that much harder to get back on track.
I barely outlined this book. This was very much a discovery writing project, but when I got into revision, I reverse-outlined what had happened so far in the book so that I could confidently write my way through to the end. I didn’t know the exact ending of the book until I was about ⅓ of the way through. I remember emailing my writing group one day to say, “I think I just wrote the last line of my book.”
For revision, the book Dreyer’s English by friend and former Random House colleague Benjamin Dreyer was essential to me. It was very helpful to read books like his as I was enmeshed in the revision process.
What can we look forward to next from you? Do you have other writing projects in the offing?
I am working on something completely different next! I am finishing a first draft this fall of my second novel, a contemporary Christmas rom-com set in southern Minnesota. There’s Christmas cookies, a local hottie, and a girl home from the big city. I’m approaching this book a little differently—starting with an outline!
Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?
I am very much a mood reader and I read just about every genre out there. I love sci fi and fantasy or romance for a quick vacation read. I try to keep up with the new, big literary novels. I have my section of craft books, like Big Magic and Bird by Bird. I have sections of series that I’m hoping to finish one day, like Outlander. I’m always reading our clients’ books for work. I have a celebrity chef’s memoir and a performance and productivity expert to read next for work. But truthfully, my shelves are full of books I haven’t read that have come with me from job to job. I have classics, I have the hot releases dating back to 2010, I have signed copies of books I’ve worked on, like Educated and Born a Crime. I also have an amazing cookbook collection from my time working in lifestyle books, lots of Mark Bittman and Jacques Pépin and Dominique Ansel.
What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?
I just finished the new Louise Erdrich novel, The Mighty Red. She’s my favorite author and as a contemporary Minnesotan author, she has had a huge impact on me as a reader and a writer. I think Erdrich most accurately captures contemporary women—and the myriad ways the world disappoints us—like no one else I’ve ever read. I make a point to buy the new books by Louise Erdrich and William Kent Krueger, another Minnesotan author, in hardcover from indie bookstores when I’m back in MN. If you haven’t read Louise Erdrich before, one of my favorite books is The Round House. I recommend that book to everyone.
While I’m in Cambridge, today members of my Information Quality Lab present a talk and 9 posters as part of the iSchool Research Showcase 2024, noon to 4:30 PM in the Illini Union. View posters from 12 to 1; during the break between presentation sessions 2-2:45; and 4-4:30 PM.
TALK by Dr. Heng Zheng, based on our forthcoming JCDL 2024 paper: Addressing Unreliability Propagation in Scientific Digital Libraries Heng Zheng, Yuanxi Fu, M. Janina Sarol, Ishita Sarraf, Jodi Schneider
POSTERS Addressing Biomedical Information Overload: Identifying Missing Study Designs to Design Multi-Tagger 2.0 Puranjani Das, Jodi Schneider
Assessing the Quality of Pathotic Arguments Dexter Williams
Cognitive and Behavioral Approaches to Disinformation Inoculation through a Hidden Object Game Emily Wegrzyn
Distinguishing Retracted Publications from Retraction Notices in Crossref Data Luyang Si, Malik Oyewale Salami, Jodi Schneider
Harmonizing Data: Discovering “The Girl From Ipanema” John Rutherford, Liliana Giusti Serra, Jodi Schneider
“I Lost My Job to AI” — Social Movement Emergence? Ted Ledford, Jodi Schneider
Recognizing People, Organizations, and Locations Mentioned in the News Xioran Zhou, Heng Zheng, Jodi Schneider
Representation of Socio-technical Elements in Non-English Audio-visual Media Puranjani Das, Travis Wagner
What People Say Versus What People Do: Developing a Methodology to Assess Conceptual Heterogeneity in a Scientific Corpus Yuanxi Fu, Jodi Schneider
The Tech We Want Summit took place between 17 and 18 October 2024 – in total, 43 speakers from 23 countries interacted with 700+ registered people about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting, and focused on solving people’s real problems.
In this series of posts, OKFN brings you the documentation of each session, opening the content generated during these two intense days of reflection and joint work accessible and open.
Above is the video and below is a summary of the topics discussed in:
Digital technologies need people to care for them and keep them alive. In a time of obsession for innovation and disruption, in this panel we will shine a light on the invisible but essential work of maintenance.
Sara Petti – International Network Lead, OKFN [moderator]
This panel sheds light on the often invisible, essential work of maintaining digital infrastructure, particularly open source software. The speakers argue passionately that the maintenance of software systems, like the ongoing care of a garden, is crucial to the sustainability of digital ecosystems. They highlight the systemic problems that maintainers face, such as burnout, lack of recognition and inadequate funding, and call for a radical shift in how this work is valued and supported.
Emphasising the ethical and social consequences of neglect, and the urgent need for a supportive community and adequate funding, the panellists argue for a culture of shared responsibility and visibility. They urge both corporations and open source communities to recognise this work, to create supportive structures, and to recognise that maintenance is as critical as innovation. The discussion is a clarion call to action, emphasising that we must prioritise care and sustainability in our digital world.
I recently attended the 2024 BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe (BFWE), hosted by the National Library of Finland in Helsinki. It was an excellent conference in a great city!
Having attended several BFWEs over the years, it’s gratifying to witness the continued progress toward making BIBFRAME the de facto standard for linked data in bibliographic metadata. BIBFRAME was developed and is maintained by the Library of Congress to eventually replace the flat record-based metadata format utilised by the vast majority of libraries – MARC (a standard in use since 1968).
This year, Sally McCallum from the Library of Congress shared significant updates about their transition to becoming a BIBFRAME-native organisation. In August 2024, they began a pilot with 15 cataloguers inputting records directly into BIBFRAME, marking the start of the next stage of a long journey. This process not only involved adopting a new system but also retraining a large number of staff—a significant challenge but a major step forward.
Several other organisations, including the Share Community, OCLC, Ex Libris, and FOLIO LSP, also presented their advancements in linked bibliographic metadata and BIBFRAME. While the progress is encouraging, there are some dilemmas, not really addressed in the conference, that libraries face as they consider adopting BIBFRAME, and I’d like to explore those here.
#1: Should linked data only be limited to bibliographic resources?
One of the key benefits of linked data is its ability to connect and relate resources across different domains, not just within traditional library systems. However, many libraries aiming to leverage linked data are primarily focused on bibliographic resources, especially as current BIBFRAME-enabled cataloguing solutions are often seen only as replacements for MARC-based systems.
The challenge arises when libraries want to integrate other types of resources—such as archival collections, historical documents, or art-related information—that don’t neatly fit into the BIBFRAME model. BIBFRAME excels at describing bibliographic resources, but it struggles with the nuances of these other resource types. There are initiatives to extend BIBFRAME to handle arts materials etc., but they are still very [bibliographic] library system focused.
Dilemma: Should a library implement a linked data solution solely for bibliographic resources (essentially as a MARC replacement), or should they adopt a broader linked data strategy that integrates all types of resources across the organisation?
My thought: If a [linked data enabled] replacement for a current library system is all you are looking for, that’s fine. However, if that is all, you need to examine the benefits that would accrue from such a significant move and investment. If your ambition is to present a linked aggregated view of all your resources to your users, a BIBFRAME replacement library system probably will not be flexible enough.
#2: How to bridge the gap between the library world and the wider web?
One of the widely-touted benefits of BIBFRAME is the ability to share library data more openly across the web. In theory, other libraries, research institutions, and even the broader public could link to a library’s BIBFRAME data. For the library community, BIBFRAME offers a comprehensive linked data vocabulary that facilitates data sharing.
However, outside of the library world, the web at large, driven by the search engines, is largely adopting Schema.org as the preferred vocabulary for sharing data. Libraries have long been seen as silos, with their data mostly confined to standalone search interfaces and complex data formats such as MARC.
BIBFRAME, while a step forward, doesn’t fully resolve this issue. Yes, it makes data more open and linked, but it still speaks primarily to the library community. If libraries want their data to enrich the wider web, they may need to also incorporate Schema.org alongside BIBFRAME to ensure comprehension and therefore visibility of their resources.
Dilemma: Should libraries focus exclusively on sharing data within the library and research community using BIBFRAME, or should they also aim to make their data more accessible to the general web audience by enriching their data with Schema.org terms?
My thought: Whatever specialist online discovery routes our users may take, they and we are also users of the wider web in general. To make best use of our resources we need our potential users to be guided to those resources. Guided from where they are, which is often not within a library interface or specialist site. To be visible beyond library focused sites, our resources need to be also described using the de facto vocabulary for the rest of the web – Schema.org.
#3: The costs and challenges of transitioning to BIBFRAME
Transitioning to BIBFRAME can involve significant upheaval for a library, especially for those still reliant on MARC-based systems. Replacing these systems often comes with substantial costs, retraining efforts, and disruptions to daily operations.
Many libraries may question whether the perceived benefits of linked data and BIBFRAME—such as improved data sharing and discoverability—are worth the investment. For smaller institutions, the costs of a full-scale BIBFRAME implementation may seem prohibitive, especially when the advantages are not always immediately tangible.
Dilemma: Should libraries undertake a full-scale, costly transition to BIBFRAME and linked data, or is there a way to adopt linked data principles more gradually, without completely overhauling existing systems?
My thought: My many years working with libraries has taught me that any significant change in systems and or practices often results in far greater investment in time, people, and money than was initially envisaged. Part of the reason for this being the integrated nature of traditional library systems. Swapping out one system for another, say to change cataloguing practices, will often result in changes to circulation and acquisition processes for example. All this whilst the library needs to continue its business as usual. Equally, is retraining of staff a necessary first step to adopting linked data, or could/should it be a more evolutionary process.
My recent work, in partnership with metaphacts, for the National Library Board Singapore has demonstrated that it is possible to make significant beneficial moves into linked data, without replacing established systems and processes or disrupting business as usual. A route others may want to consider.
In addition to attending the BFWE conference, I had the privilege of delivering a presentation titled “Building a Semantic Knowledge Graph at National Library Board Singapore” [slides, video] This project represents a two-year effort to develop and deliver a linked data management system based on both BIBFRAME and Schema.org, powered by metaphactory. What makes this initiative unique is that it integrates data from various systems across the library without requiring a complete systems replacement.
Conclusion
Since its launch 18 months ago, this system has continued to evolve, delivering linked data services back into the library. The approach has allowed the library to realise many of the benefits of linked data without the disruption of replacing its core systems. These benefits include cross-system entity aggregation & reconciliation, navigational widgets for non-linked systems, and an open linked data knowledge graph interface. Besides leveraging the benefits of linked data for library curators, the immense knowledge graph built across data sources united using Schema.org data modelling opens the opportunities of publishing rich cross-domain data to the general public. To learn more about our work with NLB, have a look at this metaphacts blog post.
For those grappling with any of the dilemmas I’ve outlined here or interested in exploring linked data further, feel free to reach out—I’d be happy to help facilitate a discussion.
(Note: This post is also featured as a guest post on the metaphacts blog)
Alma Lutz’s 1929 biography of Willard, joining the public domain in 57 days, is titled Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy. May all American daughters and other children of democracy vote to defend it today. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
“I listen to Mussolini’s gentle voice talking to me of friendship, while my ears still ring with the death threats…”
French Prix Goncourt laureate Maurice Bedel wrote in the 1920s and 30s of the appeal and threat of fascism, and the people seduced by it in Italy and Germany. Parts of his book Fascisme An VII appeared in English translation in the November 1929 Atlantic as “A Frenchman Looks at Fascism“. It joins the public domain in both Europe and America in 58 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown
This year we’re continuing to focus on indie bookstores. You can still order Kindle ebooks, we have Kenny’s and Blackwell’s for international orders, and also stores local to Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. » SIGN UP FOR SANTATHING NOW!
You pay $15–$50 and pick your favorite bookseller. We match you with a participant, and you play Santa by selecting books for them. Another Santa does the same for you, in secret. LibraryThing does the ordering, and you get the joy of giving AND receiving books!
Sign up once or thrice, for yourself or someone else.
Even if you don’t want to be a Santa, you can help by suggesting books for others. Click on an existing SantaThing profile to leave a suggestion.
Every year, LibraryThing members give generously to each other through SantaThing. If you’d like to donate an entry, or want to participate, but it’s just not in the budget this year, be sure to check out our Donations Thread here, run once again by our fantastic volunteer coordinator, mellymel1713278.
Important Dates
Sign-ups close MONDAY, November 25th at 12pm EST. By the next day, we’ll notify you via profile comment who your Santee is, and you can start picking books.
You’ll then have a little more than a week to pick your books, until THURSDAY, December 5th at 12pm EST (16:00 GMT). As soon as the picking ends, the ordering begins, and we’ll get all the books out to you as soon as we can.
To support indie bookstores we’re teaming up with independent bookstores from around the country to deliver your SantaThing picks, including BookPeople in Austin, TX, Longfellow Books in Portland, ME, and Powell’s Books in Portland, OR.
And to continue previous years’ success, we’re bringing back the following foreign retail partners: Readings for our Australian participants, Time Out Books for the Kiwi participants, and Kennys for our Irish friends.
And since Book Depository has closed, this year we’re offering international deliveries through Kennys and Blackwell’s.
Kindle options are available to all members, regardless of location. To receive Kindle ebooks, your Kindle must be registered on Amazon.com (not .co.uk, .ca, etc.). See more information about all the stores.
Shipping
Some of our booksellers are able to offer free shipping, and some are not. Depending on your bookseller of choice, you may receive $6 less in books, to cover shipping costs. You can find details about shipping costs and holiday ordering deadlines for each of our booksellers here on the SantaThing Help page. » Go sign up now!
Questions? Comments?
This is our EIGHTEENTH year of SantaThing. See the SantaThing Help page further details and FAQ.
Feel free to ask your questions over on this Talk topic, or you can contact Kate directly at kate@librarything.com.
Happy SantaThinging!
We’re thrilled to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) has achieved NGOsource Equivalency Determination (ED) certification, formally establishing our recognition as equivalent to a US public charity. This status represents a major milestone for OKFN and opens new avenues for partnerships and support from US-based donors and foundations.
What is NGOsource Equivalency Determination (ED)?
The Equivalency Determination process, administered by NGOsource, evaluates nonprofit organisations outside the United States to confirm their operations are in accordance with the guidelines that US tax authorities require for public charitable organisations. By meeting NGOsource’s rigorous criteria, Open Knowledge demonstrates its commitment to transparency, accountability, and impact on a global scale. This designation means that foundations and individuals in the United States can now make tax-deductible grants and donations to OKFN with fewer restrictions, knowing that their contributions are directed toward a recognised, vetted nonprofit organisation.
What This Means for Our Work and Communities
As a certified organisation, OKFN can now access new grant opportunities and accept tax-deductible donations from US-based donors. This expanded support base will enable us to continue our work on a global scale, advancing open knowledge, promoting transparency, and advocating for and building accessible, digital tools that serve the public interest worldwide. With US charity recognition, OKFN is now even better positioned to partner with organisations, donors, and advocates who share our vision of a world open by design, where all knowledge is accessible to all.
Renata Avila, CEO of Open Knowledge, shared her appreciation for the recognition: “Receiving NGOsource’s Equivalency Determination isn’t just an acknowledgement of OKFN’s work; it’s a profound opportunity to expand our mission. With US charity recognition, we can continue to nurture and grow a network of leaders and communities in every region of the world. We will also continue to innovate legal, technical and accessibility tools for citizens and governments to unlock the potential of open knowledge, data and digital technologies that can be applied to their work and transform lives. This will lead to open knowledge, data and technologies that are open, participatory, accountable and sustainable for a better world and empowered communities everywhere.”
This achievement is directly in line with OKFN’s vision and strengthens its ability to advocate and implement open knowledge initiatives worldwide. You can find this and other relevant information about OKFN’s institutional functions on our Governance page.
We’re excited about the opportunities this opens up and grateful for the continued support of our community. Thank you for being part of our journey towards a fair, sustainable and open future.
I recently attended the 
