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Photo credit: Mushrooms surrounded by trees by Valentin S. 

This is the sixth and final essay in a series of essays I’ve written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay.

Eviatar Zerubavel is a sociologist of time who has studied how time works in organizations and amongst groups of people; essentially collective temporal norms. He began by studying the rhythms and temporal structures within a hospital and later went on to study calendaring, scheduling, and other temporal ordering within groups. His goal was to illuminate “the sociotemporal order, which regulates the lives of of social entities such as families, professional groups, religious communities, complex organizations, and even entire nations… The sociotemporal order is essentially a socially constructed artifact which rests on rather arbitrary social conventions” (Zerubavel 1985, xii).  

Arbitrary seems like the important keyword there. The way we schedule and the way we enforce time norms in our organizations is not neutral. It reflects the values of the organization. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of moving to a new job and getting used to new rhythms and norms. I’ve worked in four different libraries and at each one, scheduling has been done radically differently. Those rhythms are neither random nor inevitable. The people there might not have consciously chosen them, but they grew out of the organizational culture and reflect its values. This means that they can also change if we stop taking them for granted or decide to value other things – like the well-being of workers.

I’ve written in the past that individualism is the enemy of slow librarianship. We are so trained to value self-sufficiency, to try to shine brighter than others, to believe that if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel (2020) writes that “the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good” (14). And I think individualism really keeps us at this frenetic pace because we fear that if we slow down, we will be giving up potential raises, accolades, job security, and more. We compare ourselves to others and fear how it would look if we worked at a more humane pace. And we know that for people in precarious positions, that fear is quite real. As Mountz et al. (2015) write in their article on slow scholarship, “our goal is to move from individualized experiences of neoliberal time to collective action, precisely to resist intensified pressures to do it all and/or intensify elitist structures that make ‘slowness’ possible for some while leaving others slogging in the trenches” (1248). 

A key shift needs to happen where we see ourselves in solidarity with one another and where we recognize that we can gain much more working together than we possibly could from jealously guarding the minimal privilege we have as individuals. A feminist ethic of care is at the heart of all slow movements. According to Mountz, et al. “slow scholarship enables a feminist ethics of care that allows us to claim some time as our own, build shared time into everyday life, and help buffer each other from unrealistic and counterproductive norms that have become standard expectations” (1253-4). Similarly, Brons et al. (2022) write, about supporting library workers in precarity, that “care ethics centers relational and interdependent human experiences, explicitly naming the value of emotional labor, community building, and nurturing… Centering an inclusive ethics of care could begin to address some of the inequity and negative effects that emerge from prolonged devaluation of care” (18-19). I agree that care ethics goes beyond solidarity and into recognition of our essential interdependence. There is something beautiful in acknowledging that we are part of a web or a tapestry of interdependence. According to Nancy Fraser “these networks of interdependencies can actually make people feel very much more connected, like their fates are tied together” (Chang 2020).  

Just as slowing down requires solidarity, building capacity for solidarity requires slowing down. As Parkins and Craig (2006) write in their excellent book Slow Living, “the daily practices which allow us to cultivate an attitude of wonder and generosity… require time, for reflection and attention, which reminds us of our connections to nature and others (50). Moya Bailey (2021) considers what an “ethics of pace” might looks like and suggests that it is a deeply relational and collaborative practice: 

The ethic of pace I want moving forward in my life and in my academic work is a slow and sustainable pace, one that moves at the speed of trust [emphasis mine] and is not driven by capitalistic imperatives… We must pivot and change how we relate to each other. We must slow down to survive. (296)

I love this deeply relational vision for a slower pace in the workplace. We have to do this work together.

Ellen Samuels and the late Elizabeth Freeman (2021) wrote during the heart of the pandemic about changes in the workplace necessitated by COVID: “at the same time that disabled people see nondisabled people now contending with a cripped workplace, we also see approaches to work and study long denied to us as ‘unreasonable’ accommodations—too expensive, too burdensome, not the way it’s done—suddenly implemented quickly, universally, and with total social acceptance” (247). How ironic that we can’t let an individual work from home a few days per week due to a disability until every able-bodied person is able to do the same. While the experience of COVID should have shown us that there is much greater flexibility within the system than is often acknowledged, people with disabilities still are often treated like the minor accommodations they are requesting are maximally disruptive (I’ve experienced this personally). And I believe that reflects the values of the institution. If it does not value worker well-being very highly, it will offer less flexibility.

Mushrooms on pile of dried leaves by Tom Swinnen

Crip time can act as a roadmap toward a humane pace for all, not just those currently living with disabilities. As Moya Bailey writes, “humans are feeling an exponential pressure to move faster and produce more efficiently, all in service to an imperative to survive that has been warped by capitalistic greed. This pressure exacerbates disability, creates impairments, and even leads to premature death.” If this unrelenting pace can be disabling, can permanently damage people, perhaps we all need to push for a pace that allows us to breathe, to rest, to reflect, and to stay healthy. There is nothing inevitable about the pace in which we currently work, about checking email or Slack or Teams 20 times each day, about checking in on work long after the workday is done. We have the power to change these norms. Cripping time should be a societal change, not one each individual person with disabilities (or person trying to avoid being disabled) must fight for. We should collectively refuse to work at an unsustainable pace.

What would a collective care-centered library organizational culture look like? It would clearly include a lot more grace and flexibility than is extended in most of our institutions. I really appreciate Leah Piepzna-Samarsinha’s vision:

Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for.

I think all this requires us to create a vision for community time that exists outside of capitalist notions of tit-for-tat and exact reciprocity. My vision for community time is one where we see all the work of libraries as a shared project and contribute as our capacity allows. And on the other side, we provide mutual support as our capacity allows, without looking to be paid back or for labor to be exchanged on a 1:1 basis. I agree with Piepzna-Samarasinha that seeing our work as a collective responsibility and providing collective care can be a beautiful and joyful experience. Imagine the peace of mind of always knowing you have the support you needed when you simply couldn’t get things done (because of illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, etc.). Imagine the freedom of feeling like you can fall down and rest and won’t let the world down or jeopardize your job. Imagine the joy of providing support to your colleagues when they really need it. Imagine the deep relationships and trust that come from a communal vision of time. Think of how vulnerable and human you could be in such an environment. And perhaps there is a new kind of freedom in such an arrangement as Ivan Illich suggested: “I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.”

My current job is the first one in which I felt like I could have bodily needs and schedule my work time around them to at least a small extent. It’s the first where people didn’t all come to work at the exact same time and that was seen as an asset. Some of us come in early to cover the early reference shifts (like me, since I have to be done before my son finishes school) and others came in later and stayed later because they weren’t early risers or wanted to miss rush hour traffic. I was able to schedule my reference shifts around my hypoglycemia (no more dizzy at the desk or grotesquely shoving a protein bar in my mouth while working with a student). Another colleague was able to skip having an evening reference shift (we each had one) for six months when they had a health condition that made it difficult. When my colleague’s spouse was in the hospital, another colleague and I took on their reference shifts and classes. I’ve taught classes with less than 20 minutes’ notice because a colleague called in sick. We all just made these things work. It took me a while to get used to it after working at places where everything was seen as your individual responsibility, not a shared one. I remember once at another job I started vomiting at work and no one would take the class I was supposed to teach even though most of them technically could have (only one had a meeting). I was running from office to office begging people when I should have been on my way home. That probably wouldn’t happen here. 

Toadstools in a Forest by Denzel V

What I think I appreciate most is that no one seems to be keeping score with these things (it took me a while to get past doing that myself) and there isn’t a focus on tit-for-tat transactional exchanges or who is asking for how much. In previous jobs, the assumption was that if you needed someone to cover a reference shift, you needed to take one of theirs. There had to be as close to a 1:1 exchange as possible. If you’re asking for coverage because you’re feeling totally underwater and have a gazillion classes to teach, you’re then just kicking the can a day or two down the road. In my current job, people ask all the time for someone to take a few hours of their reference shift and only rarely is a swap of hours involved. More often than not, we just cover each other’s shifts without expecting to be “paid back,” but expecting that when we need the same support, we’ll get it (maybe not from that exact person, but from someone else in the community). And here, it’s actually a safe assumption. People simply cover as their schedules allow as we all have somewhat different ebbs and flows to our schedules. Because of that culture, I see more requests for reference coverage come across my email than at any other place I’ve worked because people don’t feel like it has to be an absolute emergency to request coverage. It can feel a bit chaotic, but somehow everything does get covered. And that culture wasn’t dictated by a boss or even discussed and decided upon. It just grew organically by virtue of our shared commitment to the work, genuine care and respect for one another, spirit of solidarity, and trust in each other (I think it also helps that scheduling in the first place is in our hands and not that of a boss). It’s not my perfect vision for an interdependent community time, but it’s the closest I’ve experienced. 

I don’t think a culture like that could grow at an institution where people feel precarious in their jobs or see their colleagues as competition for scarce resources (promotions, raises, praise, etc.). When the culture is individualistic or people are in a space of comparing or are looking for exact equality in workload (pretty much an impossibility but that doesn’t stop people from endlessly comparing), regardless of capacity at that particular time, there will be more of a focus on an exact exchange of hours, treating them as a commodity. I also think this only works if people aren’t overworked and overscheduled, because that erodes our capacity for community care. There has to be at least a little slack in the system (something my colleagues and I will have less of this academic year which makes me worry). But because of that slack, everything doesn’t fall apart when people have a health or family emergency. While some of us may be overloaded at a particular time, we’re not all drowning in work in week 3 of the term. And it’s because of that, we don’t treat our time as a scarce commodity and instead give generously when/if we can. And, like Ivan Illich suggested, wow do I feel freer than when I was in more individualistic and transactional cultures in other libraries. 

The other thing lacking in our field is any sense of enoughness. In a profession where we could always be doing more to serve our patrons, not having any sense of what enough looks like is a recipe for always feeling like we should be doing more. I love Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling’s (2021) article on enoughness. They clearly see the problem in our organizations (and society): 

People are constantly both exposed to and subjected to logics of quantification and measurement. Rather than having enough and being enough, the dominant paradigm of growth and a culture of individualization rely on striving for more and being better, as well as idealizing maximization and perfection. (159)

Again, we see individualism playing a toxic role in holding us back from imagining something better. Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling suggest that “enoughness denotes a state or condition of having and being enough, thereby negating the need for an external reference point and avoiding comparability” (161). Imagine feeling like you were doing enough, like the organization was doing enough. Imagine being able to focus on doing better instead of doing more. We have the ability to do less. To define what enough looks like. To live in a sense of abundance. By worrying that there isn’t enough time, that we’re not doing enough, time becomes scarce, increasing our anxiety and the pace of our worklives. “The reduction of want, slowing down and producing and consuming less are the likely effects of enoughness, which shifts our focus from scarcity and wanting to abundance and being.” (Edlinger, Ungericht, and Deimling 2021, 169-170). I love what Jenny Odell (2023) says about this at the end of Saving Time: “If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world” (225). Exactly.

Close-up photo of white mushrooms by Chris G

I just read Ruha Benjamin’s (2024) terrific new book Imagination: A Manifesto (which I think is a fantastic companion to Adrienne Maree Brown’s work, like Emergent Strategy). In it, she asks us to critically think about whose imagination we are currently living in (the roots of our reality and who this reality serves), how social forces work to constrain our imagination (especially that of people society deems as less-than), who gets to imagine the future, and the power we have to imagine radically better futures. Like my vision of time, her vision of imagination is collective: “the most effective means to refute the prevailing ideologies is to do so collectively – crafting new stories, images, ways of interacting, and investments in those who have been denigrated and discarded” (10). Imagining a better world together is the only way we are going to build a better world. And we can’t allow ourselves to be constrained by forces that seek to limit our imagination to our current systems and ways of seeing. Benjamin quotes Angela Davis who writes “dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives… These ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake” (8). I recommend Benjamin’s book as much as I recommend freeing your imagination from what shackles it. 

We are currently trapped in someone else’s imagined world of work and vision of time that doesn’t serve the vast majority of us. Please remember that it can be otherwise, but we have to decide to work together. To see ourselves in solidarity with our colleagues. To see interdependence as aspirational and community care as the best way forward. To see ourselves as part of a mutual web of need, care, vulnerability, and trust that doesn’t require everyone to do exactly the same amount of work every week and allows people to fall down sometimes. Let’s put on our thinking caps and imagine this new world of work and this new relationship with time together. As Angela Davis said, “our future is at stake.”

This is my last essay on the topic of time, at least for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issues I’ve raised here and in the other essays in this series. P.S. If you’re wondering why all the pictures of mushrooms?, I was thinking about the mycelial network that connects mushrooms together and sustains them and how I wish we could see the invisible threads that connect and sustain us all. 

Bailey, Moya. “The ethics of pace.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 285-299.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination : A Manifesto. First edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Brons, Adena, Chloe Riley, Ean Henninger, and Crystal Yin. “Precarity Doesn’t Care: Precarious Employment as a Dysfunctional Practice in Libraries.” In Libraries as Dysfunctional Organizations and Workplaces, pp. 95-108. Routledge, 2022.

brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy : Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Chang, Clio. “Taking Care of Each Other Is Essential Work.” Vice, 7 Apr. 2020, www.vice.com/en/article/jge39g/taking-care-of-each-other-is-essential-work. 

Edlinger, Gabriela, Bernhard Ungericht, and Daniel Deimling. “Enoughness: Exploring the potentialities of having and being enough.” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 21, no. 3 (2021).

Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. First edition. New York: Harper & Row.

Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu et al. “For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1235-1259.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. “Introduction: crip temporalities.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245-254.

Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Penguin Books, 2021.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social life. Univ of California Press, 1985.

“What we think time is, how we think it is shaped, affects how we are able to move through it.”

-Jenny Odell Saving Time, p. 270

This is the first of a series of essays I’ve written on time. Here are the others (they will be linked as they become available on Information Wants to be Free):

• With Work Time at the Center
• The Productivity Trap
• Slow productivity is a team sport: A critique of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity
• Meredith’s Slow Productivity (not to be mistaken for Cal Newport’s Faux Slow Productivity)
• Queer Time, Crip Time, and Subverting Temporal Norms
• Community Time and Enoughness: The heart of slow librarianship

What I love about reading Jenny Odell’s work is that I often end up with a list of about a dozen other authors I want to look into after I finish her book. She brings such diverse thinkers beautifully into conversation in her work along with her own keen insights and observations. One mention that particularly interested me in Odell’s book Saving Time (2023) was What Can a Body Do (2020) by Sara Hendren. Her book is about how the design of the world around us impacts us, particularly those of us who don’t fit into the narrow band of what is considered “normal,” and how we can build a better world that goes beyond accommodation. Her book begins with the question “Who is the built world built for?” and with a quote from Albert Camus: “But one day the ‘why’ arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement” (1).

“Why” is such a simple world, but asking it can completely alter the way we see the world. There’s so much in our world that we simply take for granted or assume is the only way because some ideology (like neoliberalism) has so deeply limited the scope of our imagination. Most of what exists in our world is based on some sort of ideological bias and when we ask “why” we crack the world open and allow in other possibilities. Before I read the book Invisible Women (2021) by Caroline Criado Perez, I already knew that there was a bias towards men in research and data collection as in most things, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the world was designed as if men were the only people who inhabited it and how dangerous and harmful it makes the world for women. What Can a Body Do similarly begins with an exploration of the construction of “normal” and how design based on that imagined normal person can exclude and harm people who aren’t considered normal, particularly those with disabilities. The book is a wonderful companion to Invisible Women in looking at why the world is designed the way it is and how it impacts those who it clearly was not built for. I’ll explore that more in a later essay in this series. 

One thing I took for granted for a very long time was time itself. I thought of time in terms of clocks and calendars, not the rhythms of my body nor the seasons (unless you count the start and end of each academic term as a season). I believed that time was scarce, that we were meant to use it to do valuable things, and that anything less was a waste of our precious time. I would beat myself up when, over Spring Break, I didn’t get enough practical home or scholarship projects done or if I didn’t knock everything off my to-do list at the end of a work week. I would feel angry and frustrated with myself when my bodily needs got in the way of getting things done (I’m writing this with ice on both knees due to a totally random flare of tendinitis when I’d planned to do a major house cleaning today so I’m really glad I don’t fall into that shooting myself with the second arrow trap as much as I used to). I looked for ways to use my time more efficiently. I am embarrassed to admit that I owned a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and tried a variety of different time management methods over the years that colleagues and friends recommended (though nothing ever stuck besides a boring, traditional running to-do list). I’d often let work bleed into home time so I could wrap up a project because not finishing it would weigh on my mind. I was always dogged by the idea that I wasn’t getting enough done and that I could be doing things more efficiently. It felt like there was never enough time all the time. 

From Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923)

I didn’t start asking questions about time until I was 40 and the first one I asked was a big one “what is the point of our lives?” Thinking about that opened a whole world of other questions about how we conceive of time, what kinds of time we value, to what end are we constantly trying to optimize ourselves, what is considered productive vs. unproductive time, why we often value work time over personal time (if not in word then in deed), why time often requires disembodiment, etc. The questions tumbled out of me like dominoes falling. And with each question, I could see more and more that the possibility exists to have a different, a better, relationship with time. I feel Camus’ “weariness, tinged with amazement.”

This is an introduction to a series of essays about time: how we conceive of it, how it drives our actions, perceptions, and feelings, and how we might approach time differently. I’ll be pulling ideas for alternative views of time from a few different areas, particularly queer theory, disability studies, and the slow movement. I’m not an expert in all these areas, but I’ll be sure to point you to people more knowledgeable than me if you want to explore these ideas in more depth.

How many of you feel overloaded with work? Like you’re not getting enough done? How many of you are experiencing time poverty: where your to-do list is longer than the time you have to do your work? How many of you feel constantly distracted and/or forced to frequently task-switch in order to be seen as a good employee? How many of you feel like you’re expected to do or be expert in more than ever in your role? How many of you feel like it’s your fault when you struggle to keep up? More of us are experiencing burnout than ever before and yet we keep going down this road of time acceleration, constant growth, and continuous availability that is causing us real harm. People on the whole are not working that many more hours than they used to, but we are experiencing time poverty and time compression like never before, and that feeling bleeds into every other area of our lives. If you want to read more about how this is impacting library workers, I’ll have a few article recommendations at the end of this essay.

My exploration is driven largely by this statement from sociologist Judy Wajcman’s (2014) excellent book Pressed for Time: “How we use our time is fundamentally affected by the temporal parameters of work. Yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we work” (166). We have fallen into the trap of believing that the way we work now is the only way we can work. We have fallen into the trap of centering work temporality in our lives. And we help cement this as the only possible reality every time we choose to go along with temporal norms that are causing us harm. In my next essay, I’m going to explore how time became centered around work and how problematic it is that we never have a definition of what it would look like to be doing enough. From there, I’m going to look at alternative views of time that might open up possibilities for changing what time is centered around and seeing our time as more embodied and more interdependent. My ideas are not the be-all end-all and I’m sure there are thinkers and theories I’ve not yet encountered that would open up even more the possibilities for new relationships with time. To that end, I’d love to get your thoughts on these topics, your reading recommendations, and your ideas for possible alternative futures in how we conceive of and use time. 

Works on Time in Libraries

Bossaller, Jenny, Christopher Sean Burns, and Amy VanScoy. “Re-conceiving time in reference and information services work: a qualitative secondary analysis.” Journal of Documentation 73, no. 1 (2017): 2-17.

Brons, Adena, Chloe Riley, Ean Henninger, and Crystal Yin. “Precarity Doesn’t Care: Precarious Employment as a Dysfunctional Practice in Libraries.” (2022).

Drabinski, Emily. “A kairos of the critical: Teaching critically in a time of compliance.” Communications in Information Literacy 11, no. 1 (2017): 2.

Kendrick, Kaetrena Davis. “The public librarian low-morale experience: A qualitative study.” Partnership 15, no. 2 (2020): 1-32.

Kendrick, Kaetrena Davis and Ione T. Damasco. “Low morale in ethnic and racial minority academic librarians: An experiential study.” Library Trends 68, no. 2 (2019): 174-212.

Lennertz, Lora L. and Phillip J. Jones. “A question of time: Sociotemporality in academic libraries.” College & Research Libraries 81, no. 4 (2020): 701.

McKenzie, Pamela J., and Elisabeth Davies. “Documenting multiple temporalities.” Journal of Documentation 78, no. 1 (2022): 38-59.

Mitchell, Carmen, Lauren Magnuson, and Holly Hampton. “Please Scream Inside Your Heart: How a Global Pandemic Affected Burnout in an Academic Library.” Journal of Radical Librarianship 9 (2023): 159-179.

Nicholson, Karen P. “Being in Time”: New Public Management, Academic Librarians, and the Temporal Labor of Pink-Collar Public Service Work.” Library Trends 68, no. 2 (2019): 130-152.

Nicholson, Karen. “On the space/time of information literacy, higher education, and the global knowledge economy.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 1 (2019).

Nicholson, Karen P. ““Taking back” information literacy: Time and the one-shot in the neoliberal university.” In Critical library pedagogy handbook (vol. 1), ed. Nicole Pagowsky and Kelly McElroy (Chicago: ACRL, 2016), 25-39.

Awesome Works on Time Cited Here

Hendren, Sara. What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Penguin, 2020.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.

Wajcman, Judy. Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

In July 2024, peacebuilders, activists, academics, third sector and staff from intergovernmental organisations such as the United Nations and the OSCE, came together for a policy hackathon at the Austrian Forum for Peace Conference in Burgenland near the Hungarian border.

Photo: Nathan Coyle

The hackathon focused on harnessing open data for peacebuilding and what data providers need to do to enhance outreach. We began by exploring the concept of open data, discussing its significance in peacebuilding efforts, and how it can be effectively presented to reach broader audiences, including those with limited technical skills. Participants also engaged in discussions on various tools and resources, such as OSINT and projects like the Syrian Archive, to showcase the practical applications of open data.

We identified key challenges, including the gap between open data’s potential and its current usage, which is often limited by factors like lack of awareness and skills. In response, we brainstormed solutions and developed an open-source outreach strategy. This strategy focused on making data platforms user-friendly, tailoring data to specific needs, and fostering education, training, and community engagement, all aimed at enhancing the role of open data in global peacebuilding initiatives.

Despite its incredible potential, open data often carries a corporate image that can alienate peacebuilders and the third sector, making them feel excluded or that it’s not meant for them. However, open data is a powerful ally for these communities, offering valuable tools for everything from securing funding to preempting conflicts and mapping migration. To change this perception and ensure peacebuilders can fully leverage open data, we need to shift the narrative and make it more accessible. This is why the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open PeaceTech Hub in Austria developed an open-source policy driver toolkit, empowering data providers to better meet the needs of peacebuilders and integrate their expertise into outreach policy.

What We’ve Laid Out:

1. Transparency Matters: We’re advocating for clear information about data sources. Knowing where data comes from and who benefits from it helps users assess its reliability and avoid potential biases.
2. Understanding Data Limits: Knowing the limitations of data is crucial. Our framework emphasises the need to disclose the scope and constraints of datasets so users can understand their context and applicability.
3. Documenting the Details: Comprehensive documentation of data collection methods is essential. We call for detailed explanations of how data was gathered, including the tools and techniques used.
4. Interactive Data Tools: To make data more engaging and useful, we’re supporting the creation of interactive tools that allow users to explore and visualise data in innovative ways.
5. Ethical Data Use: We’re committed to upholding high ethical standards. This involves respecting privacy, ensuring informed consent, and avoiding practices that could harm communities.
6. Educational Resources: We recommend developing educational toolkits to help users navigate and utilise data effectively. These should include tutorials, case studies, and best practices.
7. Bias and Context: Our framework encourages assessing potential biases and providing links to related datasets for a fuller, more nuanced understanding.
8. Sustainable Practices: Sustainability in data management is key. We advocate for the use of open-source tools and consideration of the environmental impact of data practices.

Why This Matters

Data is a powerful tool in peacebuilding, but its impact is only as strong as the way we handle it. By making data more accessible, user-friendly, and ethically managed, we aim to drive more effective and informed peacebuilding efforts. The goal is to ensure that those working in conflict zones have the information they need to make sound decisions and foster positive change.

What’s Next?

Our work doesn’t end here. We’re taking these ideas forward to DataFest Tbilisi and the Data Science Conference in Belgrade, where we’ll continue to engage with data scientists and activists. These events will help us refine our framework and broaden its impact.

We’re also eager to hear from anyone involved in data or peacebuilding. Our framework is open source, and we believe that collaboration and diverse perspectives are vital for its success. If you have insights or expertise to share, we welcome you to join us in this important endeavour.

Stay tuned for more updates as we advance our work and continue to unlock the potential of data to support effective peacebuilding worldwide.

Streamline your data integration with the new Lucidworks Fusion Connectors page. Find, install, and configure connectors effortlessly.

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Announcing the CLIR Climate Resiliency Action Series – a new community of practice around issues of climate change in libraries and cultural heritage institutions. Join CLIR for this free 2024-2025 series where experts from across GLAMR institutions will share their expertise in six thematic sessions, each followed by a community-led Climate Circle designed to facilitate networking and strategic planning. Between sessions, stay connected with the community toolkit and in-person meet-ups at conferences.

Visit the website to learn more about the upcoming 6 thematic sessions, Climate Circles, and Community Archive Resource Toolkit: https://climate-resiliency.clir.org/.

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Data management and workforce strategies are key challenges in this transition to AI adoption.

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Get the most out of your search by using machine learning and ltr (learning to rank). Here are the ins and outs of both.

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We’re excited to share that Andrea Jackson Gavin, Program Director for the HBCU Digital Library Trust, will be the Virtual DLF Forum Featured Speaker! Andrea will present, “Advancing the HBCU Digital Library Trust through Relationship-Building” during the opening plenary on October 22, 11am ET USA.

Learn more about her and her talk: https://forum2024.diglib.org/virtual-featured-speaker/.

The DLF Forum welcomes digital library, archives, and museum practitioners from member institutions and beyond—for whom it serves as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress. Here, the DLF community celebrates successes, learns from mistakes, sets grassroots agendas, and organizes for action. Learn more about the event.

Subscribe to our newsletter to be sure to hear all the Forum news first.

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Don't let your Gen AI initiatives stall in the pilot phase. Discover how to get the ball rolling with these steps.

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Photo by Piotr Łaskawski on Unsplash

IIIF Viewer UX and Accessibility

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN-RCDR) has provided practical recommendations for enhancing usability and accessibility in International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) document viewers. These recommendations are based on a study that captured detailed feedback from an accessibility user panel, consisting of individuals with a range of disabilities, as well as a panel of existing Canadiana users, on their ability to perform key tasks in the Mirador Viewer. The results of this study are being integrated into the Mirador development process in conjunction with the Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS) at New York University (OCLC Symbol: ZUY), resulting in improved accessibility features for future Mirador releases.

As part of my contributions to the NISO Accessibility Remediation Metadata working group, I had the great fortune to speak with Brittany Lapierre and the team at CRKN who worked on this study. Among other functions, campus disability service organizations provide remediated versions of primary source materials for blind or low-vision students and researchers. Incorporating good accessibility features into infrastructures used to manage digital collections increases their reach and impact, and promotes equal opportunities for academic success and research advancement. Contributed by Richard Urban.

Impact of student experience and belonging on postsecondary outcomes

A new report for August 2024, How Student Experience and Belonging Interventions Can Support Strong Postsecondary Outcomes, underscores the crucial role of student experience and a sense of belonging in achieving postsecondary success. It demonstrates how daily interactions and a supportive community influence student persistence and completion rates. Evidence shows that interventions such as promoting growth mindset teaching, simplifying bureaucratic processes, and improving communications can significantly boost academic performance, retention, and mental health. By creating environments where all students, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds, feel connected and valued, these strategies aim to enhance educational outcomes and workforce readiness.

Libraries are uniquely positioned to support this work both on their campuses and within the broader community. My colleague Brooke Doyle and I have explored this topic in a WebJunction webinar titled Libraries Foster Social Connection: Responding to the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. We have learned that young adults are particularly affected by the factors influencing their experiences and we continue to seek ways for libraries to be more intentional in promoting belonging. By curating diverse collections that represent all student experiences and perspectives, hosting inclusive events and workshops, and providing a safe and welcoming environment for study and collaboration, campus libraries can play a crucial role in fostering a sense of belonging. Contributed by Jennifer Peterson.

Public opinion on book restrictions in schools

Recognizing a lack of research about public attitudes and awareness regarding the large increases in book challenges in United States public schools in recent years, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation surveyed over 4500 adults in February and March 2024 to gauge how people feel about restricting public school students’ access to books. The Knight Foundation, which supports “a more effective democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and the success of American cities and towns,” has just released the freely available study, Americans’ Views on Book Restrictions in U.S. Public Schools, in its Free Expression Research Series. Generally, Americans feel that they are aware of efforts to restrict books but are not actively engaged in the issue. Nearly two-thirds oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools and more than three-fourths have confidence that their public schools make appropriate selections. Large majorities of the respondents believe that public school teachers (65%) and public school librarians (64%) need to be the decision makers about book availability, in contrast to state governments (22%) and “community members who are not parents of public school students in your school district” (21%).

It is interesting to note that the trust in public school librarians (53%) rates slightly higher than that of public school teachers (50%) when it comes to determining the age appropriateness of books. The report concludes that, “At their base, results show that the public broadly opposes book restrictions in the schools, expresses confidence in the schools to select appropriate books and sees a bigger risk in depriving students of access to books with educational value than in giving them access to books that are inappropriate. Fears about a chilling effect in book selection are substantial.” But the study also emphasizes the complexity of the issues. For instance, conservative Americans believe that their views are underrepresented in school materials.  Despite how important parents believe the issues to be, only 7% report their children have encountered troublesome material in schoolbooks. Contributed by Jay Weitz.

Reviewing archival descriptions as part of the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan

The final report of the Revising Archival Descriptions Project to examine archival descriptions for biased and offensive language was issued in 2024 March. The project was funded by the Welsh government’s Anti-racist Wales Action Plan, which aims to eliminate racism in Wales by 2030. The project adopted methodology from the University of Leeds Archive Testbed project, using AntConc software to review XML format files for hits from the Brotherton Full list, which contains 1093 terms. The terms searched were all English-language; the report recommended that a Welsh terms list also be developed.

I was interested in this report because (unlike many reparative description projects) it is part of a huge national effort. I appreciate that the report emphasized the importance of context in word usage, noting that terms could be offensive with one meaning but not another, and that a manual review process was done after the AntConc search to determine true hits (meaning those which are offensive or biased) and false hits. However, the report does not clearly explain the Brotherton Full list—perhaps based on the assumption that it is commonly known enough not to require explanation. (A Google search for “Brotherton full list” yielded three results, only one of which was relevant and was a blog about this project.) I had questions about why specific terms listed in the report were considered “true hits.” For example, these terms were listed as having true and false hits: bisexual, gay, Jew, rape, and suicide. Perhaps such an explanation was deemed outside of the report’s scope. However, my own questions as well as the social media comments noted in the report demonstrate for me the importance of clearly communicating the reasons for undertaking a project like this. I hope this is one small part of a larger conversation in Welsh archives and libraries about problematic language found in resource description. Contributed by Kate James.

The post Advancing IDEAs: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, 3 September 2024 appeared first on Hanging Together.

When Macmillan releases a new book, library systems will be able to purchase only one digital copy for the first eight weeks after it’s published. Macmillan is offering this initial copy for half-price ($30), but that has not taken away the sting for librarians who will need to answer to frustrated users. In large library systems in particular, readers are likely to experience even longer hold queues for new Macmillan e-book releases. For example, under the new Macmillan embargo, the 27 branches of the San Francisco Public Library system, serving a city of nearly 900,000 people, will have to share one single copy right when the demand for the new title is the greatest.
...
After the two-month embargo period ends, libraries will be welcome to purchase additional copies of the e-book under normal terms, which aren’t great to begin with: typically, a $60 price tag for an e-book that can only be lent out to one user at a time for two years or 52 lends, whichever comes first. After that, the library has to license another e-book.

In a July memo, CEO John Sargent says the publisher’s move is motivated by “growing fears that library lending was cannibalizing sales” of new e-books and a need to “protect the value of your books during their first format publication,” but fails to present any evidence to back up his claims. (He also ignores existing, consistent evidence to the contrary.)

Through this landmark collaboration between IPG and DPLA, libraries around the country will now have the power to purchase and own in perpetuity, rather than merely license, tens of thousands of ebook and audiobook titles from dozens of independent publishers. The agreement will empower libraries to fulfill their mission to provide access to books for readers nationwide. Publishers such as Austin Macauley, Arcadia Publishing, Dynamite Entertainment, Dover Publications and JMS Books, alongside dozens of other renowned indie publishers, are participating in the deal.

Now, libraries will be able to purchase books through the Palace Marketplace, a non-profit ebook and audiobook platform developed by The Palace Project in consultation with libraries, for libraries. The Palace Project provides libraries with tools and resources that allows patrons to access the broadest possible range of ebooks and audiobooks sourced from the widest variety of sources. Among the tens of thousands of books that are now available for libraries to own and lend out digitally are contemporary award-winning titles, like Leticia Aguilar’s spellbinding memoir Leaving Patriarchy Behind, Michael Nicholson’s The Mosaic Escalator, a mind-bending adventure story nominated for the Best Fiction Book Award by the Golden Book Awards 2024, as well as classics like Elizabeth Bowen’s debut novel The Hotel.
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“After more than 12 years explaining to policy makers and publishers why existing license models for ebooks prevent libraries from fulfilling their mandates, this agreement is a win that libraries, publishers and authors should celebrate together,” said Christina de Castell, Chief Librarian & CEO of the Vancouver Public Library. “Now, libraries will be able to take steps to share and preserve authors’ ebooks as we have always shared and preserved their print books. I hope this agreement is a model that leads other publishers towards more flexible licensing terms, so libraries can continue to be the home for our collective knowledge in our increasingly digital world.”

Palace Marketplace, formerly DPLA Exchange, is an e-content acquisitions platform that works seamlessly with the Palace app. With Palace Marketplace, libraries can customize diverse collections beyond the bestsellers, including non-English titles. Member libraries benefit from DPLA’s ongoing publisher negotiations for new, more favorable licensing terms, and have access to our collection of more than 11,000 open access ebooks.

The first-sale doctrine (also sometimes referred to as the "right of first sale" or the "first sale rule") is an American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example, enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books or CDs to others).

The first-sale doctrine does not neatly fit transfers of copies of digital works because an actual transfer does not actually happen—instead, the recipient receives a new copy of the work while, at the same time, the sender has the original copy (unless that copy is deleted, either automatically or manually). ...

E-books have the same issue. Because the first sale doctrine does not apply to electronic books, libraries cannot freely lend e-books indefinitely after purchase. Instead, electronic book publishers came up with business models to sell the subscriptions to the license of the text.

It is essential to libraries, and the term existential would not be too great a term to use, to be able to own digital files, and care for them via preservation and library lends (e.g. to one person at a time) just as they do with print. Can readers count on books being available a year or two or five after publication? The existence of libraries has made this possible from their inception until now.

“Copyright’s ‘first sale doctrine’ is important to readers and libraries for a number of reasons, not least of which is the way that it facilitates long-term preservation and access,” noted Lyrasis CEO John Wilkin. “Licensing models have threatened this critical underpinning, which is needed for preservation of the cultural record. Lyrasis is excited to collaborate with DPLA and IPG in the creation of a model that will make preservation and access of digital content possible.”

• The publishers are highly motivated to ensure that current readers access their copy, because this provides them data they can sell to advertisers.
• The publishers view many local collections as a bigger risk of their content leaking than a small number of concentrated archives, which they expect will be better secured.
• Economies of scale mean a centralized archive is likely to have a lower cost per unit content than a distributed one.

Chief Data and Analytics Officers rush to revamp data strategies to fuel generative AI adoption.

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In Brief

Over the course of a year, I conducted a diversity audit of part of the general nonfiction collection, specifically the psychology section (BFs) at the Charles C. Myers Library at the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa. In total I audited 1,075 books using questionnaires I developed to collect data on the science collections. Prior to this project, I was doing research for another diversity audit the library was conducting on the young adult collection, only to find that other than auditing biographies, there was no developed procedure for auditing general nonfiction. During my experience I learned a great deal of what not to do; many of my questions were too rigid, and many open-ended responses collected unmanageable data. There is a lot of room for improvement with the procedure; I wanted to write this article to highlight my successes as well as my failures, so library professionals can adapt the procedure to best fit their diversity audit needs. 

By Jessica Condlin

Introduction & Motivation

A diversity audit is a systematic examination of a library’s collection to assess the identity representation currently found in the titles. Diversity audits yield concrete data that can be utilized to better develop collection(s) for patron use (Jensen, 2018). This project evolved from another diversity audit we were conducting on the young adult collection. The University of Dubuque has a diverse student body, and we wanted to ensure that all students could see themselves represented in the young adult collection to align with the library’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) statement: “Charles C. Myers Library strives to create equitable educational opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to cultivate a more hospitable environment that nurtures the intellectual, personal, and professional development of under-represented groups, including those historically marginalized” (Myers Library Staff, Updated 2021).  Before we, my supervisor and myself, began, I was doing research on the types of data we would want to collect and how to best structure the questions to gain the most accurate representation of the current collection. It was during this research that I realized that most diversity audits were conducted on fiction collections housed at public libraries; and the audits that extended to nonfiction primarily focused on the collection’s biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. I found Colleen Wood to be an invaluable source of information, especially Wood’s article (2021) “Counting the Collection: Conducting a Diversity Audit of Adult Biographies.” I continued to investigate how an individual could potentially audit a nonfiction collection, other than just biographies and the like, and found there was limited information on the topic, having identified a gap in the current knowledge. 

Historically, the sciences have been predominantly white and male dominated fields, and this trend has been reflected in the published literature (Anderson, 2015). At the University of Dubuque, I was the Science Librarian and oversaw the development of the Psychology (BF), Science (Q), Medicine (R), and Agriculture (S) collections (letters correspond to the Library of Congress classifications). The sciences for many years have lacked diversity in their respective fields, especially in published materials, and I wanted to develop a more well-rounded collection to highlight diversity in each of the scientific collections I managed. I began to then develop a procedure to audit nonfiction collections for diversity to ‘see’ where the current print collections stood and how I could better improve them moving forward. One of my goals for the diversity audit was to ensure that the collection not only housed the prominent voices in a field (i.e. Freud, Jung, Skinner, Piaget in the field of psychology) but also collected lesser known and emerging voices as well, creating a well-rounded collection to ensure the students and faculty could conduct comprehensive research. Diversity audits are important not only to “ensure libraries are being conscientious and inclusive providing materials and resources,” but also to ensure that students and faculty can find a diverse collection of ideas and evidence to support their research (Wood, 2021) and to fulfill the library’s collection development policy: “The primary purpose of the collection is to provide students with the high-quality resources they need to succeed academically and that help shape their future as lifelong learners” (Myers Library Staff, Created 2005, Updated 2021). Overall I wanted to identify gaps in the current collection and use the collected data to support future collection development and inform future purchasing decisions. 

How I jumped from the young adult collection to general nonfiction was due to a project students were doing in the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences. This project required each student to select and check-out a ‘popular-science’ title and write a report on the content. This project worked directly with the Science (Q) collection, and I began evaluating the collection to ensure that students had access to recently published titles on a variety of topics, written from multiple viewpoints. I created the Google Form questionnaires with the Science (Q) collection in mind, however, I began by auditing the psychology collection because it was the smallest of the four collections I managed. I figured I could resolve any issues with the Google Form questionnaires using the psychology collection before moving on to the larger science collections. 

After completing the audit, I presented the data to my fellow library staff, for their input on future collection development. The data could then be analyzed and presented to the corresponding departments for input and recommendations for future collection development. I also wanted this process to be sustainable and adaptable for the future. Once I completed the diversity audit to identify strengths and weaknesses of the collection, I intended to use the Google Form as a ‘living document’ by adding any additional psychology (BF) titles to the audit (you can add an unlimited amount of entries to a Google Form) so it would adjust the overall collection data automatically. I could see how the collection evolved both physically and statistically.

Prediction

I predicted that a large percent of the psychology collection would be written by white, cis, able-bodied men. I predicted that diverse identities and populations would be studied within the books, but it would be through the lens of white, male authors. I also predicted that this audit would take about a year to complete. My predictions were correct. I began auditing on May 3, 2022 and concluded the audit on March 7, 2023, taking approximately 11 months to complete it. 

What This Is

This project was very much a pilot study to fill a gap in the current knowledge. Finding few examples of conducting diversity audits on general nonfiction when researching, I created Google Forms to attempt to collect ‘everything,’ to see what would work and what wouldn’t.  My audit was a hybrid of past fiction diversity audits and what is currently published about auditing nonfiction. In many ways, I found how not to collect data. When writing the proposal for this article, I wrote, “Failure is still data,” and I would like library professionals that are considering an audit of nonfiction to learn from my missteps and adapt the questions however needed to best audit their collection(s). It might be helpful to approach this procedure with a ‘take what you need, leave what you don’t’ mentality. Upon completion, I had two sets of data, one for general psychology nonfiction and the other for biographies within the psychology collection. Here are the links to the final data for each: General Psychology Nonfiction & Biographies with Psychology. The data collected and used in this article is secondary. I wanted to address certain limitations of the collected data and question structure using the data as reference points. In reality the data collected won’t necessarily hold much significance for another academic library. While the identified trends will most likely hold true, if another diversity audit was conducted in another library’s psychology collection, it could yield different statistics. It helped thinking while auditing that the process built is for everyone, while the data is for the Charles C. Myers Library for internal purposes. While there are data and statistics discussed in this article, please remember that these data only reflect one academic library’s print collection and could vary across institutions.

Literature Review & A Different Approach

Much of my procedure was based on Wood’s article (2021) “Counting the Collection: Conducting a Diversity Audit of Adult Biographies.” Wood began by collecting U.S. Census Data, CDC, and local data to determine the diversity makeup of the library’s community. Wood hoped to use this data to build a collection that best represented her library’s community. This is a great practice for assessing public libraries; however, census data on the national level wouldn’t accurately represent our student body data at a small, private, Presbyterian university. I forwent this step because the procedure was to capture the collection as it currently stands. However, my next step would have been: reaching out to the admissions office to gain a statistical understanding of how our student body identifies. The student body data would assist me with deciding future purchases and collection development.  Also, as an academic librarian, I needed to consider courses, assignments, and research. Using publicly available data is great for public libraries but has limitations for creating an audit for an academic library focused on teaching. 

Wood also discussed difficulties searching for diversity via the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). LCSHs are terms used to ‘tag’ books to ensure patrons can search for materials in a library collection in a systematic manner (Wood, 2021). As indicated by Wood, searching for diversity information via subject headings is not without challenges, including gaps in terms and tagging, embedded bias, and that the terms themselves can be outdated or problematic (Wood, 2021). LCSH terms are often not consistent enough to capture all relevant subject areas via catalog searches. This inspired Question #10, “What are the top 5 Subject Headings” (even though I ended up collecting all of the subject headings; if there were 12, I collected all 12 subject headings). Instead I collected subject headings to better assess how the psychology collection was ‘tagged.’ Question #10 set a base understanding of how the psychology titles were cataloged to help with identifying search terms to assist with research. Collecting subject headings demonstrated that even though ‘psychology’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ were the two most commonly used subject headings, these terms were not the most efficient terms to use when searching for psychology topics in the catalog. In most cases, it was more efficient to search for the secondary subject to find related titles on that topic. For example, if a student was searching for a title on psychology and genetics, it was best to search using the subject headings for ‘genetics’ because psychology was too broad a term and would generate too many unrelated results. As a reference and instruction librarian I wanted to collect this data to be able to provide better instruction on how to search for topics via the catalog for our students, aligning once again with the library’s goal of helping the students find materials to become lifelong learners.

Timeline

In November 2021, I began researching how to conduct a diversity audit. In December 2021, I shifted my focus to finding any and all published literature on how to conduct a diversity audit for nonfiction collections. From December 2021–March 2022, I researched nonfiction diversity audits. Throughout the summer of 2021, I weeded the four collections I managed (Psychology (BF), Science (Q), Medicine (R), and Agriculture (S)). I removed titles following the MUSTIE (misleading, ugly, superseded, trivial, irrelevant, or obtained elsewhere) guidelines, focusing on ‘ugly’ and ‘obtained elsewhere.’ Specifically, I removed titles that were physically damaged (‘ugly’); and I made sure, before removal, that the content being weeded could be found in another title still found in the collection (‘obtained elsewhere’). Weeding the collection was an annual project, conducted separately from the diversity audit, but it proved to be helpful to have weeded prior to conducting the diversity audit. I not only removed damaged materials and freed-up shelf space for future purchases, but, weeding also helped me consider potential questions that could be helpful when developing the Google Form questionnaires. For example, I added a short answer question for collecting editor information when a title had no author. I also added a question asking whether the title had a religious viewpoint because I found when weeding that much of our collection does. Titles having a religious viewpoint was not surprising because the University of Dubuque was founded in 1852 as a Presbyterian institution, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. The ministry and divinity students often used the print collection, and adding this question could help me identify gaps in the collection regarding religious topics intersecting with psychology. It was my hope that I could develop the science collections not only to benefit their corresponding majors but also the entire student body. 

Procedure/Materials

The materials used included: a laptop with wireless connection, a Google account to access Google Forms, which I used to collect the data, a book cart for auditing in the stacks, and a personal journal to keep track of notes, edits, and thoughts throughout the process. The journal was crucial to the procedure because every time I came across an issue, I wrote out my thought process on how to alleviate the issue. If editing the form was required, I noted why I changed the form and the date on which I created the edit. I also kept anecdotal notes about the process that would help me in the future, if I chose to do another audit. The journal enabled me not to lose my train of thought for an entire year’s project; even after a three month hiatus when the fall semester became too busy to audit on a daily basis, I could still pick up where I left off without losing any insight into the process.

My supervisor and I often discussed how our diversity audits were proceeding differently. Her audit, focusing on the young adult collection, could be done primarily online without handling the physical collection. This was not the case for auditing nonfiction, especially the older titles. When auditing a book, I needed to flip through each book to find much of the data. There is so much information that only exists on the shelves, between the pages of the books, that does not exist anywhere online. Being able to handle each book was crucial to the process, hence, requiring the book cart to stand in the actual stacks or bringing a cart of books with me to my office. To gain an understanding of the title’s content I read the cover, spine label, title page, table of contents, and list of indexed terms. Searching for titles online was often a fruitless endeavor because titles were often vague, misleading, or shared common terms with many other titles. Many authors do not have biographies anywhere outside of the blurbs on the back of the jacket covers. I searched our catalog for each book. This way, I could copy and paste bibliographic data directly into the Google Form to save time. Even the record pages in the library’s catalog often have minimal data, especially for the older titles. To gain more understanding about the authors, I read through the author(s)’ biographies (if applicable), dedication, and acknowledgements, and also did a quick Google search for each author to supplement biographic data, because most information in the author’s biography sections was educational and professional accolades and did not provide personal data. I attempted to make a list of titles, but I had to make so many assumptions about the content without the physical book to flip through. This definitely made the process slower, because each physical item needed to be evaluated, but this step was necessary to collect the most accurate data.

Psychology

There were many trends I noticed while collecting diversity data for the field of psychology. Please note, these trends were documented in only one academic library’s collection and may vary across institutions. Anecdotally, I noticed that the field of psychology often deals with binaries of information. The most common binaries studied were men’s psychology compared to women’s psychology, and Black individuals’ psychology compared to white individuals’ psychology. Asian populations were often a specific focus of a book and were often studied alone, as in the entire title focused on Asian individuals’ psychology. The psychology of heterosexual men was compared to the psychology of gay men. Gay women were rarely discussed. Many titles focused on two aspects of a topic and compared them to each other. These three binaries were the most common I found in the collection. Another observation was that when books discussed ‘ancient’ contributions to the world, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were mentioned most frequently, and the published data often omitted Africa’s and South America’s contributions.

The field of psychology is not devoid of female professionals, however women’s contributions were overshadowed in the published literature. It was difficult to find information on women psychologists despite women being prevalent in the collection as authors. According to the data I collected, between 1900–1950 0.76% were written by women authors, between 1951–2000 39.84% were written by women authors, and between 2001–present 58.23% were written by women authors. (Please remember that these statistics only represent the print collection of one academic library and may vary by institution.) There were often Wikipedia pages for men psychologists but far fewer for women psychologists. In most cases, I learned the most information about female psychologists from their obituaries published online. Their obituaries were the first and only times their life’s work was recognized and written about. Other instances of women’s contributions to psychology include anecdotal statements about the women in the dedication sections. For example, author Roger G. Barker’s (1903–1990) wife, Louise Shedd Barker (1908–2010 estimated), collaborated on much of his research; and author James Olds’s (1922–1976) wife, Marianne E. Olds (1927–2014), assisted and supported him in the lab. These are just two examples and both were found in the authors’ biographies and book dedications. In the acknowledgement sections, many male psychologists wrote that they married their female classmates or fellow professors where they worked, indicating the women were educated and working in the field of psychology without the same recognition received by male psychologists. 

Figure 1.
Accessible equivalent of this figure.

Question #18, “Is the author an expert in the field or does the author speak from experience,” highlighted this issue well. My rationale for adding this question was to gauge what percent of the collection was written by experts versus written by nonexperts. I considered anyone with an advanced degree in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, brain health, neuroscience, holding a medical degree, or cognitive scientists, etc. to be experts within the field of psychology. 

I also created an additional part to this question, “Does the author speak from experience?” I wanted to capture any authors that may not necessarily have an advanced degree, but could still be considered experts due to lived experiences. For example, climate change disproportionately affects communities of color, so an author may not hold an advanced degree, but that doesn’t mean that individual is not an expert regarding climate change if they have advocated for their community or studied how it affects their towns/cities. Part I was designed to capture an author’s professional and academic credentials, and part II was designed to capture authors with lived experience that enabled them to discuss the topic from a different perspective.

What the data demonstrated is that even though women authors comprise a much smaller percentage of the collection, when it comes to holding advanced degrees in the field of psychology it was almost a 50/50 split between the two binary genders. I collected 495 ‘yeses’ for this question, so 495 individuals held advanced degrees in the field of psychology. Of the 495 individuals, 151 of them were women (30.5%), and 374 of them were men (75.5%). This data alone could lead the audience to believe that less than one-third of the women in the psychology collection hold advanced degrees; but when these numbers are compared to the entire collection (all 1,075 titles), they demonstrate a very different story. I collected data for 743 male authors during the entire audit. 374 of those men held advanced degrees, demonstrating that only 50.2% of the collection was written by male experts. I collected data for 303 female authors during the entire audit. I found that 151 of these women held advanced degrees, demonstrating that 49.8% of the collection was written by female experts. When looking at the entire collection, even though there are fewer titles written by women authors, just as many women were experts in the field of psychology. 

The statistical breakdown:

When calculating based on ‘yes’ responses for question #18:

• 75.5% Men = experts in psychology (374/495×100)
• 30.5% Women = experts in psychology (151/495×100)

When calculating based on entire psychology collection:

• 50.2% Men = experts in psychology (374/743×100)
• 49.8% Women = experts in psychology (151/303×100)

I also noted that authors were not necessarily experts in psychology but were often experts in whichever field intersected with psychology. One example is Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation (1970) written by Paul Ricoeur. Paul Ricoeur was a distinguished French philosopher, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Another example is Figments of reality: The evolution of the curious mind (1997) by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Stewart is a mathematician and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England, and Jack Cohen was a reproductive biologist. The majority of the psychology collection was written by experts in their distinct fields, however, their fields of study may not have necessarily been psychology. 

The inverse of this was trying to gauge expertise in certain subtopics, like self-help books. It was difficult to find an individual’s qualifications for these themes. Many authors have claimed to have discovered the ‘best’ way of living or layout groundwork for ‘living authentically,’ but does being a ‘life-coach’ make someone an expert or did that lifestyle work for that individual, and now they want to sell it? The psychology section has taught me that people can literally be an expert in anything: ‘world’s leading expert on human potential’, ‘billionaire,’ and ‘anarchist-activist’ were all self-identified professions.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

Freud created many dilemmas while auditing because there is so much content on his life and work; he did not fit neatly into the multiple choice questions I designed. But these dilemmas helped shape my thinking on how to collect data that doesn’t necessarily fit well into defined categories and forced me to ask myself what I wanted to learn from this audit. I struggled knowing how specific to be. I used the index of a book to identify specific topics discussed and often found that diverse content may only be discussed on a page or two. Titles written by or about Freud highlighted this issue and helped me decide only to collect diverse content data if the information pertained to at least a chapter of the book. Freud discussed many topics throughout his life’s work (homosexuality, bisexuality, women, race, etc.), but in the published literature, these topics often only were written about on a few pages of the book. His writings on these various topics were often not the main focus of the book, and therefore I did not always collect this diverse data because I wouldn’t recommend a title to a student or faculty member doing research on a topic that’s only discussed on a few pages. For example, if a book only discussed bisexuality on one to a few pages, I would mark this title as ‘no,’ for my audit when determining if the title discussed the LGBTQ+ community within their research or case studies (Question #28) because if the topic wasn’t discussed for at least a chapter of the book I wouldn’t recommend a book to students or faculty doing research on bisexuality and psychology. Throughout the audit I collected data with the mindset of recommending titles to students and faculty for research purposes. I used Freud as an example because his writings helped me adopt this practice of determining when to collect diversity content data, but this was true for many titles; the titles would mention a diverse topic on only a page or two, and auditing Freud helped shape my thinking of how to collect data that didn’t fit into checkboxes. I justified collecting diverse content data based on quantity found within a title because titles that were published more recently often still discussed the historical context of that topic. Recommending a title with a topic that was discussed for at least an entire chapter still enabled students to gain a broader understanding of the topic because the topic was discussed within the larger field of psychology. 

Freud also helped me figure out how often I should collect an author’s personal data. I decided to collect the authors’ diversity data, other than gender expression, only once because I didn’t want to misrepresent the statistical data collected; meaning, Freud was the author of 32 books in the collection and I only collected his race/ethnicity data once, so the data only showed information for one Austrian psychologist instead of data misrepresenting that there were 32 different Austrian psychologists. 

Collecting personal data in this manner also highlighted that the questions created were designed to collect diversity data by the standards of today and could flatten historical differences of certain data. For example, I had separate questions for an author’s race and religious beliefs, when in a historical context, these two aspects of identity may not have been separate. Historically, Freud’s race was Jewish and Austrian as determined by himself and social standards that considered Jewish individuals as ‘not-white.’ According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (2020) “92% of U.S. Jews describe themselves as White and non-Hispanic.” My audit was designed to collect data that meets today’s social standards because my goal was to collect data that students would see when they approached the science collections. By today’s American standards Freud could be considered ‘white’ even though historically this would be inaccurate. The questionnaire in many ways did not collect historically accurate data, but collected data that students would assume when browsing the collection. Social standards evolve and will continue to do so. This diversity audit functioned like a cross-sectional study (an observational study that analyzes data from a population at a single point in time). It collected data in 2022–2023 by 2022/23 standards and the social standards will again change in the future. 

This could also be seen in Question #24: Does this title contain any negative representation? The most commonly noted ‘negative representation’ was ‘outdated views and language‘ because I created the audit using today’s standards. Many titles in the psychology collection used language that by today’s social standards would be considered outdated and potentially offensive (for example, a few titles used the term ‘gay gene’ when diagnosing gay men or many titles used the term ‘mentally retarded‘). This language is outdated by today’s standards but at the time when these titles were published this was the common vernacular. And if an audit is conducted 30 years from now, much of our language would be considered outdated because of the constant evolution of standards. 

Challenges

The main challenge for the project was that the Google Form and questions were designed for the ‘life sciences;’ however, I first used the psychology collection as practice. Many of my questions were designed for topics like climate change or physics and not specifically designed for measuring the sciences rooted in humanity, like psychology. The questions would need to be developed further for the social sciences. This procedure ended up collecting a lifetime’s worth of personal data for many authors, but a lifetime’s worth of data does not fit neatly into a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ binary in the majority of cases. Many of my questions are too stagnant or static. For example, an author’s socio-economic or disability status may be fluid throughout a lifetime, and doesn’t fit into a yes/no binary. Over time definitions and conceptions of statuses like socio-economic and disability status can change as well, making it difficult to classify these into quantifiable data. I often asked myself, why does life not fit into the clean, organized boxes I created, highlighting that even though I spent weeks mapping out the information I’d like to collect, these books and lives are complicated when trying to quantify them. 

One thing I constantly needed to remind myself was not to make assumptions; to only record diversity data that was clearly defined by text. For example, there were many authors on whom I could not find any personal data. All I would have is their name. I often found myself trying to make assumptions about their identity just based on their names (e.g., whether or not an author was male or female) but would hold off in an attempt not to infuse the data with my personal bias. This happened many times. I would find breadcrumbs worth of information, and my brain would want to fill in the rest of the picture, but to collect the most accurate data, I refrained from adding data which was not clearly defined by text.

I had to remind myself that an author’s life work/specialization may not be the content of the book in front of me. Many times while researching an author I would note that they specialized in XYZ, but the book may have been about ABC. I collected the authors’ personal data prior to the content’s diversity data, so it was easy to assume while looking up information about the author, that the book would focus on that author’s specialty, but often this was not the case. It was easy to lose sight and accidentally attempt to audit based on webpage content versus the actual content of the book. I also noticed, while typing my notes, I spent a lot of time falling down rabbit holes when searching online for author content or reading more than necessary from each book. I justified this practice because I wanted data that was tied to field relevance. I wanted to provide context to the data, so it wasn’t just numbers with no connection to the field of psychology. But at the same time, it ate a lot of my time, and this process was not as efficient as it could have been. The Charles C. Myers Library houses a collection of over 180,000 print titles. The psychology collection represented just .6% of the entire print collection (1,075/180,000×100). Less than 1% of the collection took me almost a year to audit; my goal was to calculate what portion of the psychology titles would be equivalent to the statistics I collected during the audit. That way I could use this found number of titles to audit the other collections I managed because the Science, Medical, and Agricultural sections were much larger than the Psychology section. This would ensure I could collect accurate data more efficiently, moving forward. 

Specific Question Commentary

The majority of the questions I designed collected data that worked well. There were a few questions that, if I were to conduct another audit, would need to be edited or adjusted. 

Figure 2.
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Question #2: “What are the author(s)’ names or the name of the editor?” I wouldn’t change the question or its design, but there are certain circumstances I wish I had considered before auditing. Many titles had 50+ authors. In these instances, I wrote “58 authors” or “56 authors” in the short-answer response. These responses were not helpful when analyzing the data. Prior to beginning I should have made a plan for when there were many authors (more than two or three authors). I also wanted to be mindful not just to audit the first author because older editions of the American Psychological Association citation style required the author’s names to be in alphabetical order, and only auditing the first author would favor/distort my data towards people with names at the beginning of the alphabet. If there were two authors, I attempted to audit both, but down the line that created issues discussed later in the article. In the future, I would add an additional question, “Does this title have multiple authors,” and the options would be yes/no, to identify which titles would have more than one author’s personal data. I ended up writing ‘multiple authors’ as a way of uniformity in my responses, but it was only a Band-Aid fix. 

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Question #11: “How does the author identify; race and ethnicity?” The structure of the question, check box, select all that apply, worked for the majority of the authors because the majority of authors identified as one race/ethnicity. However, it was not conducive to collecting racial and ethnicity data for authors that identify as more than one race/ethnicity or if the title had multiple authors of the same race/ethnicity. 

When the data was collected behind the scenes in the Google Form, it counted each check-box as a one-count; meaning, if an author identifies as both Black and Asian, I could select both checkboxes, but behind the scenes it didn’t count them as one individual that identifies as both, it counted them as two individuals, one Black and one Asian. This is why I had more racial and ethnicity data for certain populations than I did authors. 

This question also proved difficult when collecting racial and ethnicity data for multiple authors when they all identified as the same race. The most common scenario was multiple authors that all identified as white. So, even though according to the data, white individuals comprise 85.6% of the collection, this percentage should actually be higher because I could only collect the racial data for one author, even though, on some occasions there were multiple white authors associated with a title. I don’t believe this skewed the data too much because only a small percentage of the psychology section was written by multiple authors. My workaround for this situation was to write “whitex2” or “whitex3” in the short answer response and adjust the numbers at the end. That is why the pie chart in my slides reads differently than the bar graph that was collected from the inputted data in the Google Form. 

I deduced an author’s identity based on the data I found on various sources; the most common were Wikipedia, university faculty websites, personal websites, and obituaries. I searched these and other sources of information to see if it clearly stated the author’s race and ethnicity anywhere. The biography blurbs on the back of jacket covers often excluded personal data and focused on academic and professional accolades. This method of collecting diversity data via external sources often written by individuals other than the author themselves is not without potential misinformation or personal bias on my part, the collector. One way to mitigate personal bias was not to assume any aspects of an author’s identity that were not clearly stated. One of the changes I would make to this particular question is adding an ‘unknown’ option. 

I found there was a void of information on authors that published between the years of the 1970s–1980s. Prominent, well-known authors have most of their lives recounted in Wikipedia pages and more recent  authors all have personal websites, podcasts, TedTalks, etc.; their information is very accessible online. But there were many authors about whom I couldn’t find any personal data and did not want to make any assumptions regarding race or ethnicity. Initially I had this question be ‘required’ but removed that requirement due to the fact that I sometimes could not find this data; in this case I left it blank and moved on to the next question. 

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Question #12: “How does an author identify; sexual orientation?” This question requires commentary on the potential for misinformation regarding authors’ lives. To find and collect this data I checked the book’s dedication and acknowledgments to see if the author was married. I recognize this is not a perfect system to determine an individual’s sexual orientation but had difficulty finding it another way. The most common scenario was male authors dedicating books to their wives or acknowledging their wives’ support in the acknowledgement section of the book. 

If an individual was never married, I checked not mentioned/not identified to avoid making assumptions. The not mentioned box represented authors that never married or instances where I couldn’t find any information on the individual. Many women authors are in the not mentioned/not identified statistics. Anecdotally, it was often more difficult to find a woman’s relationship status than a man’s. Many women authors never mentioned their relationship status anywhere in their profiles, websites, etc., while male authors were much more open about being married. 

It’s important to remember that there is a lot of ‘room’ in these selected answers, especially in ‘not mentioned’ and ‘heterosexual.’ Many authors lived during a time when same-sex relationships were stigmatized and/or illegal, so the data collected for this question only portrays static data that may not necessarily accurately portray the entire picture. Many individuals could identify as bi/ace/gay but be in a heterosexual relationship due to social structures during the authors’ lifetimes. 

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Question #14: “How does the author identify; religious beliefs?” This is another question that requires a bit of commentary. This data was difficult to collect accurately because an author’s beliefs can be, and often are, fluid throughout their lives. Many authors were raised with specific religious beliefs convert to a different religion later in life, practice multiple religions at once, or renounce religion altogether. The religious beliefs of peoples’ lives is not easily calculable with checkboxes. It should also be noted that the collected data represents the author’s adulthood beliefs. If an author was raised Jewish as a child and then became an Atheist as an adult, I counted them as ‘other’ and wrote ‘Atheist’ in the short-answer response. This is another question where there is a lot of ‘room’ within ‘not mentioned/not identified.’ An individual could be a devout Buddhist, but it’s never mentioned in their biographical data, therefore, it’s not represented here. 

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Question #15: “How does the author identify; neurodivergency? This question was another difficult one. There are many assumptions about authors, especially the well known voices in psychology. For example, many suspect Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) of being schizophrenic, but he was never diagnosed during his lifetime. One source claimed Jung heard voices and experienced visions and that even Jung himself worried about having schizophrenia. However, other sources claimed he induced these visions and voices himself to find a deeper version of himself. In this instance, I marked Jung as ‘no’ because it wasn’t a definite ‘yes,’ and it was mentioned so I couldn’t select ‘not mentioned’ either. Many individuals were ‘diagnosed’ after their deaths; I did not count these because while there may have been speculation, I didn’t want to collect data based on assumptions and not official medical diagnosis (even though medical diagnosis might have been very different when certain authors were alive). I don’t have a perfect answer for this.

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Question #22: “Are any populations of people represented in the content of this title?” I also struggled with this question. It was difficult to collect this data accurately because I designed this question with the Science and Agriculture sections in mind. This question was to help me field whether a book discussed human populations or topics like top soil. The structure of this question did not work well for the psychology section because, in most cases, psychology, the scientific study of the mind and behavior, pertained to humans. In the majority of cases, titles would discuss a specific population, culture, or nationality, but it would only be a sentence to a paragraph discussing this group of people. I counted these as ‘no,’ because I wouldn’t recommend a book to a student for research based on a sentence to a paragraph of relevant content. I only marked the titles ‘yes’ if the population was studied for at least a chapter. Most titles used population data anecdotally or as a case study to prove a larger point or support an overall thesis. 

Changes I would make include adding a ‘humanity’ or a ‘population as a whole’ option. As it reads right now, by selecting ‘yes’ it sounds like the content only discusses one population that will later be specified in the part III short answer response. But many titles do not discuss specific populations; they discuss humanity as a construct or universal abstract (e.g., living with anxiety). When this was the case, which it often was, I selected ‘other’ and wrote “humanity” in the short answer response, to be able to count those when analyzing the data. 

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Question #23: “Does this title discuss any kind of adversity regarding someone’s identity?” I often found myself questioning the difference between adversity, discrimination, and challenges when trying to answer this question. Many books mentioned difficulties of being dyslexic without necessarily mentioning adversity or discrimination. However, the difficulties mentioned are often due to society not being accommodating enough for those experiencing dyslexia. I ended up selecting ‘neurodivergent discrimination’ because not being accommodating would count as discrimination. 

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Question #24: “Does this work contain negative representation?” When collecting data for this collection I checked the book’s chapter titles and the index list and flipped through the pages to find any images. I found that many titles had outdated language and outdated views, as indicated by the screenshot above. Due to the nature of how I searched for this information, I could have missed a lot of outdated views and language so the statistics in the linked slides could be conservative. However, I could not simply weed every title I found with outdated views and language because these outdated views were often the basis for the field of psychology, and we (universally) need to understand where we (as society) have been to not repeat dangerous practices and move the field of psychology forward. Also, students need to be able to think critically about information, questioning why certain practices were once acceptable and understand how our psychological practices have evolved. 

I would edit this question to have another bubbled choice that stated ‘outdated views and/or language’ because simply selecting ‘yes’ didn’t provide enough context as to what was problematic. What I did during the audit was to select ‘other’ and type “outdated view and language” into the short answer. The question is structured the way it is now with a yes/no/other response choices because I created this form with all my collections in mind. I think this question structure would have worked well for the Science (Q) section, but would run into the same issues in the Medical section (R) as found in psychology. 

Conclusion

There is always room for improvement. As mentioned above, over the course of a year, I learned what to do as much as what not to do. This project did not happen in a vacuum. I had constant support from all the librarians. I constantly discussed the development of the Google Form, diversity audit, and how it was proceeding with my fellow library staff. They offered insight and ideas that guided my thought process to ensure the process would reflect the library’s goals. This project would hopefully benefit not only the psychology students, who were in one of my liaison areas, but also other majors and programs throughout the university. 

Based on the data collected I would suggest developing the biography collection further with more voices. As of right now, the collection holds biographies from the prominent voices (e.g., Freud, Jung, or Skinner), but few others. Plus, most of the biographies about women were in the parapsychology subcollection, and there needs to be more in the general psychology section. (This collection of biographies in the parapsychology subcollection was due to students needing to research the Salem Witch Trials for a course assignment.) In the past, many titles have compared two aspects of psychology: men versus women, Black versus white, gay versus straight. I would like to focus on purchasing titles that focus on one aspect supported by research and case studies (e.g., psychology of the LGTBQ+ community without comparing this community to heterosexual individuals). It’s also helpful to see when neurodivergence exists in the current collection to fill these gaps. For example, the collection holds many titles discussing anxiety, but far fewer discussing OCD. When collecting publication date data, I noticed that the children’s psychology titles in the collection were most recently published in 2006 and could seek titles published more recently. I would also want to present this data to the psychology department to demonstrate where the collection currently stands and discuss what types of resources the faculty would like to see in the collection to support research and assignments. This was an imperfect project, and I didn’t have perfect answers for collecting data. But hopefully I have stirred ideas, and people can build upon this work to build a better diversity auditing procedure for nonfiction. 

Words of Encouragement

I had a lot of doubt throughout this process, so here are some of the words of encouragement I wrote to myself that hopefully will assure individuals that want to do this in the future. I wrote many times in my journal, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.” I kept delaying starting the audit because I wanted the ‘perfect’ Google Form to collect data, fully knowing that that was an unattainable goal. It might be helpful to know that you can edit a Google Form at any time, and edits do not alter the data already collected and stored in the form. It was also helpful to realize the physical collection was not going anywhere. I collected the title, author, and call number for every single title. If there were questions down the line or if I needed to double check something, I could just go to the stacks and double check. Another realization that was helpful, was the fact that the data was for myself and the library staff. Every collection of titles will be different and therefore will yield different statistical data. Realizing the data would not necessarily mean anything to anyone else or another library was helpful not to lose focus. I could explain why I did what I did to my colleagues and could stop stressing about the exact percentages. Realizing these three things helped me not to lose focus or stress too much about having the perfect set of data, because in the end there’s always a margin of error. 

Miscellaneous 

There have been numerous indirect benefits of conducting this audit that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the audit itself. Going through the stacks while auditing I was also able to generate title lists for future books displays, recommended readings, and content for LibGuides. While at the reference desk I have been able to recommend three titles I had already audited based on their reference questions and  the students’ informational needs. I was also able to observe how patrons use the stacks. A few patrons walk the stacks for exercise, like in walking laps on a track.

I was able to find books on the shelves that had been reshelved without being checked in; their statuses were still ‘checked out’ in the catalog. Shelf reading, I was able to straighten up the physical collection.¹ I was able to ‘clean up’ the OCLC records as well. There were a few titles that were linked to completely different titles in the catalog. For example, Social Amnesia by Russel Jacoby had the same summary and Library of Congress Subject Headings as Old Black Fly by Jim Aylesworth. Subject Headings were: Alphabet, Stories in Rhyme, Flies Fiction, and also Psychoanalysis History.

1. I was also able to clean items out of the books. I found: a business card for dentistry school, a secret message and a spell, a CDC vaccine card (Covid-19), a printout of the catalog, an Iowadot Driver’s License renewal notice, rhubarb torte recipe, rhubarb pie recipes (in total I found 4 different rhubarb dessert recipes), assignment parameters, countless Stickies, Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School floor plans, a thank you card, a postcard, old ILL slips, insurance cards, and numerous index cards. ︎

Acknowledgements 

With great love and adoration, I’d like to dedicate this article to Becky Canovan, who always listened and was willing to discuss this process and all its frustrations. Thank you. And all of the staff at the Charles C. Myers Library, without their support, this process and article would not exist. 

I am also extremely grateful for my peer reviewers Ian Beilin and Stephanie Sendaula and my publishing editor Ikumi Crocoll. Thank you. This article would not have been possible without all your time, feedback and guidance. I can’t express how much I appreciate all your support throughout this process. 

Works cited/Bibliography

1. American Library Association. (2017, December 25). Collection maintenance and weeding. https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/weeding 
2. Anderson, M. (2015). The race gap in science knowledge. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/09/15/the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/  
3. Fuller-Gregory, C. (2022). DEI audits: The whole picture | equity. Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/news/DEI-Audits-The-Whole-Picture-Equity?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=215707081&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_cCgmhWCgTvCguLlnCwPaGxtmAmmUjPknbCQMkWYjKbLnsfc_rm7fuklQKehzrARpZ5guzBNmXDM_QBK_G7RmkXdi22w 
4. Jensen, K. (2018). Diversity Auditing 101: How to Evaluate Your Collection. School Library Journal, https://www.slj.com/story/diversity-auditing-101-how-to-evaluate-collection  
5. Marianne Egier Olds. (2014, November 6). Marianne Olds Obituary. Los Angeles Times. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/marianne-olds-obituary?id=17282105 
6. Obituaries – January/February 2010. (2010, January/February). Farewells. Stanford Magazine. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/obituaries-4675 
7. Peet, L. (2022). On critical cataloging: Q&A with Treshani Perera | equity. Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/news/On-Critical-Cataloging-QA-with-Treshani-Perera-Equity?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=215707081&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_cCgmhWCgTvCguLlnCwPaGxtmAmmUjPknbCQMkWYjKbLnsfc_rm7fuklQKehzrARpZ5guzBNmXDM_QBK_G7RmkXdi22w 
8. Pew Research Center. (2021, May 11). Jewish Americans in 2020; Report. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/race-ethnicity-heritage-and-immigration-among-u-s-jews/ 
9. Wood, C. (2021). Counting the collection: Conducting a diversity audit of adult biographies. Library Journal, https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/Counting-the-Collection-Conducting-a-Diversity-Audit-of-Adult-Biographies 

Accessible Equivalents

Figure 1

Question 18 Description

Question 18 Text

• Question Part 1: Credentials – Is the author an expert in the field?
• Answer Part 1: Multiple choice: Yes, No, Other
• Question Part 2: Credentials? If Other, Identify: 
• Answer Part 2: Long answer text
• Question Part 3: Credentials 2.0 – Does the author speak from experience?
• Answer Part 3: Credentials 2.0. If other, specify:
• Answer Part 3: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 18

• Question #18: Is the author an expert in Psychology? Part II: If the author doesn’t hold an advanced degree in psychology, are they an expert due to lived experience?
• Question Design: Bubbled Yes/No/Not Mentioned / Choose One, not required.
• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge if authors are experts in some field of psychology to have published a book cataloged in this collection. I used this term “expert” to cover multiple disciplines: psychologist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, MD involving brain cognitive scientist, etc.
• Change: No.



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Figure 2

Question 2 Description

Question 2 Text

• Question Part 1: Author(s)’s Name(s)
• Answer Part 1: Short answer text
• Question Part 2: No Author? Editor(s)’ Name(s)
• Answer Part 2: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 2

• Question #2: What are the author(s)’ names or the editor’s name?
• Question Design: Short answer / fill in the blank, not required.
• Data Collected: This question created a list of all the authors and editors in the psychology section.
• Desired Outcome: To determine who were the prominent, published voices in the collection and to determine if the collection was missing any voices.
• Change? Not necessarily, but there are considerations I think would have made this easier for data collection. Please read article for more information about challenges and considerations.



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Figure 3

Question 11 Description

Question 11 Text

• Question Part 1: Author Information; Diversity Information about Author(s)
• Answer Part 1: Race/Ethnicity; Multiple choice: Caucasian/White, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, African, Middle Eastern, European, Native American
• Question Part 2: Specific Race/Ethnicity Details
• Answer Part 2: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 11

• Question #11: How does the author identify? (Race)
• Question Design: Check Box/ Select all that apply, not required.

• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge the author(s)’ racial diversity of the current psychology collection.
  • Rationale: I structured the question in this format, to be able to select more than one answer, because many individuals identify as multiple races or ethnicities. However, how the data was collected behind the scenes doesn’t capture the actual individual authors well.
• Changes:
  • I would add the following check boxes: South American, Australian, and Unknown. ‘Unknown,’ especially because for many authors I could not find any information. In this event, I left the checkbox question blank to avoid making assumptions, and wrote, “unknown” in the short answer below.
• Note: Life is messy; individuals move countries or have multiple nationalities. One author’s nationality belonged to a country that no longer exists. So, I used today’s country borders when auditing.



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Figure 4

Question 12 Description

Question 12 Text

• Question: LGBTQ+
• Answer: Multiple choice: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Asexual, Heterosexual, Not Mentioned/Not Identified

Author’s Annotations of Question 12

• Question #12: How does the author identify? (Sexual Orientation)
• Question Design: Check Box / Select all that apply, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge the sexual orientation diversity of the current psychology collection.
• Changes: Not necessarily. There are other orientations in which individuals could identify, I did not audit any authors that identify as a different orientation than what was listed in the question.



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Figure 5

Question 14 Description

Question 14 Text

• Question Part 1: Religion
• Answer Part 1: Multiple choice: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Other, Not Mentioned/Not Identified 
• Question Part 2: Religion? If Other, Identify:
• Answer Part 2: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 14

• Question #14: How does the author identify? (Religious Beliefs)
• Question Design: Check Box / Select all that apply, not required.

• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge the religious diversity of the current psychology collection.
• Changes:
  • I would change ‘religion’ to ‘beliefs’ to be more inclusive.
  • I would add an Atheist checkbox. Many authors identified as Atheists.

Figure 6

Question 15 Description

Question 15 Text

• Question Part 1: Neurodivergent
• Answer Part 1: Multiple choice: Yes, No, Not Mentioned/Not Identified
• Question Part 2: Neurodivergent? If Yes, identify:
• Answer Part 2: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 15

• Question #15: How does the author identify? (Neurodivergent)
• Question Design: Bubbled Yes/No/Not Mentioned / Choose One, not required.
• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge the neurodivergent diversity of the current psychology collection.
• Changes: I could add a ‘Possibly’ checkbox? There were many authors with speculation. I didn’t add the checkbox because I couldn’t decide if selecting ‘possibly’ prevented assuming or if it was assuming of an author’s neurodivergence.
  • For example: Ludwig Wittgenstein might have Autism Spectrum Disorder (once referred to as ‘Asperger Syndrome’); however, he was ‘diagnosed’ with ASD after his death.
  
  

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Figure 7

Question 22 Description

Question 22 Text

• Question Part 1: Any population(s) of people represented? (asterisked)
• Answer Part 1: Multiple choice: Yes; No – Just Science and/or Research; Other…
• Question Part 2: Represent / Discuss Marginalized Communities (asterisked)
• Answer Part 2: Multiple choice: Yes, No, Other…
• Question Part 3: Marginalized Communities? Specify?
• Answer Part 3: Long answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 22

• Question #22: Are any populations of people represented in the content of this book?
• Yes/No/Other / Choose One, required.
• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To gauge if the collection discusses certain populations of people, to understand the diversity of content within the field of published psychology.



Return to Figure 7 caption.

Figure 8

Question 23 Description

Question 23 Text

• Question: Discusses Adversity? (asterisked)
• Answer: Multiple choice: Racial Discrimination, Sexual Orientation Discrimination, Gender Discrimination, Religious Discrimination, Neurodivergent Discrimination, Disability Discrimination, Socioeconomic Discrimination, Other, Adversity not discussed or mentioned

Author’s Annotations of Question 23

• Question #23: Does this title discuss anytime of adversity regarding someone’s identity?
• Question Design: Check Box / Select all that apply, required.
• Desired Outcome: To identify which books discuss adversity.
• Changes:

• I would add additional check boxes: ‘Body Discrimination’ (e.g., fat shaming) and ‘age discrimination.’ These were the two most common ‘other’ responses.
• I would add an additional short answer, fill in the blank question to keep track of ‘others’ that were not listed in the options provided.
• I would also add ‘Violence Against Women’ option – I put that under ‘gender discrimination’ but that feels like a trivialization because it’s so much more than a micro-aggression.

Figure 9

Question 24 Description

Question 24 Text

• Question Part 1: Does this work contain negative representation (asterisked)
• Answer Part 1: Multiple choice: Yes, No, Other…
• Question Part 2: Negative Representation? Specify:
• Answer Part 2: Short answer text

Author’s Annotations of Question 24

• Question #24: Does this title contain any negative representation?
• Question Design: Yes/No/Other / Choose One, required.
• Additional Question: Short Answer / Fill in the blank, not required.
• Desired Outcome: To identify any titles with mis- or dis-information still contained in the collection.
• Change: I would add an ‘outdated’ option. There were very few titles that were a strong ‘yes,’ like Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Many books were marked ‘yes’ because they contained outdated language or outdated views. The most common outdated information was the diagnoses of women, discussions of gay men (certain books used the term ‘gay gene’), and outdated terms used for neurodivergence (such as ‘mentally retarded’).

In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes substantive discussion about the content of published articles. This includes critical feedback. However, comments that are personal attacks or harassment will not be posted. All comments are moderated before posting to ensure that they comply with the Code of Conduct. The editorial board reviews comments on an infrequent schedule (and sometimes WordPress eats comments), so if you have submitted a comment that abides by the Code of Conduct and it hasn’t been posted within a week, please email us at itlwtlp at gmail dot com!

Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.

• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022
• 2023

• Month: The date marked on the media in Sharpie, and verified via the on-disk metadata.
• Media: The type of media.
• Good: The number of media with this type and date for which all MD5 checksums were correctly verified.
• Bad: The number of media with this type and date for which any file failed MD5 verification.
• Vendor: the vendor name on the media

Today we are happy to announce The Tech We Want, a series of initiatives that we’ve been working on for a long time at the Open Knowledge Foundation and that has been guiding us in the way we develop software.

In recent years, technology has adopted a complex, wasteful, and expensive approach to serving its purpose, making it rare, even in the open movement, to find affordable, accessible, and sustainable software. There is an urgent need for the technology industry to re-think how software is developed, which tools do we use and how tech solutions are currently conceived, coded, and deployed.

The first practical and publicly faced intervention is The Tech We Want Online Summit. In this one-day event, OKFN is bringing together key voices working on public interest technologies to start a collective conversation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting and focused on solving people’s real problems.

Building technology for technologists is NOT the tech we want. Source: xkcd.com (CC BY-NC 2.5)

The world is tired of falling down the endless rabbit holes of tech tools that have become the norm as if it’s the only way forward. The Tech We Want is our attempt to help build critical mass and put the issue on the agenda of developers and decision-makers everywhere.

The Online Summit is open to everyone, especially technology workers, developers, engineers and programming language specialists who are interested in taking a critical stand on today’s technologies.

Join us in building the tech we want and that the world needs!

Practical info

Date – 17 October 2024
Time – 10 am to 6.30 pm UTC (various sessions)
Online (link will be shared with registrant participants)
More information and programme – https://okfn.org/the-tech-we-want
Registration required – https://forms.gle/uThkiQYdEiEtNnNy5

Get involved

Open Call for Tech Demos – https://forms.gle/sPhRn4jVY92hxZqN9
The Tech We Want Manifesto (open for collaboration) – https://docs.google.com/document/d/10cWRtIJgSqxKE9qKp4sPRBlJpFvTtHzGLTBuN0SRz6c/edit?usp=sharing

Though we are living in a time in which cultural knowledge is being recorded and stored at a higher rate than ever before, there is no guarantee this information will be effectively transmitted. Optimising cultural transmission, I believe, involves more than new technologies, massive digital repositories and artificial intelligences. It involves learning how knowledge is archived in human bodies.

🔖 How do we transmit culture when it cannot be put into words? - Helena Miton

This post relates to H2O Open Casebook, our tool for law professors to make open, remixable casebooks, and the Caselaw Access Project, our project to digitize the law of the United States.

H2O Open Casebook makes the law fresher for students by letting professors teach from recent and relevant cases instead of cases involving steam engines and horses.

Today we’re making that even easier by adding new cases to search and import from CourtListener. CourtListener has all 7 million cases from our own Caselaw Access Project, which we use for cases up to 2018, as well as millions of more recent or unpublished decisions collected directly from court websites. If you use H2O, you’ll now automatically get cases from this larger and more up-to-date collection.

This project is part of our larger plan to share effort with CourtListener, following the successful release of our Caselaw Access Project, to ensure access to law for everyone.

Keep an eye on our blog for more announcements, coming soon.

Enhance your website with Lucidworks' AI-driven, hyper-personalized site search. Boost engagement, reduce bounce rates, and increase conversions by delivering tailored search results that anticipate user needs. Discover more today.

The post How to Build a Hyper-Personalized Site Search Journey appeared first on Lucidworks.

it is defined as the process of seeking electoral victory or legislative relief for grievances by helping political actors find and mobilize a sympathetic public, and is designed to create the image of public consensus where there is none. Astroturfing is the use of fake grassroots efforts that primarily focus on influencing public opinion and typically are funded by corporations and political entities to form opinions.

Donald Trump, 2019

Who knows, maybe we’ll pay off our $35 trillion dollar [national debt], hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little Bitcoin and wipe away our $35 trillion

A poll released by crypto industry groups this week showed that more than 20 percent of voters in six key swing states identify crypto as a major issue. A separate nationwide survey of registered voters commissioned by the crypto firm Paradigm found that crypto ownership is higher among communities of color and young people — key constituencies that helped boost Biden in 2020 but are now proving to be challenging for him to win over.

Crypto has gained support from politicians on the right who tout it as an alternative to the mainstream financial system. The Paradigm poll found earlier this year that crypto owners favor Trump over Biden, 48 percent to 39 percent, with 13 percent undecided.

Source

In reality, their poll of 1,201 American voters in six swing states is a masterclass in spin. 69% of the people surveyed had “very” or “somewhat” negative opinions towards crypto, but DCG is crowing that “Among a sizeable contingent of voters, crypto attracts a level of interest that translates into pro-crypto sentiments across the board” and advising political candidates to adopt pro-crypto stances to attract voters. Many of the questions were framed ambiguously — such as the “Crypto is a major issue I’m considering during the next election” one — which allowed DCG to put “21% agree” in big letters while obfuscating the fact that those who agreed were not necessarily crypto supporters. In fact, if you do the math, more than 100 of the 252 people (~40%) who said they felt crypto was a major issue in upcoming elections do not feel positively towards crypto — in other words, there's a contingent of fellow skeptics among that 21%, who are likely hoping for candidates who might support more aggressive approaches against the industry.

Frankly, it just doesn't seem likely to me that a substantial number of people are single-issue crypto voters and would be swayed to vote for a candidate they might not otherwise support because of it. Many of the people celebrating Trump's recent crypto U-turn were probably already planning to vote for him, and I doubt there were many crypto-skeptical people out there previously who didn't otherwise support Trump, but who intended to vote for him because of his former position on the industry.

Source

A super PAC bankrolled by a small group of crypto companies has backed the winning candidate in 33 of the 35 House and Senate primary races it entered.

Fairshake PAC kicks off the general election season with a strong track record and at least $100 million to spend on crypto-friendly candidates for Congress.

The PAC has spent tens of millions already on ads that rarely mention crypto. Instead, the messages they deliver are about “fairness” and “integrity.”

I’ve noted before that, despite the industry’s attempts to convince incumbent politicians, candidates, campaign managers, and anyone else who will listen that there is a major bloc of single-issue voters who will vote for people with pro-crypto policy stances, the people in charge of actually running strategy don’t seem to truly believe it. Ads run by the Fairshake PAC and related crypto-focused super PACs make no mention of cryptocurrency, for example, suggesting that those behind them understand that it’s not an issue that’s likely to sway voters.

Of the $160 million in total contributions Fairshake has raised since it was founded, around $155 million — or 94% — can be traced back to just four companies: Ripple, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase and Jump Crypto.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump presented himself as a champion for cryptocurrency and slammed Democrats' attempts to regulate the sector during a San Francisco fundraiser on Thursday, three sources present told Reuters.

Trump raised $12 million from the fundraiser hosted by tech venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya at Sacks' home in the swanky Pacific Heights neighborhood.

Several Bitcoin miners met with former president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, according to Matthew Schultz, executive chairman at crypto mining company CleanSpark Inc.

Trump told attendees that he loves and understands cryptocurrency, adding that Bitcoin miners help to stabilize energy supply from the grid, according to Schultz. Trump said he’d be an advocate for miners in the White House, Schultz added.

But it does seem that some of the more gullible executives and figureheads within the crypto world have themselves been bamboozled by the questionable numbers and creatively interpreted polls. The feeling among that group is not that they need to pursue a positive relationship with a possible future Harris administration, but rather that this supposed crypto vote will decide the election, and that they are its gatekeepers.

But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto

But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:

https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/

At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:

• Will a Harris administration provide "regulatory clarity"? I commented on Hadriana Lowenkron's Harris Supports Policies to Expand Crypto Industry, Aide Says:
  

  "Vice President Kamala Harris will back measures to help grow digital assets, a policy adviser to her campaign said, highlighting efforts to court an emerging cryptocurrency industry expanding its political influence.

  But Protos had a skeptical take in Kamala Harris ‘pro-crypto policy’ is yet more fake news:
  

  Another day, another fake Kamala Harris headline. Already this week, we’ve heard all about her non-appointment of Gary Gensler and her non-existent unrealized crypto gains tax, and today we have to point out that the 2024 White House hopeful hasn’t adopted a ‘pro-crypto policy.’
  ...
  Well, rather than Harris suddenly adopting a pro-crypto platform to boost her presidential campaign, Bloomberg published an article.
  
  Specifically, behind its paywall, it ran the quote, “She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow.”
  
  That quote related only broadly to the ‘crypto community’ and didn’t come from Harris or her spokesperson. It was actually said by Brian Nelson, a mere campaign advisor.

• Exercising traditional bothsiderism, Bloomberg's Editorial Board weighed in with Harris and Trump Shouldn't Pander to the Crypto Crowd:
  

  Just 1% of Americans say they used them for a payment or money transfer last year. More often crypto is used to move money outside of government oversight. That’s helpful for criminals, terrorists and anyone under sanctions. But these are hardly the constituencies that a presidential candidate should be soliciting. Nor should policymakers be encouraging people to park their savings in digital wallets instead of stocks, bonds and other assets that support the real economy.
  
  Instead, candidates should promise to work with Congress and regulators to ensure that the rules applied to cryptocurrencies are consistent with existing laws on fraud, money laundering and sanctions enforcement.

  What is the chance that this would happen in a Trump administration?
• The answer had come the day before the Editorial Board's vain hand-waving. MacKenzie Sigalos' Trump promotes family’s new crypto platform, ‘The Defiant Ones’ made it crystal clear:
  

  Former President Donald Trump on Thursday promoted a soon-to-launch, Trump Organization crypto platform, “The DeFiant Ones” to his 7.5 million followers on Truth Social
  ...
  “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand — together.”
  
  The post marks the first time the Republican nominee for president has used his personal platform to promote the as yet unactivated digital bank. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr., shared the post with his 12 million X followers.

  Trump's floundering Truth Social posted a $16.4M loss on revenue of $837K (down 30% year-on-year). The stock is currently down 75% from the peak and Trump is widely expected to pull the rug out from holders by dumping his stock in the next few weeks. Thus he needs to find a new grift to replace DJT, and this is clearly it. The probability that "The Defiant Ones" will be rug-pulled is close to 100%.

• How much profit will the contributors garner if their wishes are granted?
• Where will this profit come from? In other words, if the contributors are the winners, who are the losers?

This post is part of a growing series on the Library Beyond the Library. 

^{Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash}

My colleague Rebecca Bryant recently offered a synthesis of roundtable discussions on cross-campus collaboration convened by the OCLC Research Library Partnership. The roundtables included 48 library leaders from 26 RLP institutions in four countries. Participants discussed how their libraries are collaborating with other campus units to provide research support services in response to university (or parent institution) priorities, and the challenges involved in making these partnerships work. Some of the participants also talked about how new cross-campus operational structures, involving the library and other units, have emerged, and the subsequent impact on the library’s value proposition. 

These topics all connect to a concept we recently introduced called the “library beyond the library” – the idea that academic and research libraries have increasingly partnered with other units on campus to address a range of emerging institutional priorities and expectations in research support, such as scholarly communication and open research, research data management, research expertise profiles, and research analytics. In engaging in these partnerships, the library role, contribution, and value proposition may not be clearly defined or recognized by other campus stakeholders. 

Rebecca’s post on the roundtables highlighted key motivations for building partnerships between the library and other units on campus to address emerging institutional priorities in the area of research support services. While our roundtable participants shared a wide array of motivations for engaging in these partnerships, they also marshalled an equally broad list of complexities and frictions that stood in the way of making them successful and sustainable. As the conversation turned to speculation about the future, and the possibility that cross-campus partnerships might be formalized into new kinds of multi-unit operational structures, responses were often pessimistic. The key difficulty? “It just won’t work on my campus.” 

“It just won’t work on my campus” 

The main insight of the Library Beyond the Library model is that the library’s expertise and capacities will be increasingly combined with those from other campus units under new operational structures, outside of current library administrative hierarchies. In thinking about this model, many roundtable participants expressed doubts that structures of this kind could emerge on their campus, citing, among other issues, the decentralized nature of campus organization, and the need for every campus unit to demonstrate a clear value proposition to senior campus leadership. A number of discussants summed it up with the observation that it simply was not how the campus operated. 

This is a very legitimate perspective, and we readily acknowledge that for some – perhaps many – campuses, the Library Beyond the Library model will find difficulty emerging, or if it does, be significantly limited in its extent. However, we would like to offer a response to consider alongside it. Our response touches on three main points:  

• Path dependency 
• Patience 
• Plurality. 

Path dependency 

In a recent OCLC Research report, Library Collaboration as a Strategic Choice: Evaluating Options for Acquiring Capacity, we identified four economic concepts that impact the decision whether to choose collaboration as a strategy for acquiring library capacities like expertise, services, or infrastructure. One of these concepts is path dependency, which addresses how organizations cope with change, especially when decision makers and other stakeholders are invested in established relationships, workflows, and systems for getting things done. In other words, “history matters.” A key reason that path dependency inhibits change is the existence of switching costs – the costs of moving away from one approach and adopting another, such as learning curves, building new relationships and workflows, and installing new software or equipment.  

Switching costs are indeed an important consideration when contemplating impactful changes like new operational structures. However, it is also important to consider status quo costs – the costs of avoiding change and continuing as before. We heard many examples in the roundtable discussions of potential status quo costs of the library continuing to operate autonomously in the provision of research support services: less visibility across the campus; less impact; fewer resources. For example, one participant noted that training workshops conducted in partnership between the library and another unit providing research support on campus attracted far more attendees than the training offered by the library alone. By acting in partnership, the library increased its visibility and impact. In short, switching costs may be high, but status quo costs may be higher. 

Switching costs may be high, but status quo costs may be higher.

Patience 

The Library Beyond the Library concept involves a movement toward new operational structures that combine library capacities with those of other campus units. But in listening to our roundtable participants, it is clear that this movement should not be interpreted – at least in most cases – as a dramatic, discontinuous, and abrupt shift from current operational structures to new ones. A better characterization of the dynamics underpinning the Library Beyond the Library is probably “evolutionary.” For example, the new Research Alliance unit at Montana State University, involving an operational convergence of five campus units including the library, was the result of years of planning and preparatory work preceding the launch. Moving from current operational structures to ones that formalize and sustain cross-campus partnerships can take years and years.   

The word “formalize” suggests another reason for the need for patience in shifting to a Library Beyond the Library model. We noticed that several roundtable discussants used the phrase “informal services” while at the same time acknowledging the need to formalize them. Participants characterized the informal nature of these research support services in various ways. For example, one participant noted that a number of services offered at their institution have yet to be documented on the library web site. Another indicated that instead of clearly scoped services, much of their library’s offerings in research support are more along the lines of encouraging researchers to reach out to the library if they need help. Another point raised was that sometimes new services that are not adequately staffed/resourced are deliberately kept informal and are not heavily promoted for fear of exceeding capacity limitations. These and other examples are all suggestive of a service space that, for many institutions, has yet to mature into a consistent operational structure. 

Given the current “informal” state of research support services at many institutions, it may be premature to consider transitioning them to Library Beyond the Library-type operational structures when the library – as well as other campus units – are still in the process of establishing a foothold in this space and clarifying what their unique capacities and expertise may be in contributing to related institutional priorities. One roundtable participant observed that in their experience, new services such as those emerging in research support tend to grow organically, and in their early stages, are almost entrepreneurial. As time goes on, formal resource allocations, service boundaries, and workflows eventually emerge. It is perhaps after this “sense-making” process, as the participant described it, that cross-campus partnerships for service provision can be usefully considered. 

It is perhaps after this “sense-making” process . . . that cross-campus partnerships for service provision can be usefully considered. 

Plurality 

It is important to emphasize that the Library Beyond the Library concept does not describe a monolithic, identical end state that all libraries are inevitably converging on. Rather, it is a framework for understanding trends in service provision in domains like research support, in which the library and other campus units are stakeholders in meeting institutional needs and priorities. But the outcome of these trends is highly context-dependent, and Library Beyond the Library operational structures, when they emerge – if they emerge – are likely to be quite diverse in shape and intensity. In this sense, rather than a specific endpoint toward which all libraries are moving, it is better to think of the Library Beyond the Library concept as a continuum of outcomes along which libraries will align themselves according to what works best on their campus. 

In our roundtable discussions, we heard a number of examples of how libraries are implementing the Library Beyond the Library concept, illustrating the plurality of ways cross-campus partnerships can be incorporated into new operational structures. 

The Library Beyond the Library concept in action 

Change is hard (see above regarding path dependency!). This is certainly true of the kinds of changes involved in adopting a Library Beyond the Library approach to service provision. Yet, as our roundtable discussions revealed, some libraries have taken steps toward those changes – albeit in different ways.  

Consolidated marketing of decentralized research support services 

One example of the Library Beyond the Library concept in action, mentioned by multiple participants, is the deployment of an institutional, concierge-style website that serves as a single portal or hub for researchers in need of research support. The website presents the institution’s research support offering in a holistic way, independent of the unit-specific operational structures underpinning the services. For example, one roundtable participant at a US research university described their online portal that aims to reduce the burden of connecting to research support expertise and services distributed across the campus, and in doing so, expand the reach of those resources throughout the local research community. While websites of this kind direct the user to the appropriate campus unit to fulfill their inquiry, the idea of presenting research support services as a centralized, institutional capacity (as opposed to a decentralized set of unit-specific capacities) certainly captures the spirit of a Library Beyond the Library model. From an operational standpoint, the website integrates the marketing of research support services distributed across multiple campus units. 

Convening institutional stakeholders on enterprise topics 

The Library Beyond the Library concept can also be seen in examples described by several roundtable participants of the library serving as the convener or co-convener of multi-unit efforts to address topics of institutional interest in research support, such as research impact or compliance. The connection to the Library Beyond the Library concept arises in the recognition that certain institutional needs in the research support space must be addressed through multi-unit collaboration – which in turn is a necessary condition for a potential future re-alignment of operational structures optimized to meet those needs. Acting as a convener of campus-wide committees, task forces, or interest groups confers agency to the library in gathering stakeholders around issues of institutional priority and identifying future collaborative partners. 

Demonstrating the portability of library expertise  

Lastly, the Library Beyond the Library concept appears in emerging expertise-sharing patterns where a librarian joins a research project or grant-planning committee as a team member. In these cases, the librarian combines their expertise in information organization with the subject experts on the team. Roundtable participants cited examples of this approach relating to evidence synthesis (systematic reviews) and research data management. A key element of this model is that it is based on the idea of the “librarian as expert”, possessing a skill set that can be dropped into research teams and combined with subject and methodological experts as an important contribution to the success of the project. In this sense, the Library Beyond the Library concept manifests in the portability of library expertise outside the library walls and into cross-campus research teams. 

It should be emphasized that none of these examples represent full-scale shifts in operational structures. However, they can be interpreted as first steps toward more expansive re-imaginings of cross-campus partnerships that do lead to formalized changes in operational structures as new cross-unit alignments coalesce. Consolidated marketing of decentralized services, gathering and convening campus stakeholders, and demonstrating the portability of library expertise into cross-unit venues can be interpreted as necessary precursors to future, potentially deeper, forms of operational reconfigurations further along the Library Beyond the Library continuum. 

Communicating the library’s value proposition 

An important aspect of the Library Beyond the Library concept is that the library value proposition needs to evolve alongside changes in multi-unit operational structures. As the library’s contribution to addressing institutional priorities becomes increasingly embedded in multi-unit collaborations, its value proposition must be articulated in new ways to reflect the changed circumstances under which it is operationalized. 

Our roundtable participants described some of the difficulties they have encountered in communicating the library’s value proposition in the context of cross-campus partnerships. Some spoke of the library being tasked with a lot of “invisible work” that no other campus unit is willing to take on: while this work needs to be done, the library’s efforts tend to fly under the radar with little recognition. One participant also noted that cross-campus collaborations often resulted in internecine struggles for leadership and reputation-enhancing credit. Others mentioned experiences in which the library initiates an effort only to have another unit take it over once it is off the ground; the library then steps away, its only reward the knowledge that the project is at least being sustained. 

Another issue that was repeatedly mentioned was that library contributions in the form of the temporary assignment of a librarian to a research team or other group, while highly valued by campus stakeholders, nevertheless quickly drained available resources. As one participant noted, everyone wants their own “personal librarian.” For example, systematic reviews, which were frequently mentioned as an area of high interest, tend to be bespoke allocations of staff time and effort, rather than a formal, clearly defined service supported through functional roles. In these circumstances, the library’s value proposition is not scalable.   

The challenge of surfacing the library value proposition in multi-unit operational settings is amplified in novel, emerging areas of institutional interest. Contrast this with a relatively long-standing model of library partnership with other campus units: embedded or liaison librarians. In this case, the library contribution is often connected to collection development, a traditional, recognized library function. But for Library Beyond the Library-type models taking shape in new areas like data management and research impact, the library contribution may take forms not immediately attributable to the library by other campus stakeholders (think, for example, of the “invisible work” mentioned above in the context of research support services). This illustrates the need for the library value proposition – and how it is communicated – to evolve in concert with changing operational structures, ensuring full recognition of the many ways libraries contribute to the university research enterprise. 

The realities of change 

As the examples above show, there are lots of ways to move toward a Library Beyond the Library operational structure. For those institutions where cross-campus partnerships are the best choice for providing research support services, building a successful, sustainable cross-unit operational structure will likely require overcoming the frictions of path dependency and careful consideration of status quo costs; patience to manage transitions as a gradual, evolutionary process, and a keen sense of timing to implement these changes when services have reached an appropriate level of maturity; and the ability to identify, among the plurality of options, the right way to organize (and formalize) cross-campus partnerships to align with local needs and circumstances. Underpinning all of this is the necessity to find new ways to articulate and amplify the library value proposition alongside any changes in operational structure that combine library capacities with those of other campus units. 

Our OCLC Research Library Partnership roundtable participants shared invaluable perspectives on the opportunities, challenges, and future of cross-campus partnerships in research support. Moreover, their on-the-ground experiences helped add practical context and nuance to the Library Beyond the Library concept laid out in our earlier post, rounding out the abstraction with a healthy dose of reality.  We thank all who joined us for the discussions! Stay tuned for more posts about the Library Beyond the Library as we continue to explore this topic and its implications for the future of libraries.

Thanks to Rebecca Bryant and Richard Urban for great advice on this post!  

The post Moving the library beyond the library: Reflections on an RLP leadership roundtable appeared first on Hanging Together.

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

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

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

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

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

*

This time we did something different, a collective conversation. A few weeks ago we had the chance to bring together several members of the Open Knowledge Network to talk about the current context, opportunities and challenges for open knowledge in Asia.

The conversation took place online in English on 4 July 2024, with the participation of Nikesh Balami (Nepal), Tomoaki Watanabe (Japan), Thanisara Ruangdej (Thailand), Nurunnaby Chowdhury (Bangladesh), Apoorv Anand and Setu Bandh Upadhyay (India), moderated by Lucas Pretti, OKFN’s Communications & Advocacy Director.

One of the important contexts of this conversation is precisely Setu’s incorporation as regional coordinator of the Network’s Asia Hub. With this piece of content, we also aim to facilitate regional integration and find common points of collaboration for shared work within the Network. That’s why we started by asking him to introduce himself in her own words. 

We hope you enjoy reading it.

*

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: Hello everyone! It’s great to meet you all. My name is Setu and I’m the Asia Coordinator for the Prototype Programme at OKFN. I’m a lawyer and policy analyst by profession. I studied law in India and later did a Masters in Public Policy in Europe.

For the last six or seven years, I’ve worked in the broader field of digital rights, technology policy and open data. I’ve had the opportunity to work with organisations like Mozilla and Global Voices. I’m currently leading the learning portfolio at the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder organisation that brings together businesses, civil society, academia and investors to ensure that human rights are embedded in all their activities.

That’s a bit of my background. Since joining the programme, I’ve been mapping stakeholders in the region, a task that other coordinators are also doing in their respective regions. My plans are very much in line with what the community in this region wants.

For example, in our conversations, we discussed focusing on open climate data. Nikesh took the lead on this initiative, while I contributed some ideas, and together with Nurunnaby, we were able to submit a proposal for funding to support this project.

I’m very open to hearing from the community about your needs and interests in the region. I’m here to support you, share ideas and help move projects forward in any way I can.

Tomoaki Watanabe: Great, thank you. So this is a question that I’ve been thinking about and discussing with my colleagues in the openness movement: How much of our efforts in this movement have been either misguided or perhaps unsuccessful? In particular, I’ve been thinking about the tendency to make resources available for free.

Recently I’ve been hearing more about the idea that such resources should be fairly compensated. In fact, I noticed that OKFN has started to use the word “fairness” in their slogan. For me, this shift feels a little unfamiliar, maybe even unsettling, because I’ve long associated openness not only with freedom of speech, but also with the idea of free access in a very literal sense.

I understand the reasoning behind this change, but I’m still trying to figure out the best way forward. How do we strike the right balance and navigate this evolving landscape?

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: That’s a very broad and challenging question. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to get a little academic to answer it. My Ph.D. thesis focused on the “tragedy of the commons” and the “resource curse”, concepts defined by Elinor Ostrom. I’m a strong believer in the idea of the commons, especially in the digital world, where everyone can benefit from shared resources without depleting them.

Investing time, energy and advocacy in the openness movement is critical to its growth and development. In my experience, while I’ve mostly worked on open data in India, I’ve also worked with organisations in East and West Africa and Sri Lanka. What I’ve found is that governments and regulators are increasingly recognising the value of open data. In India, for example, the government has introduced policies to regulate and promote open data, despite historical bureaucratic challenges.

This recognition by governments, particularly in developing countries, signals real potential for the movement. Unlike in countries like Germany or the US, where governments often lead innovation, in India policymakers tend to act after the public has already demonstrated the value of an idea. This gives me hope for the future of the movement.

Of course, as with any initiative, there have been successes and failures. But in the realm of open data, where resources are often free to use and innovate with, there are relatively few barriers compared to something like personal data. The benefits are clear, and it’s easier to get people on board when there’s little to no compromise required.

So while the movement has its challenges, I remain optimistic. The potential for innovation is huge and the incentives to participate are strong. I hope that answers your question.

Nikesh Balami: I don’t have a specific question for this session, but I’d like to throw out some thoughts and questions that we can discuss together. Setu can also chime in and it would be great to hear everyone’s views.

Reflecting on the journey of open knowledge and open data in South and Southeast Asia, I’ve noticed something important. While we’re doing great work in our respective countries – collaborating on projects and initiatives – there is a significant limitation when it comes to regional collaboration and knowledge flow across borders. Learning from each other has been somewhat limited, particularly in South Asia.

For example, there are strong examples of cross-border cooperation in regions such as Thailand, Myanmar and the Mekong. But in South Asia, we face geographical and geopolitical challenges that hinder similar efforts. Despite these challenges, as individuals leading civil society and the knowledge movement in our countries, we should consider some ideas to bridge this gap.

It would be valuable to discuss how we can begin to foster better regional synergies and what steps need to be taken to move forward. I’d like to hear Setu’s thoughts as a regional coordinator and discuss how Open Knowledge can move these collaborations forward, focusing on prioritising this crucial aspect.

Thanisara Ruangdej: When you asked your question, and after listening to all the answers, I started thinking about the Open Knowledge initiative in Southeast Asia. As you mentioned, these initiatives often start with good intentions, driven by civil society. However, when we try to make them more impactful, we often have to work with the government. This can sometimes lead to the politicisation of our movement, especially in polarised societies.

What starts as a movement for everyone can change once it becomes embedded in the system. We are seeing this debate in several countries. We’re now asking ourselves how we should position our relationship with the government. I’ve talked to people in the US, where civic tech initiatives are often adopted by the government, and that’s seen as a success. But in Thailand and Southeast Asia, it’s different. Here, we want social credit – firstly because the initiative came from us, and secondly because it helps us secure funding or create new projects.

However, if the government adopts something and takes ownership of it, it can become a political issue. I don’t have a clear solution, but I wanted to share this concern. Perhaps you all have more opinions or ideas on how to overcome this challenge.

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: To start with Thanisara’s point, it sounds like you’re talking about the government co-opting the movement for political gain. This happens everywhere, and I’m sure we’ve seen it here in India. While I don’t have a definitive solution, the key may be to make it clear that this is not a political movement, but a social one – for everyone, regardless of party lines or polarisation. Of course, this can be much harder to do in certain countries, especially as polarisation is increasing globally. But it’s important to continue the movement and innovate despite these challenges.

Regarding Nikesh’s point about the lack of knowledge transfer across countries and regions, this is an important issue that we can work on. For example, we could have quarterly or bimonthly learning sessions. In my current job, I facilitate learning between different stakeholders, so I could help with this. For example, if Nikesh has successfully completed a project and Thanisara wants to implement something similar, it would be beneficial for one to learn from the other’s experience – what worked, what didn’t and what lessons were learnt.

One idea could be to share regular updates from members and experts with the whole group. I could also host a bi-monthly or quarterly call for members to discuss their projects, share insights and make connections. If there’s interest, we could start as early as this month. I’d love to hear if anyone has any thoughts or would like to add to this idea.

Nurunnaby Chowdhury: It’s great to see so many new faces here. I’ve already noticed some helpful discussions, which reminded me of a similar conversation we had at the OK Festival in Germany in 2014. Some of us from Nepal, India and elsewhere were discussing the same issues. Nikesh and Open Knowledge Nepal are doing incredible work, and I’ve been associated with Open Knowledge since 2013, observing their various efforts. However, in Bangladesh, we haven’t been able to achieve the same level of success, partly due to a lack of technical expertise.

Nikesh, being an expert in these areas, could really help us. I discussed this with him about a year ago, and it’s still a crucial point. In 2021, after the pandemic, we organised a conference in Bangladesh that brought together open access and open knowledge advocates from several countries. I chaired two seminars at this event and it was well received, especially by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, one of the largest agricultural research organisations in the country.

They had originally planned to invite a minister to inaugurate the event. As a well-connected journalist, I was asked to help, and after a brief discussion, the ICT minister agreed to attend. When he joined us and attended two seminars, he later told me how much he appreciated the opportunity to interact with intellectuals and experts from different countries.

This experience has taught me that if we can invite regional experts to our programmes, it is easier to attract policymakers. They tend to focus more on events with diverse, international participation. For example, if we invite Nikesh to our programmes and engage policymakers, they are more likely to pay attention and support our initiatives.

In South Asia, the political landscape can be challenging, but by using our network of experts and working across countries, we can make real progress. We’ve seen that getting the right people involved can lead to tangible results, such as the launch of the Open Government Portal in Bangladesh. Although it’s not fully active or up to date, the fact that it was launched at all shows the impact of engaging the right people. If we continue to engage the right people and involve our network of experts, we can achieve more at government and policy level.

Apoorv Anand: I agree with all the points that have been raised. The first priority should be to strengthen cooperation within the region. Both Nikesh and I, along with someone from Bangladesh, have already tried to initiate something. The issues we face – like climate change, AI policy, etc. – require an exchange of ideas across borders. I agree with Setu’s suggestion to start with a regular online meeting, perhaps quarterly. A dedicated discussion forum for the region could also be beneficial. While the OKFN calls keep me up to date with the Network, a focused channel for regional projects would be invaluable.

From my experience in India, the concept of open knowledge is still seen as very technical, which inadvertently excludes a lot of people. I’ve worked with many NGOs over the last four to five years, and while they agree with the principles of open knowledge, they struggle to apply them to their projects. The challenge lies in the perceived zero-sum game due to limited funding and resources, which makes it difficult for people to see the benefits of participating. We need to shift the conversation from open knowledge as a tool to a community movement where everyone’s participation is critical to growth.

It would be great to see more diverse participation, especially in India. We could be more intentional about inviting people who aren’t currently part of the network but could benefit from it. This approach would help the network to grow organically as they in turn reach out to others.

As a community, if we can identify two or three key priorities for the next year or two, it would help everyone focus on how they can contribute, both individually and collectively. Even if we don’t work on specific projects, regular communication and collaboration – such as inviting each other to relevant events – will be essential.

These are just some initial thoughts on how we can move forward.

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: Thanks everyone. I agree that a discussion forum is valuable, but in my experience live interactions tend to foster more dynamic conversations and idea generation. Perhaps we can do both. I’m happy to facilitate the calls – schedule them, send out invitations, host and moderate. We can also circulate notes afterwards for those who couldn’t attend.

The challenge of open knowledge being perceived as a technical concept is significant. To overcome this, we could frame it as a social movement rather than focusing on technical solutions and incentives. For example, I worked on a case study of the Electrical Supply Monitoring Initiative (ESMI) by Prayas, an Indian NGO. India has a history of severe power cuts, although the situation has improved in recent years. ESMI began by distributing IoT devices to monitor power cuts in Pune, and using the data collected as evidence in public interest litigation against power companies and the government. This initiative led to better public services, proving that when people see a clear benefit, such as improved electricity, they are more likely to participate.

The key is to present open knowledge as something that benefits society without asking individuals to give up much – whether it’s time, money or effort. With ESMI, for example, the promise was better electricity with fewer blackouts and less need for backup power. While not everyone will be on board immediately, especially as the results aren’t immediate, pushing the narrative of long-term societal benefits can help build momentum.

In my experience, people are more receptive if the movement is framed as something that improves public services without asking much of them personally. We can’t make everyone happy, but by promoting it as a social movement, we’re more likely to get wider acceptance and results.

I’ve done some research and interviews on the open data movement in India, and this approach seemed to resonate with those involved. I hope this perspective is helpful.

Nikesh Balami: There have been a lot of interesting discussions, case studies and ideas shared here. I really like the idea of hosting calls on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. For example, during the recent Open Data Day, I hosted an Open House session for the Open Data Charter in Asia. It was a great experience and I noticed some fascinating case studies from countries like Cambodia and Korea. This highlighted the need for us to regularly share knowledge so that we can learn from each other, stay up to date, and explore potential opportunities for collaboration.

When I was at the Foundation, we often discussed how to engage the network in potential collaborations – whether through events, joint funding proposals or joint projects. Regular calls could help us continue these discussions and strengthen our network.

I also have a question about the changing dynamics of the open knowledge movement in our respective countries. Globally, there’s been a noticeable shift. Organisations that used to focus on open data and open knowledge are now struggling with funding and support, especially compared to the support they received 7-10 years ago. The focus seems to be shifting towards more thematic areas, such as climate data, gender data and other specific issues, rather than general open data initiatives.

So my question is: how is the momentum around open knowledge shifting in your countries, and what are the current emerging thematic priorities? Is the focus on climate, gender, transparency or something else? It would be great if we could document these insights, as they could serve as a blueprint for our upcoming activities.

Anyone can start by sharing what’s happening in their respective countries and we can use this as a basis for future discussions and planning.

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: That sounds good to me. I don’t know if anybody wants to jump in.

Apoorv Anand: My observation is that there has been a significant shift in India in the last year or two, particularly with a strong push from the government. This push is very top-down, focusing on keywords like Digital Public Goods (DPGs) and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPIs). The recent G20 summit played a big role in this momentum. As a result, these terms have started to influence the funding landscape, with funders increasingly looking for projects that align with these concepts.

However, there’s still a lot of ambiguity around what exactly qualifies as a digital public good. Different stakeholders have different interpretations. For example, can something you’re working on be considered a digital public good if its source code is available online? Or does it go beyond that? People are still learning and figuring this out, but the push to integrate these concepts is strong.

Importantly, this focus is sector agnostic, although there is a noticeable emphasis on climate change. The intersectionality of these issues is evident, as they affect sectors such as public health, disaster management and more. While the emphasis on DPGs and DPIs cuts across sectors, climate change remains a key focus.

Overall, these are the buzzwords driving the current landscape, and even I’m still learning about them. But it’s clear that the impetus is coming from the top.

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: In many ways, India often presents itself as a bottom-up country, but in reality it operates in a top-down manner. This isn’t unique to India; it’s a pattern seen in many other countries, particularly those represented on this call. However, this is where social movements come in – they play a crucial role in shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up approaches.

However, when an initiative is endorsed by the government, it gains momentum. You can use the idea of nationalism to argue for it, saying ‘it’s good for the country because the government supports it’, unless of course there’s strong opposition to the government itself.

You’re absolutely right – buzzwords are prevalent, especially in the context of AI. Concerns like “AI is going to take over” dominate the conversation, which leads to questions about data: Where does it come from? How do we get it? This push to open up data is an important part of current policy discussions.

Lucas Pretti: Can I just add something? I was talking to someone the other day and I mentioned how much you seem to travel. I said, “I always see your updates, you’re in Asia, India, Japan, everywhere”. This person, who is a CEO, replied, “Oh yeah, that’s where the money is.”

I’m not sure if that’s true, so I wanted to ask: do you see a trend? Is there more funding or focus on open data and technology in Asia? I don’t have any concrete evidence, but I’m curious – do you find it easier to secure funding now compared to, say, 10 years ago?

Nurunnaby Chowdhury: In Bangladesh, our government has been focusing on digital initiatives for many years, and now they’ve announced a plan to transition to “Smart Bangladesh” by 2041. There are several major projects underway, such as the new Metro Rail in Dhaka.

In light of these developments, I discussed with Nikesh a few months ago how the Open Knowledge Network could take the initiative to engage with the government on these projects. For example, we could ask ministers or relevant authorities to share project details. Many people in Bangladesh are curious about these big projects, especially the funding sources and details, but it’s often difficult to get this information.

Even though we have laws, it’s not always easy to access data. If we could encourage the government to make this information openly available, it would be a significant step forward. This initiative could really resonate with people, showing them how to find data and ask the government for details. I think projects like this would be incredibly helpful in getting more people involved in the open knowledge movement, especially in politically sensitive environments like ours.

Thanisara Ruangdej: I have a few thoughts, but I can’t fully answer your question, Lucas, because my organisation is only five years old. For the past four years, we’ve mainly received support from abroad, mainly from the US and some European countries. The reason is that we deal with political issues, such as advocating for transparency, and local governments are unlikely to fund us for that.

Apart from the funding itself, one of the biggest benefits of international support is the network it provides – just like what we’re doing here. When we talk about collaboration, it’s not just about sharing what we’re working on, but also sharing information about funding opportunities and strategies for tackling these issues. In Thailand, many civil society organisations are struggling to survive because they can’t maintain sustainability, both in terms of funding and in terms of how they promote their causes. So it’s important to focus not only on what we do, but also on how we do it.

Setu Bandh Upadhyay: Thank you everyone. This has been a very enlightening and productive conversation. I think we already have some action items lined up and ready to go. I’m looking forward to working on them and continuing to engage with all of you.

I’m also looking forward to discussing more solutions to practical problems, as well as larger, overarching issues. I hope that together we can tackle these challenges and help transform the open movement into a broader social movement and drive it forward. It’s great to be part of this movement from the inside and I’m excited about what we can achieve together.

The CKAN Community announced today the release of the latest version of CKAN: 2.11. This new version ships with a lot of improvements thanks to the great work of the Tech Team and dozens of contributors. In this post, I would like to focus on what makes us really excited: cementing the Hypermedia Approach of its architecture.

The Open Knowledge Foundation created CKAN back in 2007 and since then it has always followed a hypermedia approach. Its architecture didn’t change much in the last 17 years and it is based on the traditional 3-Tier model, currently powered by Flask, SQLAlchemy, Jinja2, Javascript, HTML and CSS. Since its inception, and more often in the past 5 years, it has received several proposals to “modernise” its architecture: migrating to microservices, reworking its frontend in newer technologies (react, vue, etc) and decoupling backend and front end.

During the development of CKAN 2.11 an idea was proposed to decouple its front-end from its backend, which surfaced a lot of interesting points about the benefits of our current setup and how introducing a decoupled solution could lead to more complexity that we can handle as an open source community.

To settle the debate, the Tech Team of CKAN proposed an Hypothesis: embracing an hypermedia approach could lead to an easier transition to a richer UX. The idea was to test out if integrating HTMX to CKAN would give us more tools to improve our UI. This hypothesis was successfully proven correct given that it took just a couple of weeks of volunteer work to integrate HTMX, start refactoring our UI, document the new capacity and present it in the tech meeting. This integration was soon followed by a Pull Request from a contributor to improve other parts of the UI using the flamant HTMX integration. Further information on how to work with CKAN/HTMX can be found in the official documentation under the section Creating dynamic user interfaces with HTMX.

We want to congratulate the CKAN Community and the CKAN Tech Team for the new release. We are also happy to see the CKAN community pushing to keep the technology simple and maintainable, proving that software can be built to last.

Looking forward to a bright hypermedia future!

NDSA has been an active membership organization since its founding in 2010. It advocates for the digital stewardship needs of its member organizations, convenes a community of practice, and provides professional development opportunities for its members. Today, NDSA is completely run by volunteers from its member organizations, with administrative assistance subsidized by CLIR.

NDSA membership has always been free for any organization committed to long-term digital stewardship. While NDSA has thrived thanks to an active network of volunteers, this model has also presented many challenges to NDSA’s sustainability and independence as the organization has grown and matured. While NDSA was fortunate to have been funded through the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program in our early years, and has received financial support from CLIR since 2016, we now find ourselves unable to fulfill our mission and goals without a sustainable funding model.

NDSA funding would enable us to hire a community manager, who would onboard and support NDSA members, coordinate communications and outreach, and assist with NDSA in-person and virtual events. These are all unmet needs that have been identified as high priority through member surveys, interviews, and discussions within NDSA Leadership.

Over the past few years, NDSA engaged in many activities to uncover these unmet needs. The Task Force on Membership Engagement and Recruitment began in 2021. The group conducted a survey of NDSA’s member base to measure the current value of benefit offerings and understand how to attract and recruit broader partnerships. Survey results led to the creation of the Membership Working Group, charged with discussing the findings on membership types and fees, criteria for evaluating new members, improving the new member onboarding, and more. In 2023, the Membership Working Group held group listening forums and individual interviews to gain more information on member preferences and opportunities for NDSA to engage with and grow our membership. The group recently completed its recommendations on improvements and expansion of NDSA’s member engagement, and submitted a report for review by the NDSA Leadership.

Concurrently in 2022, NDSA Leadership began efforts to explore the optimal organizational alignment to meet member needs and help NDSA fulfill its mission and to serve as a national leader in the field of digital preservation. Through this evaluation, NDSA refreshed its Mission, Vision, and Values and developed a summary of its current host relationship with CLIR, its operational support requirements, and its financial impact.

In late 2022, the Long-Term Conference Planning Working Group was charged with examining NDSA’s annual conference practices and making strategic recommendations on the future of NDSA conferencing and events. The group recommended that NDSA lengthen the interval between its national in-person conferences, incorporate more virtual options, and create a clear mission statement for those in-person gatherings. They also recommended that NDSA explore the implementation of smaller “Designated Community” events that would be accessible to more of its members. Through these recommendations, NDSA will develop a more holistic strategy for its programming and events. A new working group focused on implementing these improvements to NDSA events began its work in May 2024.

When thinking about how to financially support these growing needs, NDSA Leadership has discussed a sliding scale membership fee model, organizational vs. individual memberships, vendor sponsorships, and revenue from events such as the DigiPres conference. Your feedback is critical to help us determine a membership fee schedule that would be both sustainable and affordable. If a fee-for-membership model is not feasible for a majority of member organizations, NDSA will evaluate its other funding options. However, without sustainable funding, meeting the most basic needs of NDSA’s members will be at risk and NDSA’s strategic goals will not be met.

In order to evaluate these funding options, we have created a brief survey which should take about 10 minutes to complete. The survey will be sent out via email to NDSA’s member representatives – please keep an eye on your inbox! In exchange for completing the survey, you may choose to be entered into a raffle for one free registration to the next DigiPres conference. (Your contact information will only be used for the raffle and will not be included in the dataset for analysis.) We request that you complete the survey by September 10, 2024.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact Bethany Scott, NDSA Coordinating Committee Chair, at ndsa[dot]digipres [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you for your feedback and support!

The post Member Fee Survey: Feedback Requested appeared first on DLF.

The following post is one in a regular series on issues of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility, compiled by a team of OCLC contributors.

^{Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash}

Book bans and Indigenous children’s literature

An episode of National Public Radio’s Code Switch ‘Not a badge of honor’: how book bans affect Indigenous literature looks at how book bans impact Indigenous children’s literature. The interviewees include acclaimed expert on children’s literature, Dr. Debbie Reese. Reese explains that representation matters, not only for Indigenous children, but for all children who benefit from understanding more about their Indigenous neighbors, community members and fellow citizen. When a book by an Indigenous author is banned, it removes already scant but vital representation. Hawaiian author Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, whose book Kapaemahu has been banned in a Virginia library, chooses not to spend energy on that issue. “Hawaii is my mainland. . . . I can’t control what happens in Virginia or any other state.”

This piece provides useful context on the importance of children’s literature. I have long admired Dr. Reese’s dedication to interrogating authenticity and have respect and appreciation for Wong-Kalu’s focus on what is important in her own writing. Contributed by Merrilee Proffitt.

Tale as old as time: support for young readers

Reading help has long been a core service of public libraries. Most people are familiar with summer reading programs where school-aged children can practice reading between school years. Poor performance and declining reading skill development have been impacted in recent years by several factors, not least of which is the COVID-19 pandemic, and students are falling further behind. Studies have shown that once students fall behind, they rarely catch up. At the Public Libraries Association 2024 conference, librarians shared programs they host to support struggling young readers in the hopes that other public libraries can utilize the same, or similar programs, to empower children and families in more communities across the US. These programs are not limited to summer only, or the same structure as typical summer reading programs, which helps close the gap for students that need help during the school year.

I was struck by this article because the two programs highlight librarians with titles such as Learning Differences Librarian or Early Learning Specialist. This is an important signal that public libraries are expanding their services for literacy programmed by staff with enhanced educational training. Having staff embedded full time in the public library dedicated to early educational programming is heartening in a time when schools and teachers are overworked and underpaid. Everyone suffers from the lack of access to education, but the earlier that children fall behind in reading the longer their future outcomes are delayed. Contributed by Lesley A. Langa.

Resources for Intersectionality Awareness Month

The important concept that individuals can identify with more than one demographic group is highlighted during August which is Intersectionality Awareness Month. Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE), the blog from ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), brings together resources to keep all types of libraries informed about important ideas and initiatives. In cooperation with Resources for College Libraries (RLC), TIE helps to promote diverse and inclusive institutions with a collection of important documents in “A Selection of Titles to Commemorate Intersectionality Awareness Month.” The sixteen resources listed cover such social markers as gender and sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, class, and the ability/disability spectrum and how they interact.

Although the ideas that form the basis of the concept have been around since before the United States Civil War, the term “intersectionality” was coined by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in a landmark 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum essay entitled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Contributed by Jay Weitz.

Survey now open on neurodiversity in library workplaces

The Information School at the University of Washington (OCLC Symbol: WAU) has a call for participation in its neuroinclusive workplace survey. The survey, which closes 15 September 2024, is open to neurotypical librarians and library supervisors currently employed or employed within the last five years at an academic or public library. This is the next phase in its IMLS-funded research project, Empowering Neurodivergent Librarians. The project team will produce training materials for United States libraries and MLIS programs “to prepare inclusive future librarians and improve overall neurodiversity inclusion and empowerment in the library profession nationwide.”

The University of Washington’s Information School created the Autism-Ready Libraries Toolkit in 2023 as the result of a previous IMLS grant. This is an excellent online resource for training public library staff in providing services to autistic children and their families. I look forward to the resources produced by the current project and commend the Information School for its continuing research about neurodiversity in libraries. Contributed by Kate James.

The post Advancing IDEAs: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, 19 August 2024 appeared first on Hanging Together.

Gen AI has CIOs rethinking data sources and reexamining their unstructured data.

The post Generative AI Unlocks the Door to Unstructured Enterprise Data appeared first on Lucidworks.

At this midpoint of the year, I write to express my heartfelt gratitude for support and participation in the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP). The passion and commitment demonstrated by our member institutions inspire our work.

The OCLC Research Library Partnership places people at the center 

^{Total Cost of Stewardship Workshop, RBMS Conference. Courtesy of Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research.}

We see evidence of the RLP program’s contributions in numerous ways: 

• The impact of our research. The community catalyzed by Reimagine Descriptive Workflows continues to grow, and the Social Interoperability frameworks continue to provide value, extending beyond their initial research support context. 
• The uptake of the Total Cost of Stewardship. The report has been cited in numerous articles in the Journal of Western Archives’ special issue on Collection Stewardship in the Age of Finite Resources and we saw the practical benefits of our research at the sold-out workshop we hosted on this topic at the Rare Books and Manuscripts (RBMS) Conference.
• Robust participation in RLP-hosted engagement opportunities. Activities like our OCLC–LIBER collaboration provide structure and order in a complex and rapidly changing environment, while our Metadata Managers Focus Group convened the community on important topics like AI.  
• Connecting in person. We’ve had the opportunity to connect directly with our Partner affiliates through our partner-focused in-person workshops in the UK and presentations at the Art Libraries Society (ARLIS) of North America, the American Library Association annual conference, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) IDEALS conference.   

These are strong signals that our programming resonates with our networks and will guide our future efforts.  

New leadership roundtables support RLP engagement

We’ve launched two new leadership roundtables for Research Support and Archives and Special Collections. 

Using the model established with our Metadata Managers and SHARES communities, these new leadership roundtables allow RLP libraries to share information and benchmark their strategic and tactical goals.  
 
Since February, we’ve hosted four sessions on topics of interest, including the challenges of archiving born-digital collections, bibliometrics and research impact, and cross-campus collaboration. You can read more about what we’ve learned from these sessions on Hanging Together. We’ll convene again before the end of the calendar year. 
 
If you are an affiliate, please let us know if you would like to nominate a colleague to join us.  

The library beyond the library 

^{Cookie and Rou, “Let’s collaborate!” Courtesy of Brian Lavoie, OCLC Research.}

A new OCLC Research effort is underway to explore “the library beyond the library.” This project observes that libraries are increasingly engaged in partnership with other campus units, which are manifesting in new operational structures that extend beyond the confines of library hierarchies. This new project expands on our past work on social interoperability to identify key changes in library operational structures and value propositions.

We want to learn how you’re responding to these changes to support your growth. 

The RLP leads on topics critical to the field

^{OCLC Research Library Partnership Workshop, Sheffield. Courtesy of Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research.}

A highlight of the past year has been our OCLC-LIBER engagement experience, where we had the chance to lead community conversations around important topics such as AI. These discussions fostered opportunities for shared learning and to embed outcomes into our communities of practice. We will continue holding space to learn more about how AI is being incorporated into our everyday work lives. 
 
We’re proud of the RLP’s work to support inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA). We featured two webinars on diversifying collections—implementing strategies and student-led collection development—and our blog, Hanging Together, features a biweekly series on these topics. 
 
Additionally, we’re informing the development of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) standard by connecting the working group with experts in the Metadata Managers Focus Group and SHARES communities.  
 
Finally, we continue to follow the principles outlined in Reimagine Descriptive Workflows to reimagine a critical component of the OCLC linked-data ecosystem, the WorldCat ontology. 

Welcome to three new Partners!  

Please extend a warm RLP welcome to our newest network members, Clemson University, Vanderbilt University, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. We’re thrilled to have such an amazing group of individuals from these institutions join us! 
 
If you didn’t see us in person earlier this year, you have other opportunities to catch up with us. Senior Program Officer Chela Weber presented at the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in Chicago last week, and team members will be present at the International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums in November and at the December CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) meeting. 

Looking forward 

We remain committed to a virtual-first approach to ensure our members can engage and connect regardless of physical limitations. By embracing technology, we can continue to foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation. 
 
Once again, I extend my deepest gratitude for your continued support. Your dedication and passion drive us forward, and we’re honored to have you as part of our membership community. Together, we’ll continue to prioritize centering our work on the great people in our network and focus on amplifying your contributions to make a lasting impact. 

The talented RLP team of program officers, along with the broader OCLC research team, are eager to extend our work, with our Partners at the center. Partner participation is an essential ingredient that helps us to learn and grow as a community.  

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I missed the first day of VALA 2024, but I was there for days 2 and 3. The subsequent few weeks at work were ...eventful, including getting Covid (not from the conference). So this is my belated write-up of what I learned and observed at VALA 2024.

Sites of resistance in the digital age

The keynote on Wednesday morning was from dynamic Deakin University duo Hero Macdonald and Tui Raven. You can tell they are serious people because their bio photos are in black and white and they both have their arms crossed. "Hmm, I wasn't expecting a talk about French philosophy at VALA 2024", I thought. It wouldn't be the last time. Tui spoke about libraries and knowledge systems as being social, relational, and alive:

Tui talked about the datafication and ownership of knowledge, and and as she spoke I thought about how this is linked to conversations the previous week about generative AI being used to use synthesised voices of dead actors to narrate audiobooks. I'd expressed the view on Mastodon that this was "creepy", and there was a bit of a conversation exploring why it seems creepy specifically. As I listened to Tui her words helped me realise that it's because synthesised voices of people we know (or in the case of celebrities, people we've formed para-social relationships to) both breaks and fakes the social bonds and promises of our knowledge systems.

More things to explore from this talk

• AIATSIS Core cultural learning course
• National survey on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment in Australian libraries : Research report

Being Hacked

Vickery Bowles and Steve Till-Rogers presented via video link from Toronto about the experience they had with a major "cyber incident". This was similar to what happened to the British Library - TPL's entire system was compromised in an attempted ransomware attack, and they had to rebuild their network and databases from scratch. Their ILS was down for over three months, but none of their branches were closed the entire time: they moved to recording loans via ye olde paper and pen. TPL is huge: 2400 staff and 100 branches. The whole thing sounds like a massive logistical nightmare.

Key take-aways for me were:

• prior "tabletop cyber exercises" were very helpful to TPL as they knew basically what they needed to do to respond and recover
• there was a significant focus on internal communication - not just on "public relations" (or at least that's what these two senior managers assert!)
• they implemented a "phased recovery" where systems and processes were essentially triaged. Getting the website back up was a priority so they could communicate with library users, and this itself was phased: initially a simple static site. Someone decided they may as well do a website redesign since they were rebuilding the website anyway, which I guess makes sense
• logistics around storage of collection items that couldn't be checked back in was a major consideration
• disaster recovery plans need to have a reasonable level of detail to be useful in situations like this

Creating narrative-based rubrics for library services evaluation

Anna Rubinowski and Lauren Halcomb-Smith from Deakin ran an excellent workshop after the keynotes. They have been busy improving their system for analysing collection usage and making decisions about subscription renewals - a common and laborious activity in academic libraries. This workshop was to teach us how to think about and create rubrics for decision making. Lauren explained the concept of "consistent subjectivity" - we know our assessments are subjective, but with the help of a rubric we can at least be consistently subjective by being explicit about what it looks like to meet, exceed, or fail to meet a given criteria.

I could immediately see how this approach would be helpful when making and justifying decisions about subscription reviews. But it has also been incredibly useful already for our work at La Trobe on open education projects, where I started using it immediately. Our process for approving La Trobe eBureau proposals has certainly used criteria for some time - but just like Deakin with their subscription reviews, if anyone was to ask us to justify our decision making we haven't had much in the way of documenting how we come to our decisions. Just as importantly, by using a rubric we can use the rubric itself as a way to indicate to the academics writing a proposal what it is we're looking for and what we want them to think about. In this context, the rubric isn't just to help make or justify a decision to approve or reject a proposal - it also helps us understand what aspects of open educational practice our applicants will need support to develop further. This workshop has had a big impact on how we are thinking about open education projects, using the rubric as a launching point for a lot of other things.

The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation

I have to be honest - I mostly went to VALA to attend Ruth Tillman's keynote. Ruth's topic was the Integrated Library System, but she's primarily interested not so much in the tech itself as the experiences of the people using it. Specifically, Ruth has been doing an oral history project talking to librarians (retired and practicing) about their experiences of ILS migrations.

I found the whole talk very interesting, but one of the things that really struck me about how Ruth talks about her topic is that for something so ubiquitous in libraries, we rarely discuss the ILS as a general technology. Usually, we're talking/complaining about a specific implementation.

Ruth spoke of each library service as an "implementation of the technology of 'library'". This in turn is why a single ILS software can work in multiple library contexts. It's rare for libraries to migrate their ILS very often, and when they do it's often traumatic and frustrating for library staff. Ruth outlined a reason for this: An ILS is a prescriptive technology, and ILS migrations are shifts between prescriptive systems. Ruth's formulation reverses the common complaint from managers that staff are "resisting change" and insist on processes occuring in a particular way. On the contrary, it is very often the ILS as a piece of software that forces staff to do a task in a specific way: when you change the ILS, you change the procedure.

Ergonomics in ILS design

Ruth mentioned in her talk that she kept hearing a new word in her interviews, particularly regarding Alma and FOLIO: "clicky". Tasks that had previously required one or two mouse clicks or perhaps just some keyboard shortcuts now took several clicks to achieve. This is an important aspect of systems changes that is often brushed aside. "It's just one or two more clicks" sounds reasonable in the abstract. But Ruth pointed out that small changes in process can have big ergonomic and psychological impacts to people doing the same thing over and over.

A final aspect from my notes is on staff as workers, and the "hacky workarounds" that those of us doing library systems work are familiar with. For Ruth, these workarounds are all about worker self-empowerment. I made a note as she spoke about this: "Is this also why sometimes people resist a more robust solution?" Something to ponder.

More things to explore from this talk

• The text and images from Ruth's talk: The Interdependent Library System: Revisiting Human Aspects of Library Automation
• The real world of technology / Ursula M. Franklin

Communities in code

Aleisha Amohia is the Rōpū kohinga Technical Lead at Catalyst IT. This includes working on KohaILS, one of my favourite open source software projects. Aleisha's talk was about the alignment between open source values and the Māori worldview. She also introduced me to the term "LinkedIn broetry", for which I thank her.

Regulating the digital frontier

Trish Hepworth was such an energetic speaker after presumably drinking 7 coffees that I was too captivated to take any notes. She took us through what she and ALIA have been doing to stay on top of the Australian regulatory environment when it comes to AI, what the current state of play is in legal terms, and what we should be thinking about. The morning keynote felt like being blasted by an Academic Twitter Ray Gun and after months on end of people declaring that Everything Has Changed it was refreshing for Trish to confidently declare that we all need to chill out, and in fact everything librarians have been doing for the last decade (focussing on information literacy, critical thinking, and ontological mapping) is exactly the sort of thing needed to manage in a generative-AI-impacted world. Trish also snuck in a slide with Monkey Selfie, which is always fun.

Like and subscribe: How to keep up after #LibraryTwitter (RIP)

I attended this session because ...I was the speaker. I presented a poster session which is basically a lightning talk to a small crowd while you stand in front of your poster. The tl;dr is that you should go check out Aus GLAMR, my new application for sharing and finding out about GLAMR blogs, events, groups, and newsletters.

Privacy, security and browser changes: how to future-proof your library’s authentication

Anna Russo came all the way from the UK to give this short presentation on the latest and upcoming changes to security in web browser engines. I almost didn't attend because I figured it would probably be an OpenAthens sales pitch, but the VALA conference organisers did a good job of preventing those sorts of sessions and this turned out to be incredibly useful.

Jisc and NISO have both analysed how upcoming changes to browser privacy and security are likely to affect library authentication, and there's both good and bad news. Third party cookie blocking seems to be largely unproblematic for common library authentication systems. This makes sense, as we're generally sending authentication information forward rather than backwards. IP address masking, on the other hand, is going to break everything that relies on non-proxied IP recognition. This is likely to primarily affect "walk up" access, because this is usually unauthenticated access provided by vendors simply recognising the requesting IP address. Lots for library discovery teams to check - IP obfuscation is available optionally in Safari already, but there is talk of Google Chrome turning it on by default some time next year. We're likely to have at least until the end of 2024 to come up with workarounds.

More things to explore from this talk

• Browser Changes: What, When, and How to Prepare your Library’s Authentication

The once and future librarian

Donna Benjamin was the conference "lock note". Her talk rapidly took us through a series of "four things" in open practice.

Donna also asked a rhetorical question that got me thinking: "Why is library search still so bad [compared to Google]?". I've heard this question asked at library conferences for years on end. Donna is a fan of libraries rather than a librarian, so I'm not having a go at her here. But I wrote a note to remind me later that I was wondering is this even a useful question? Librarians have been beating ourselves up about Google Seach being Good and library search being Bad for the entire life of Google. This is an entire other blog post, but briefly there are two things I want to note here:

1. Google Search is a full-text index of the world wide web. Library Search is at best a full-text index of abstracts of various texts, and never only that. So asking why one is better than the other is a category error, like asking why hot air balloons are better than goats.
2. Google Search has obviously and measurably become much worse over the last 5 years, and Google Inc seems to be doing their best to accelarate the decline. I'm convinced that thoughtful, human-scale information management and classification will win out over the long term.

More things to explore from this talk

• Four powers of AI
• Open practice library

Anyway, VALA conference was great as usual. You should go to the next one.

Discover how AI-generated document summarization and entity extraction can transform research and decision-making for customers and employees alike.

The post AI Summarization: The Easiest and Fastest Win for Gen AI appeared first on Lucidworks.

Back in 2020 and 2021, while the Penn Libraries were largely closed, many of our librarians worked from home on the Deep Backfile project that I’ve written about here before. Faced with more demand than ever for online access to our collections while most users couldn’t go into our libraries, we researched the copyrights of some of the many thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials in our collections. We hoped that documenting their public domain status could pave the way to making them more widely available not just to users of our library, but to readers in many other places as well.

By the time our library buildings fully reopened in 2021, our librarians had researched and reported on the copyright status of over 8,000 serials owned by Penn. They also found free online copies of at least some issues in over 2,000 of those serials. Our plan for the project was to do two reviews of every serial, one based on filling out a questionnaire we developed, and one done by someone with more expertise to review and edit the initially reported data, and to create a linked data record for it.

I’m pleased to announce that that second review is now complete. We now have copyright data for all the serials our librarians worked on now published as JSON linked data, connected with Wikidata, available in bulk on Github, and linked to free online content that our librarians found (via The Online Books Page)

When combined with other work, such as the JSON records we have now made for all other serials in our first-copyright-renewals list, our full Deep Backfile knowledge base now covers over 12,000 serials. The free serials available via The Online Books Page now amount to over 25,000 titles, many of them automatically imported from the Directory of Open Access Journals, but over 7,500 more with records we’ve created especially for The Online Books Page. (And that doesn’t include many thousands of additional older serials on HathiTrust that we list but don’t yet have serial-specific records for.)

Many thanks

As you can see in the Credits section of the project page, a lot of people have worked on the Deep Backfile since 2020. I’m grateful to all of them. I want to especially thank Rachelle Nelson, who managed and trained library workers, Jim Hahn and Kathleen Burlingame, who coded automated creation of Wikidata entries for the serials for many of the serials, Jie Li, who created many of the Online Books records for serials with free online content, and Beth Picknally Camden, Joe Zucca, and Emily Morton-Owens, who supported having library workers at Penn work on this project (among others) while our library buildings were largely closed. Some library workers also continued to put time into the project even after they reopened. Our most prolific contributors, Pete Sullivan and Nat Bender, each researched more than 1,000 serials. But there were also many other contributors who filled out questionnaires or created Wikidata entries, and whether they did it for just a few titles, or hundreds or more, their contributions are valued.

I hear regularly from readers around the world that use these and other serials online, thankful that they can access and read sources that were previously obscure or difficult to access in their research. The copyright information that the Deep Backfile team worked on has also been noticed by a number of digitization projects. The Internet Archive’s Serials in Microfilm project has been scanning microfilms and opening access for some of the serials we documented. HathiTrust conducted a pilot program for reviewing copyrights, based in part on our work, that led to them opening access to a small number of the serials we researched, and we now have a Deep Backfile table focusing on HathiTrust serial titles that might be openable there, if members are interested in supporting copyright review for them. As I noted in a talk I gave in January, we’ve also created another Deep Backfile table highlighting serials that have articles about them in English Wikipedia. We may also be able to take advantage of the information we’ve gathered for our own digitizations at Penn.

What’s next

We have a lot of information now about the rights and availability of many public domain serials. But there’s a lot of information we don’t yet have. The Penn Libraries own a lot of other serials we didn’t get to in our 2020-2021 survey. We don’t yet have information on a lot of the potentially public domain serials mentioned in Wikipedia. HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and a lot of smaller sites now provide freely readable copies of serials we don’t yet list, including both public domain content and content freely licensed by the publishers or authors. And many of the large publishers and aggregators still include lots of public domain serial content behind paywalls.

So we could go in a variety of directions in further expanding our knowledge base. Which directions we focus on may depend on interest, support, and available resources. For now, I plan to take a short pause: first, for a vacation for much of the rest of this month, and then for working on some other digital library projects that have been in progress for a while (some of which you may hear about eventually).

But if you find this knowledge base of interest, I invite you to contribute more to it. To that end, I’ve adapted the questionnaire we developed for Penn librarians and now make it available for all of our Deep Backfile tables. Feel free to check it out, and fill it out for as few or as many serials as you like. Is there a serial on Wikipedia you’re interested in that we don’t yet have copyright information on? Feel free to select the “Contact us” link and answer the questions you see there. Annoyed when you hit an unwarranted paywall for an old or long-running journal at one of the big publishers, or a big aggregator? Go to its Deep Backfile table and help us document what’s public domain, and could be provided online by others even if a paywall exists elsewhere. Know of an authorized or public domain archive of one of the serials we mention? You can also use the “Contact us” links, or our general suggestion form, to let us know about additional content we can link to.

I’ve been gratified to regularly hear from readers who are using or are interested in the serials we now cover. And after I get back from vacation, I look forward to hearing more of what you’re interested in, and in reviewing any information you send us. Thank you again!

Stop wasting valuable time on outdated intranet search. Discover how AI-powered ranking delivers the right information to the right people, instantly.

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The following post is part of a series that documents findings from the RLP leadership roundtable discussions.

Over the past several years, research libraries have become increasingly engaged in the university research enterprise through an expanding array of research support services, assuming new responsibilities in areas such as research data management, institutional reputation management through research information management, and support for bibliometrics and research impact services. These activities are often closely aligned with institutional priorities, and require cross-campus collaboration to implement and sustain.

These topics all connect to a concept we recently introduced called the “library beyond the library” – the idea that academic and research libraries ever increasingly partner with other units on campus to address a range of emerging institutional priorities and expectations in research support. However, a significant challenge for libraries in these partnerships is that their role, contributions, and value proposition may not be clearly defined or recognized by other campus stakeholders.

To learn more about about the opportunities and challenges of cross-campus collaboration, as well as their connection to the Library Beyond the Library concept, the OCLC Research Library Partnership convened four 90 minute roundtable discussions with library leaders from RLP institutions in many different time zones during the week of June 17. These discussions focused on how library offerings were evolving in response to university priorities, and what role cross-campus partnerships played in advancing institutional and library goals.

Overall, 48 individuals from 26 RLP institutions in four countries participated, including representation from:

RLP leadership roundtable discussions generally follow Chatham House Rules, in order to support open, trusted conversations. This blog post offers a high level synthesis of our recent discussions, without naming individual speakers or their institutional affiliations.

Growing demand for research support

Many roundtable participants described a growing demand for research support services, driven not only by ambitious research productivity goals but also often by the growing size of large public institutions. Local conditions vary broadly, but activities include:

• Research data management (and data storage solutions), which frequently involves library collaboration with campus IT. In particular, there is significant interest from researchers in data mining, and libraries are working with partners to manage the costs of data acquisition.
• Evidence synthesis support is a rapidly growing offering in many RLP libraries, which more than one roundtable participant described as a “campus priority.” While many libraries reported new hires to support systematic reviews, there is significant uncertainty about how to offer services at scale.
• Tracking the institutional scholarly record, frequently through a RIMS/CRIS system, to support institutional reporting, reputation management, and expertise discovery. Libraries are frequent leaders, in collaboration with the research office and academic affairs units.
• Closely related to this is research impact support, the focus of a previous RLP roundtable discussion. One US institution described how its research impact librarian is working with other campus stakeholders on the implementation of an institutional faculty information system (Interfolio), in addition to their routine support for faculty preparing tenure dossiers. Another participant in the UK described how their library is expanding its research metrics service offering, including support for academic reviews and advocacy for responsible metrics.
• Campus ORCID adoption was mentioned as a priority for many institutions, such as a pilot project recently announced by the University of Waterloo, with support from the library, office of research, and other campus stakeholders. These efforts seek to integrate ORCID into a broader array of campus workflows, to enhance functionality for researchers and the broader research ecosystem.
• Data security and research integrity issues, while primarily the purview of the research office, have offered several libraries an opportunity for closer collaboration with that unit on RDM topics, as well as in the deployment of electronic lab notebooks.

Research support drives cross-campus collaboration

Growing demand for research support services goes hand in hand with library collaboration with other campus stakeholders. In particular, roundtable participants described several factors that were driving collaboration with other campus stakeholders:

Library alignment with institutional goals

Several RLP affiliates described ambitious research productivity goals at their institutions, including one university where the goal is to double research productivity by 2025. Notably, several RLP member institutions have recently joined the prestigious Association of American Universities, comprised of 71 leading North American research universities. Institutional efforts to increase research productivity, prestige, and rankings have significant implications for libraries, as well as other units like research administration, campus IT, and academic affairs units, motivating service development for data management, research information management, and more.

Mandates

Open science mandates

Many roundtable participants described how the shift toward open science and public access mandates are catalyzing cross-campus conversations. This was most evident among US institutions, where institutions are beginning to organize in response to the recent OSTP public access memo, which requires the free, immediate access to federally-funded research, with each federal funding agency enacting their own policies by the end of 2025.

Librarians at three public land grant institutions described how their institutions were responding with cross-campus task forces or committees comprised of stakeholders from the library, research office, and other institutional stakeholder groups, in order to address the complex institutional implications and ensure compliance (and continued eligibility for grant monies). Other US libraries described low awareness of upcoming policies by non-library stakeholders at this time, a condition likely to change as policy implications become clearer.

Research assessment mandates

For UK institutions, the nationally mandated Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a strong driver of cross-campus collaboration, as it has implications for block-grant research funding for UK institutions. The library plays a central role in the REF for most UK institutions, by managing the scholarly record for the university, which is used for outcomes reporting.

Amplification of library offerings within a broader research support hub

With research support services atomized across the campus, it can be challenging for researchers and students to connect with available resources. At least six of the institutions participating in this roundtable reported efforts to develop a web page or portal to highlight all the research support services at the institution, at various stages of maturity. One library described their library services being “fully integrated” with those of the research office, which helps to raise awareness of services, but at the risk of losing library identity–and visible value proposition. I’ve previously blogged about how Montana State University has launched a Research Alliance comprised of both library and non-library research support units, physically housed in the university library. This operational configuration positions the library as the hub of institutional research support, signaling its value proposition to the campus community.

Challenges and obstacles

Roundtable participants shared numerous examples of the challenges of developing and sustaining collaborations with other institutional partners. As we described in our 2020 Social Interoperability report, cross-campus collaboration is HARD! For example:

_{Photo by Iqro Rinaldi on Unsplash}

• Leadership churn. The high turnover in campus leadership roles adds uncertainty and complexity, particularly when it can take months or years to fill vacancies. One participant described the negative impact of leadership turnover by saying, “It’s hard to align with campus strategy when you aren’t sure what it is.”
• Decentralization. Decentralization was described as a barrier to collaboration, both across campus and within the library itself. One participant described the decentralization of the library system as creating obstacles for collaborations with other campus units because “. . . [other units] don’t want six partners, they really want one.” And to add to the complexity, efforts to centralize points of contact can also run afoul of local interests, particularly in departments and colleges/faculties.
• Existing hierarchies and financial models are often fossilized within this highly decentralized structure. Inflexible structures can create a formidable barrier to more formalized partnerships and cost sharing. One participant described how their library provides direct support for managing the institutional scholarly record for strategic campus reporting efforts, which requires numerous product licenses, including a research information management platform. To date, the library has covered costs for this effort, including labor as well as software expenses, but it would like to shift some licensing costs to the research office. However, inflexible funding structures are proving a barrier to this cost-sharing effort.
• Rigid HR policies, job categories, and union contracts can limit flexibility to change positions or revise job descriptions, as needed for operational changes–both within the library and other campus units.
• Difficulty scaling services to meet demand. Many library leaders described significant challenges with the resourcing and scaling of research support services, particularly as demand for high touch services like evidence synthesis and data curation exceed library capacities. One participant described this as as representing a “desire for a more personalized approach, [with] librarians available for specific people or specific tasks.” This is particularly challenging for both large public institutions as well as less well-resourced private institutions.
• Competition. Several participants described how opportunities to collaborate can instead turn into “turf wars” over a given topic such as research data management, frequently driven by individual ambitions and overt concerns about which individuals and units get “credit” for the effort. One participant knowingly said, “I think that the reputation of goal of [individuals] entering leadership can have both legitimately positive but also potentially devastating effects on existing and in-progress services.”
• Resource scarcity. Austerity and budget cuts make the work harder to staff, potentially amplifying competition for often already scarce resources. RLP institutions across many national environments reported resource challenges, which are particularly significant today in UK institutions.
• Cultural norms. Collaboration is set up to be hard in part because universities are “complex adaptive systems,” characterized by self-directed, independent agents with heterogenous goals operating in a federated and often chaotic environment.

Support for positive cross-campus collaboration

Register for the upcoming Social Interoperability Workshop

To help support RLP libraries in building successful cross-campus relationships, the RLP will again be offering our popular (and RLP exclusive) Social Interoperability Workshop. This concise 90-minute virtual workshop features a combination of presentations and small group breakout discussion to:

• Explore the challenges of building relationships in a complex multi-stakeholder environment
• Identify strategies and tactics to build stronger cross-campus relationships
• Learn from peers facing similar challenges

Affiliates of RLP partner institutions are invited to register for the time that fits your schedule:

• Tuesday, 8 October, 10-11:30 am EDT / 4 -5:30 pm CEST
• Tuesday, 8 October, 6-7:30 pm ET / 3-4:30 pm PDT / Wednesday, 9 October 9-10:30 am AEDT

Reflect on how your library articulates it value proposition to other stakeholders

I invite you to read our recent blog post on the Library beyond the library, which describes a current OCLC Research project examining how research libraries are engaging in new operational structures that extend the the library beyond traditional hierarchies. As libraries evolve, they must find ways to boldly articulate the library’s value proposition to key non-library stakeholders. Stay tuned for more posts about this project.

Thanks to my colleague Brian Lavoie for his input on this blog post.

The post Cross-campus collaboration in research support: Insights from an RLP leadership roundtable appeared first on Hanging Together.

Photo credit: The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

This is the fifth in a series of essays I’ve written on time. You can view a list of all of them on the first essay.

In my second essay in this series, I wrote about how work became the dominant temporality in our lives and how we bend our lives to be in sync with the demands of work time. Frese (2022) writes “time is a vector of power that structures not only our every daily activity, encounters, and actions, but also encroaches on the overarching course of life” (57). In reality, there are people who simply can’t be in sync with the dominant temporality and this may be a temporary, permanent, or intermittent condition. Whichever it is, it can be keenly painful to feel that out-of-syncness because being in sync is so pegged to career success and people’s sense of worth. I wrote about how soul-killing it was to stay yoked to the dominant temporality when I had my son and was dealing with physical illnesses as well as postpartum depression. For many parents and other caregivers, the demands of caregiving can push us out-of-sync at certain points in our lives. The needs of children and other people we care for don’t always conveniently occur during non-work hours. Flexibility in our jobs is helpful, but, as I wrote earlier, it usually requires the performance of increased commitment, so, for many, it means pushing our work into the nights and weekends we desperately need to recharge (and/or to offer more care).

Katie Walsh brings up an example that should be familiar to us all: “Remember the last time you got sick and had to take time off work, did you simply take the time you needed to recover, or did you guess how many days you were ‘allowed’ to be sick, as though you can simply stop being ill whenever it is convenient for capitalism?” If you’ve ever come back to work still sick or fatigued or depleted or in pain, you’ve experienced the pull to prioritize the dominant temporality over your well-being. You’ve experienced ableism. 

People with disabilities often live lives out of sync with the dominant temporality. The temporality of disability is so often profoundly different from the dominant temporality that it has a name: crip time. Crip time, a term reclaimed from its traditional use as a slur, can mean so many things. I’d highly recommend Ellen Samuels’ essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” to get a sense of just some of the different ways we can conceive of crip time. It’s much more than just needing more time for things. It’s the starts and stops. The unpredictability. The two steps forward and three steps back nature of being disabled. May Chazan (2023) defines it as “the non-linear, unpredictable, ever-changing, or multiply enfolded temporalities of being disabled” which is the most concise definition I’ve seen to describe something so multifaceted and complex. 

Rest by Charles Jacque

People’s experiences of disability are so diverse that it’s difficult to generalize about crip time. According to Sheppard (2020) “there are as many forms of crip time as there are crip bodyminds, crip ways of being in the world and being in/through time” (40). In addition to being out of sync with the dominant temporality, there are also different seasons in crip time (also not experienced the same by everyone if at all): before disability, pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, grief, acceptance, recovery/remission. And people rarely move linearly through those categories. As Samuels writes, “disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.” While the pain I experience is pretty horrible, the most frustrating part of my illness for me is the unpredictability. I don’t know how I’m going to feel from one day to another and thus what my capacity for work or contributing to my household will be. It makes it so hard to make plans. But the price of ignoring my body is too high as Samuels explains:

For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don’t want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.

To do this, disabled people have to often live in the future, guessing how many spoons we have to do what we need and imagining what might happen if we use too many on any particular day. Chronic illness makes it nearly impossible to “live in the present” because not thinking about  tomorrow could be ruinous. 

There’s something quite beautiful about crip time too in that it can be positioned as a critique or resistance to the capitalist imperative of speed. To live outside of capitalist demands can feel paradoxically liberating. To prioritize ourselves, our well-being, is powerful. By prioritizing my health, by refusing to allow my bones to be ground up on the altar of capitalism, I set an example for others and break open the possibility of reorganizing the world around all of us prioritizing our health together. I love what Gauthier-Mamaril (2024) says about crip refusal:

Crip refusal is an important and generative tool in our effort to hack our way to a more just world. After all, crip time is our time. It is not “how to make up for lost abled time”. With every refusal we open a portal, a sliver, a crack that shows us that an alternate reality is possible. What Smilges calls “access thievery” is both a mundane and radical act: the act of taking what we need, taking the time we need, without waiting for it to be offered, without asking for permission (2023). The more comfortable you become living in crip time, the more adept you become at rewriting the rules of living.

Sleep by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Like the brilliant Alison Kafer (2013), I see the possibility in crip time to destroy our current toxic temporal norms and create something better for everyone: 

crip time is flex time not just expanded, but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies. We can then understand the flexibility of crip time as being not only an accommodation to those who need ‘more’ time but also, and perhaps especially, a challenge to normative and normalizing expectations of pace and scheduling. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds. (27).  

When so many simply can’t meet the organizational pace and others sacrifice pieces of themselves in order to do so, is the answer accommodation (as it is now if organizations do anything)? Or is the answer a radical rethinking of how our organizations work and how we work together? Do we dare change the pace? More on this in my next essay!

There’s clearly more to the dominant temporality than just the times and numbers of hours we are expected to be working. There’s also the definition of what a “normal” life course looks like. The late (and brilliant) Elizabeth Freeman (2010) coined the term “chrononormativity” to refer to “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). We’re expected to live our lives in a certain linear way with certain milestones, including producing the next generation. In our society, there’s an expectation that we will grow up and become independent adults, find a partner, get married, have and raise children, and contribute productively to the capitalist project. Chrononormativity defines what is considered “normal” in how we move through our lives and careers. In our profession, chrononormativity might look like moving up the career ladder to Director/Dean/University Librarian or pushing towards the highest rank possible in the organization. The idea of chrononormativity came from queer studies because, historically, openly queer lives rarely followed the “normal” chronology. Its critique, however, can go beyond those who identify as queer. Freeman writes about how “failures or refusals to inhabit middle- and upper-middle-class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint” (19). When success or normalcy is pegged to a certain progression through life or one’s career, it leads some to either grasp for that progression (when perhaps it isn’t what they really want or what fits their life) or to feel like they are out-of-step and somehow failed at life. I remember my Director in my first professional job expressed being disappointed in a colleague of mine for not being “ambitious” because she was happy in the staff job she had and didn’t want to go to library school and climb the career ladder. She had fully internalized chrononormativity and painted everyone who hadn’t bought into it as somehow deficient. I recently read the delicious book I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol and while MacNicol sees her disinterest in marriage and children as deeply liberating, it’s interesting to see how even some of her friends assume that she ultimately must want these things and thus not understand her hookups in Paris with 27 year old men as a 46 year old woman.

From the rejection of chrononormativity came the concept of queering time. Jack Halberstam (2005) writes that queer time is a kind of warping of normative time, “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” and also “time outside of productivity.” Halberstam sees different temporalities, milestones, and disruptions in the lives of queer people, so defining the normality or success of queer lives by heteronormative standards makes no sense. Like crip time, here’s no one definition of what queer time looks like; instead, it is more a queering of the very notion of chrononormativity and a freeing from heteronormative and linear ways of looking at time. In that sense, it can be both an acknowledgement of queer people’s lived experiences outside of the dominant temporality and queer people’s rejection of and resistance to chrononormativity. Carrie Sandahl describes queer time as a “wry critique of hegemonic norms” (as quoted in Kafer 2021, 426). While her relationships are heterosexual, I see MacNicol also queering time as a “woman of a certain age” (AKA my age) rejecting the traditional chrononormative limitations and wants she is supposed to be subject to and living life joyfully on her own terms.

Dancers in garden, resting by Louis Fleckenstein

Queer time might sound a lot like crip time and there’s a reason for that. The notion of crip time was largely based on writings on queer temporality. We know that for so long, queerness was viewed through the lens of ableism and defined as mental illness. Both temporalities have different seasons and milestones that define the life course as different from heteronormative and able-bodyminded. I was, at first, going to write separate essays on crip time and queer time, but they are so deeply entwined that it didn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, both have many key thinkers in common (Alison Kafer, Elizabeth Freeman, Ellen Samuels, etc.). Valuable critiques and brilliant ideas about crip time and disability justice have also been published by disabled feminist thinkers of color (Leah Piepzna-Samarsinha, Sami Schalk, Jina Kim, Audre Lorde, Moya Bailey, etc.) bringing the various lenses of their identities and scholarship to bear on these topics. As Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:

The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy leverages ableism to create a subjugated ‘other’ that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable … We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism.

I deeply appreciate their critiques of the whiteness of traditional disability studies and their more collectivist visions of what disability studies could be. According to Schalk and Kim, “by situating disability within other overlapping systems of domination, feminist-of-color disability studies also emphasizes coalition, affinity, and solidarity.” Solidarity… I love that. In my next essay, I’ll be highlighting a brilliant essay by Moya Bailey that looks at what an ethics of pace might look like. I’m not an expert in these topics and maybe this is just a product of what I’ve chosen to read, but it really feels like queer, disabled women of color have the most progressive, solidarity-focused, and visionary views of what a more just and humane future could look like. They are the futurists I want to listen to. 

I’ve come to really appreciate groups whose temporal norms exist outside of the dominant temporality because it’s nice to find practices that either do not conform to or that actively resist these hegemonic norms. It breaks open the possibility of other ways of being in relation to time. I love that Islamic temporalities, specifically Muslim prayer temporality, have stood the test of time in spite of how out-of-sync they are with the demands of capitalism. They do not conform to colonial and neoliberal notions of time, which makes so much sense since one’s relationship with God should take precedence if you’re a believer (I’m not but I can appreciate faith). I appreciate other groups who have reclaimed their culture’s lack of Western-valued punctuality as a point of pride. Jenny Odell writes about this in Saving Time: 

This brings me back to “Filipino time.” From one angle, the term looks derogatory, given that it was coined by the Americans who took over the Philippines at the turn of the century and who found Filipino people to be less than punctual. Still, it’s often invoked as a sort of inside joke or even a wry point of pride, at least among people I know. When a recent memorial service that my mom attended started late, my cousin said, “What do you expect? It’s a Filipino church.” (Odell 2023, 203)

That pride in a cultural practice that also thumbs its nose at colonial and neoliberal values around punctuality really holds a special place in my heart. Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman (2021) ask “what if we all simply took as much of our time as possible back from late capitalism? What if we developed new forms of punctuality centering on presence, simultaneity, and concurrence: new ways of being together in time?” (251). I’m not 100% sure what that would look like, but I’m very interested in finding out. 

Repose by John White Alexander

Our society has constructed so many norms or “idealized standard[s] of human life” (Hendren 2020, 10). According to Sarah Hendren, these norms are relatively recent, most of them having come from the scientific and social scientific work of population data collection and the notion of “the average man” that only came into being in the mid-19th century. And these norms were quite faulty. For example, about 150 years ago, we were told that the average body temperature is 98.6, and it’s not anymore, yet the myth persists (and wow is modern medicine good at uncritically using norms like BMI to bully and scare patients). But more than that, they created this narrow vision of normal that keeps so many of us chasing or trying to live up to or feeling alienated by standards that don’t fit for probably 90%+ of people (oh, and by the way, a lot of these great 19th century statisticians were eugenicists!). As a parent, I remember worrying hugely about the few areas where my son was not developing on schedule as if every child could possibly be developing exactly the same way on exactly the same timeline like they’re little machines. How will my child’s life be forever ruined because he can’t use a sippy cup when the books say he should?!?! These constructions of normal serve only to harm us and I am deeply appreciative of queer studies, disability studies, and critical race theorists for revealing these social constructions for what they really are: hegemonic tools of social control and stigmatization.

I’m grateful to those writing about queer and crip time for opening up new possibilities for being in relationship with time and showing us that our relationship to time doesn’t have to be as harmful as it is when capitalist productivity is centered. I’ll leave you with an exhortation from Katie Walsh, writing about crip time: “I urge you to reconsider your understanding of time in the workplace and reckon with the idea that your worth cannot be determined by the schedule on which you operate.” As I and others have written before, nothing about how we work is inevitable. 

If you’re interested in learning more about disability in libraries here are a few resources:

Kumbier, Alana, and Julia Starkey. “Access is not problem solving: Disability justice and libraries.” Library Trends 64, no. 3 (2016): 468-491.

Manwiller, Katelyn Quirin, Amelia Anderson, Heather Crozier, and Samantha Peter. “Hidden Barriers: The Experience of Academic Librarians and Archivists with Invisible Illnesses and/or Disabilities.” College & Research Libraries 84, no. 5 (2023): 645.

Manwiller, Katelyn Quirin. “Disability in Academic Libraries: Moving from Accessibility to Inclusion.” PaLA CRD Connect and Communicate Webinar Series (2023 Nov). 

Schomberg, Jessica. “Disability at work: Libraries, built to exclude.” In The Politics and Theory of Critical Librarianship, ed. Karen P. Nicholson and Maura Seale. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2018: 111.

Schomberg, Jessica J., and Wendy Highby. 2020. Beyond Accommodation : Creating an Inclusive Workplace for Disabled Library Workers. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.

Other works cited:

Frese, Hannah. “Time to Care: Disabled and queer lived realities of care and time as forms of non-normative resistance.” Master’s thesis, 2022.

Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds : Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham [NC: Duke University Press.

Gauthier-Mamaril, Élaina. “MedHums 101: What is Crip Time?” The Polyphony (2024 Jan 26),  https://thepolyphony.org/2024/01/26/medhums-101-what-is-crip-time/ 

Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place : Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.

Hendren, Sara. What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World. Penguin, 2020.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Kafer, Alison. “After crip, crip afters.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 415-434.

May, Heather. “Practice-Based Research: Working in Crip Time.” Performance Matters 9, no. 1 (2023): 205-221.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. Random House, 2023.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Samuels, Ellen. “Six ways of looking at crip time.” Disability studies quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017).

Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. “Introduction: crip temporalities.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245-254.

Schalk, Sami, and Jina B. Kim. “Integrating race, transforming feminist disability studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 1 (2020): 31-55.

Sheppard, Emma. “Performing normal but becoming crip: Living with chronic pain.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 22, no. 1 (2020): 39-47.

Walsh, Katie. “Cripping Time at Work” Early Magazine. (2023, March 30).  https://www.earlymagazine.com/articles/cripping-time-at-work

Ward, Marchella. “Queer Time, Crip Time, Woman Time, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Muslim Time… Remaking Temporality Beyond “the Classical”.” In Critical Ancient World Studies, pp. 172-188. Routledge, 2024.

NDSA will be electing three members to its Coordinating Committee (CC) this year, with terms starting in January 2025. CC members serve a three year term and participate in a monthly call to help guide and sustain the organization’s strategy and direction. The Coordinating Committee provides strategic leadership to the organization in coordination with group co-chairs. NDSA is a diverse community with a critical mission, and we seek candidates to join the CC that bring a variety of cultures and orientations, skills, perspectives and experiences, to bear on leadership initiatives. Working on the CC is an opportunity to contribute your leadership for the community as a whole, while collaborating with a wonderful group of dynamic and motivated professionals. 

If you are interested in joining the NDSA Coordinating Committee (CC) or want to nominate another member, please complete the nomination form by 11:59pm EDT Friday, August 30, 2024, which asks for the name, e-mail address, brief bio/candidate statement (nominee-approved), and NDSA-affiliated institution of the nominee. We particularly encourage and welcome nominations of people from underrepresented groups and sectors. 

As members of the NDSA, we join together to form a consortium of more than 270 partnering organizations, including businesses, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, professional associations and universities, all engaged in the long-term preservation of digital information. Committed to preserving access to our national digital heritage, we each offer our diverse skills, perspectives, experiences, cultures and orientations to achieve what we could not do alone. 

The CC is dedicated to ensuring a strategic direction for NDSA, to the advancement of NDSA activities to achieve community goals, and to further communication among digital preservation professionals and NDSA member organizations. The CC is responsible for reviewing and approving NDSA membership applications and publications; updating eligibility standards for membership in the alliance, and other strategic documents; engaging with stakeholders in the community; and working to enroll new members committed to our core mission. More information about the duties and responsibilities of CC members can be found at the NDSA’s Leadership Page.

We hope you will give this opportunity serious consideration and we value your continued contributions and leadership in our community.

Any questions can be directed to ndsa [dot] digipres [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The post Call for Nominations to the NDSA Coordinating Committee appeared first on DLF.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of Zotero 7, the biggest update in Zotero’s 18-year history and a major leap forward in design, performance, and functionality.

A Major Redesign

Zotero 7 introduces a beautiful, modern design that will still feel familiar to long-time Zotero users.

New Item Pane

As part of the redesign, we’ve taken the opportunity to rethink some core elements of Zotero. One of the most important changes is in the item pane, where we’ve replaced the horizontal tabs (Info, Tags, Notes, etc.) with collapsible vertical sections and a side navigation bar for quick access to specific sections. This approach allows us to show additional information right in the item pane without compromising usability. Plugins are also able to easily create dedicated sections with custom information or actions.

At the top of the item pane, a new customizable header lets you choose what info to show: title, title/author/date, or even a bibliography entry in your chosen citation style. The header remains visible when the Info section is collapsed, so you can choose to keep the Info section closed when you’re not editing metadata and still see the title and other important info.

Dark Mode

We heard the calls: Zotero 7’s new design includes a gorgeous dark mode. We know dark mode is important to many people, so we wanted to do it right: every part of the new design was created with dark mode in mind.

We’ve also implemented basic dark-mode support for PDF and EPUB content, with more advanced rendering options coming soon. If you need to view a document in its original state, you can disable dark mode for content from the reader’s View menu.

Compact vs. Comfortable

We now offer two density options for Zotero’s user interface, Compact and Comfortable. Compact resembles the previous density, while Comfortable, the new default, provides a more approachable experience for new users with smaller libraries or people who just prefer a bit more breathing room.

New App Icon

Finally, to complete the look, we’ve created a delightful new app icon.

Improved Performance

Zotero 7 is dramatically faster across the board, and it brings native support for Apple Silicon Macs, 64-bit Windows, and Windows on ARM, ensuring smooth operation on the latest hardware.

Improved Reader with EPUB and Snapshot Support

Zotero 7 includes the next major version of the built-in PDF reader — which, in fact, is no longer just a PDF reader!

EPUB

EPUB is the most popular ebook file format, and many people prefer EPUBs to PDFs for the improved reading experience they provide. Unlike PDFs, which have fixed layouts, most EPUBs allow text to reflow to the size of your window or device, and you can adjust the font and text size to your liking.

EPUBs now open in Zotero’s built-in reader in the same way as PDFs, and you can annotate them and add those annotations to notes just as you’ve been able to for PDFs.

Zotero can also automatically retrieve metadata for most EPUBs and create a parent item.

While Zotero won’t yet download EPUBs automatically from websites, we’ll soon make it possible to specify whether to save PDFs or EPUBs when both are available, and then we’ll begin the process of updating site translators to support EPUBs. If there’s a site that provides EPUBs that you’d like us to support, please let us know in the Zotero Forums.

Webpage Snapshots

Zotero already saves webpage snapshots on news articles and other pages, and those now open automatically in the new reader as well, enabling you to annotate webpages as easily as PDFs.

New Annotation Types

We’ve also added support for creating ink, underline, and text annotations. Ink annotations were already supported on iOS, and it’s now possible to create them in the desktop app as well. (This works best if you have a touchscreen PC or stylus.)

Underline annotations work just like highlights, while text annotations allow you to add text directly to the page.

Underline annotations are available for PDFs, EPUBs, and snapshots, while ink and text annotations are available for PDFs only.

Smart Reference Popup

Hovering over a citation or internal link now opens a popup showing the associated reference or figure. No need to jump back and forth just to check a reference.

Smarter Citing

Citing your sources is now faster and more intuitive. The citation dialog automatically suggests items you have selected in the items list or have open in the reader. Citing something you’re viewing is now as simple as clicking Add/Edit Citation and pressing Enter/Return.

Collection Search

Quickly find the collection you’re looking for in any of your libraries and jump to it without your fingers leaving the keyboard.

Press Enter/Return after typing to move to the collections list, up/down-arrow to move between results, and Esc to clear the search.

Tabs Menu

See a vertical list of all your tabs, type to filter the list, and quickly jump to a given tab. You can also quickly close or reorder tabs right from the menu.

Attachment Previews

See a preview of PDFs, EPUBs, snapshots, and images right in the item pane without opening the reader.

Collections and Searches in the Trash

Deleted collections and searches are now moved to the trash, just like items. If you delete a collection by accident, you can easily restore it from the trash with all the same items and subcollections.

“Libraries and Collections” List

A new section in the item pane shows all the collections and libraries the current item is in. (You can still hold down a modifier key to highlight the collections an item is in.)

Customizable File Renaming

Zotero has always automatically renamed files, but you can now rename files according to a much wider array of options. Write complex rules to make sure filenames always contain all the information you need.

Improved Accessibility

We’ve put in a huge amount of work to make Zotero more accessible to users of screen readers, and we’ve improved keyboard navigation throughout the app. We’re still working to make additional accessibility improvements and will be rolling out more changes in upcoming updates.

Improved Plugin Architecture

Zotero’s own functionality is supplemented by a vast ecosystem of plugins that can transform the Zotero experience: advanced BibTeX support, knowledge management, language translation, custom scripts, AI integration, and much more.

Zotero 7 introduces a new plugin architecture with restartless loading/unloading and built-in support for common integration points (items-list columns, item-pane sections, settings panes, etc.), which helps make plugins easier to write and more stable across Zotero updates. We’re working with plugin developers to add additional integration points.

All plugins need to be updated for Zotero 7. If there’s a plugin you depend on, check with the plugin developer to see if a version is available for Zotero 7.

And Much More

The Zotero 7 update includes much more than we can list here. See the changelog for additional details.

Get Zotero 7

If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.

Existing Windows users should install 64-bit Zotero for the best performance. You can reinstall over your existing version without affecting your data.

If you’re using an Apple Silicon Mac and do an in-app upgrade from Zotero 6, Zotero 7 will continue to run under Rosetta immediately after updating, so restart it for native performance.

Don’t yet have Zotero? Download Zotero 7 now.

Why do we celebrate “efficiency” so much?

Cuts to public services are vaunted as “efficiency savings”. Free markets (and by extension capitalism though they’re not technically the same thing) are touted as the most “efficient” way to distribute resources. New technologies are sold on promises of more efficient working practices.

But we rarely question who benefits from these supposed efficiencies, and who pays the cost.

One example I’ve run into time and time again will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in a large organisation: replacing experienced specialist staff (often on finance or HR, but anything seen as a “support service” is at risk) with an IT system that enables, “self-service”.

Usually this is celebrated as a resounding success, since it’s generally followed by a reduction in headcount with no cost other than the cost of the system, which is both lower and reduces your risk because you don’t to have to make redundancy payouts when you get rid of a service provider. The thing these assessments never seem to account for is that the work doesn’t disappear: it simply moves somewhere its cost isn’t so visible on a balance sheet.

Suppose my employer has introduced a Revolutionary New System™ to let me submit my own expense claims via the web. I do this a handful of times a year, so every time I have to do it I need to:

1. Find the expenses policy
2. Check it really is the latest version
3. Figure out what limits apply and which categories each of my expenses fall into
4. Remember how to put all of that into the counter-intuitive self-service system
5. Apply the right accounting codes
6. Find a working scanner and scan the receipts
7. Upload those and finally hit submit

If I’ve made a mistake, it’ll be sent back to me to try and figure out what I did wrong, after which I’ll have to repeat the process.

In contrast, the finance assistant replaced by that self-service system did that (and a range of other tasks) on a daily or weekly basis. They knew the policy, they knew the edge cases, they knew the mistakes to look for and how to explain to me how to fix them. In the time it took me to submit one very average expense claim, they could process several based only on the scanned receipts they received. They were a specialist and good at their job. I’m great at my job but not so great at doing theirs too. Multiply that across every employee who travels for work, or otherwise pays out of pocket for things that need to be claimed back from the employer, and for every person you’ve made redundant, you’ve reduced your organisation’s capacity to get things done by much more by pushing specialist work onto non-specialists.

The balance sheet tells a different story though: you’ve (apparently) reduced your pay bill and all that work is (apparently) still being done, so everyone wins, must be an efficiency saving. The things those making these assertions never seem to ask is this: what work is not being done for this to continue being done by fewer people?

Alternatively, maybe everyone ups their pace, picks up the extra work and manages to continue as before, eating into any spare capacity they might have had. They’re rushing through things that they would’ve checked before, so mistakes start to slip through. When the mistakes come to light, they need to be fixed, which is more work that must be done, further eating into that spare capacity. The end of that road is catastrophe for the employer and burnout for the employee, but it will have an impact long before then.

Consider this example of a corporate invoicing scam, where a fake invoice is sent to a company’s accounts department in such a way to manipulate someone into paying the scammer as though they are a real supplier. As @joepie90 notes in that thread, and like so many others, this type of scam relies on cranking up the time pressure on the recipient, giving them less time to make an accurate assessment of how they should act. Who’s more likely to get that wrong? Someone in a team of four under pressure to pick up a workload previously carried by six.

Reducing spare capacity also hits resilience. We saw this writ large with the pandemic: the recent UK Covid-19 Inquiry Report described “public services … running close to, if not beyond capacity” after years of austerity. The National Cyber Security Centre has also hinted at this, saying that our resilience has not developed “at the pace necessary to match our adversaries”.

None of the issues I’ve just described are easy to capture on a spreadsheet. So what looks like a success on paper — a consequence-free reduction in staff costs — is in fact nothing of the sort. The costs are still there, and probably greater than before, but they’ve been shuffled around in a way that makes them hard to see.

It’s like that optical illusion where a bar of chocolate is sliced up into uneven shaped pieces, which are then apparently rearranged to make a chocolate bar the same size as the original but with one square left over. It looks like you’ve made free chocolate from thin air, but the space where that chocolate used to be is long- and thin-enough that your eye assumes the pieces just haven’t been pushed all the way together.

In other words, these amazing efficiency savings are a sleight of hand meant to hide a reduction in capacity by spreading it so thinly no one notices. In the short term we’re all fooled into doing a tiny bit more work, and the person at the top gets a nice bonus for their financial prudence. But do it over and over again and people start to notice they’re working harder than ever while getting less and less done. You can’t keep that up long without burning out large portions of your workforce.

You don’t get infinite chocolate for free.

Source

Hunterbrook hit upon a differentiated media business model:

1. They would start a newsroom (Hunterbrook Media) to publish general news and investigative journalism.
2. There’s no paywall and no advertising.
3. But before each investigative piece is published, the newsroom would send it to Hunterbrook’s affiliated hedge fund (Hunterbrook Capital), which could trade on the news.
4. The hedge fund’s trading profits can — they hope! — pay the journalists’ salaries.

One way to think of this business model is that Hunterbrook is essentially an activist short-selling hedge fund, like Hindenburg Research: It investigates companies, finds problems, shorts the companies, and then noisily publishes its investigation to draw attention to the problems. But whereas Hindenburg is straightforwardly a short-selling firm, Hunterbrook’s news site is at least theoretically independent of its hedge fund, and if it publishes enough good general news then perhaps it can become more widely read and trusted — and have more stock-price impact — than a pure hedge fund.

The future is #ZeroCarbon ♻️⚡️ and $WULF is ahead of the curve.#Bitcoin #BitcoinMining #SustainableMining pic.twitter.com/3aq4OipWld

— TeraWulf (@TeraWulfInc) February 28, 2024

• TeraWulf Inc. (NASDAQ: $WULF) brands itself as a “zero-carbon Bitcoin miner” — and claims its commitment to renewable energy will help it land AI data center contracts. But the New York Power Authority, which supplies 45% of the facility’s energy, told Hunterbrook Media: “None of the power that NYPA provides the firm can be claimed as renewable power.”
• The rest of TeraWulf’s power is sourced from the New York grid, which is less than half zero-carbon, according to the New York Independent System Operator, the organization responsible for managing the state’s wholesale electric marketplace.
• The only way TeraWulf can legally substantiate its zero-carbon claims is by purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), according to New York and federal regulators, but a TeraWulf spokesperson confirmed that the company has not done so. “Without the REC, there is no legal claim to the renewable attributes of electricity,” a spokesperson for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority confirmed in an email to Hunterbrook.

The team behind TeraWulf promised New York State that it was “not targeting bitcoin or any other cyber currency” in a 2019 application for its facilities seen by Hunterbrook, despite seizing on the idea of bitcoin mining as a strategy as early as 2018.

The company’s management team, including CEO Paul Prager, trace their roots to Beowulf Energy LLC, an operator of fossil fuel plants that previously revived a struggling coal plant to mine bitcoin. The same TeraWulf executives who claim TeraWulf’s mining is zero-carbon likely continue to manage this coal plant.

Prager has been known to split his time between a “five-bedroom Fifth Avenue co-op” in Manhattan and a sprawling 250-acre estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, according to a 2021 profile in Washingtonian. This estate, called Maiden Point Farm, is described as “more like a small village with 20 structures,” including a “main house, English-style gardens, a pool, a tennis pavilion, a squash court,” and even a private gas station for his car collection, which includes multiple Ferraris.

Hunterbrook’s analysis of the company’s SEC filings shows TeraWulf’s operations are deeply entwined with a constellation of entities under Prager’s control, making it difficult to discern where TeraWulf ends and Prager’s other interests begin.

Beowulf Electricity & Data, a company owned and controlled by Prager, provides TeraWulf with “infrastructure, construction, operations and maintenance and administrative services necessary to build out and operate certain Bitcoin mining centers” — functions that TeraWulf claims are “readily available from independent entities.”

In 2023, TeraWulf paid $20.3 million to Beowulf for these services, representing 38% of TeraWulf’s combined operating and administrative expenses. It also accounted for more than half of the company’s $29.4 million operating loss for the year. The trend continued into 2024, with TeraWulf recognizing $3.5 million in related party expenses in the first quarter alone, amounting to 21% of its operating and administrative expenses for the quarter.

Source

In recent years, Prager has received a significant quantity of TeraWulf shares — through both the related party transactions and financial activities. And in an open letter published early in 2023, he shared that he hadn’t “sold a share” as “evidence of my conviction.” But since mid-2023, Prager has significantly reduced his claimed ownership of the company through a series of stock disposals.

His reported ownership has dwindled, with his holdings falling to around 10 million shares compared to more than 30 million shares in 2023.

There’s one group of people for whom bitcoin mining is an extremely lucrative business: executives. Last year, one MARA executive earned over $220 million in cash and stock-based compensation, in a year when the company’s total revenue was $150 million. RIOT’s top five executives collectively took home a more modest $90 million in a year with a net loss.

This, I think, points to the crux of the problem. Investors have been happy to provide capital to these companies, looking for anything in the public markets that provides some exposure to bitcoin, without paying much attention to what the companies are doing.

I don’t think it ends well.

TeraWulf has not resisted the hype, with the management team suggesting it could land a similar deal. CFO Fleury specified in an earnings call earlier this year that, by leasing out all of the 300 available megawatts at Lake Mariner, the company could bring in $300 million to $450 million in hosting revenues a year. TeraWulf’s revenue last year was $69 million.

TeraWulf doesn’t yet have AI-ready facilities, unlike competitors who made the switch to HPC data center hosting years ago. But TeraWulf announced it is on track to build a 2 MW experimental AI data center by the third quarter of this year and plans to build another 20 MW data center with a target completion date of the end of 2024.

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. You can help me get there.)

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.

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.) 

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.

Reminder: I'm earning my way into the NYC Marathon by raising money for Amref. 

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. You can help me get there.)

 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. (And with your contributions towards my fund-raising goal, as well.)

We're gonna get to that place where we really wanna go and we'll walk in the sun

Jim Thorpe Half Marathon 2024 results.