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Each year during the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” librarians display famous books that have been challenged in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. This book-centric approach seems to be the standard. By focusing on the books themselves, however, do librarians tacitly concede that these books are indeed controversial? Defending challenged books on their merits, as in typical Banned Books Week displays, accepts the debate terms set by would-be censors. The problem is not the book; it’s the act of censorship. We should closely examine the motivations and political context of book banning movements in order to face this challenge with a fuller understanding of the problem. This article describes an exhibit at Florida State University Libraries during Banned Books Week 2022 that confronted this problem directly by trying to understand acts of censorship in Florida history. The exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida,” deployed primary sources readily available online and in the FSU collections to explore who has challenged books in Florida history, and what were their motivations.
Each year in fall, typically in late September, the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors “Banned Books Week,” an annual event observed in libraries across the United States to raise awareness of challenges to the freedom to read and to build community with librarians, authors, publishers, and the reading public. Many librarians take this opportunity to create book displays, often showcasing famous books that have been banned in the past as well as the most frequently challenged books in the present day. In support of such efforts, ALA maintains a webpage that includes a variety of creative ways to display banned books in libraries. In almost every example on the site, the books themselves are the focus, often with some note about their content that has been considered objectionable.1
But considered objectionable by whom? In describing the current wave of book challenges, the ALA website alludes to “[g]roups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time,” but doesn’t elaborate further about who these groups are.2 PEN America, an advocacy group for writers and free expression, reported that, since 2021, the dramatic increase in the number of book challenges in the United States is largely the work of a movement to “advance extreme conservative viewpoints about what is appropriate and allowable in schools.”3 But who belongs to this movement, and why are they coordinating efforts nationwide to remove books en masse from library shelves across the country? Moms for Liberty, headquartered in Florida, is one of the organizations coordinating today’s book banning movement. For example, Bruce Friedman, a member of Moms for Liberty in Clay County, near Jacksonville, submitted over 400 book challenges to the county school district during the 2022-2023 school year. According to the Tampa Bay Times, which reviewed statewide data on book challenges, over 600 challenges of the total 1,100 received throughout the state that year came from either Friedman or former Escambia County teacher, Vikki Baggett. Baggett presented to the Santa Rosa County chapter of Moms for Liberty in May 2023 to share tips on how to get books removed from school libraries.4 The numbers of book challenges are staggering and the coordinated campaign that now extends nationwide, led by well-connected organizations including Moms for Liberty, suggests there is more to this movement than local parents’ concerns. In the face of this powerful movement against the freedom to read, librarians and the reading public need to follow the advice of censorship and intellectual freedom expert Emily Knox and take seriously the book challengers’ reasons for action, both to better understand their motives and to more effectively respond to attempts at censorship.5
In the summer of 2022, during what seemed at the time to be the height of the mass book banning movement sweeping public and school libraries in Florida, I decided to respond by rethinking the traditional Banned Books Week display. My goals were to turn the spotlight onto the would-be book banners in order to interrogate their motives and to put the current wave of book challenges into historical perspective. I decided to focus entirely on the state of Florida, where I lived and worked, because it was home to most of the university’s student body, and because the state has been the epicenter of US book banning in the twenty-first century. Based on data collected by PEN America, the 2021-2022 school year was, unfortunately, not the height of book banning, but only the beginning. Since that year, when PEN America documented 566 book bans in Florida, the number more than doubled to 1,406 in the 2022-2023 school year, and then skyrocketed to 4,561 book bans in 2023-2024. Since 2022, Florida has led the nation with the most book bans by state.6 Florida has also served as a testing ground for government action, providing a model for other censorious politicians to follow at the state and federal levels.7
It is also important to acknowledge that my individual and institutional positionality made it possible to create an exhibit that some might find politically provocative. I was able to proceed in part because of my union membership in the Florida State University chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. As a faculty member covered by the collective bargaining contract, I enjoyed the same academic freedoms and job security as other university faculty and felt empowered to present an honest and historically accurate narrative of book banners in Florida history. Unions are also under threat in Florida; the Republican-controlled legislature regularly passes new laws making it difficult to sustain union membership and legal recognition. However, at the time of my exhibit, the FSU faculty union had succeeded in meeting each new requirement that the state imposed. I also obtained backing from my library Dean, who supported the project enthusiastically. Additionally, as a cisgender white male, I might not be as easily targeted as faculty and staff from historically marginalized groups, especially given the political backlash currently aimed at campus offices and curricula that support the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. And finally, working at a large research university library meant that my collections were not the typical targets of coordinated book banning movements, which are more likely directed at public and school libraries.8 For all of these reasons, I felt both empowered and compelled to raise my voice on this issue.
In this article, I will share both the content and process of creating my exhibit, “Against Liberty: A History of Banning Books in Florida.” In sharing my historical research and experience creating the exhibit, I hope that library workers and other readers will recognize the core message of my exhibit: that book banning is rarely pursued as a good faith effort to protect readers from harmful content. Rather, as evidenced many times in Florida history, acts of censorship are rooted in struggles for power and social dominance. The three major episodes of book banning that I explored in my exhibit coincided with times of social crisis. In Florida, in the 1830s, in the decades after Reconstruction, and again during the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement, reactionary forces used censorship as one tool in their bid to control the political narrative in times of significant social and cultural change. This historical approach helps us to see continuities between the motives and methods of book banners past and present. With a clearer understanding of these moments of conjuncture and why censors have challenged books in the past, we may be better equipped to respond today by crafting effective policies, procedures, and political advocacy in our communities. As my exhibit showed, the challenges we face are not new, and recognizing the true motives of book banners is essential to resisting the often powerful interests that seek to limit our freedom to read, learn, and imagine alternative futures.
The idea for this exhibit came together during the summer of 2022, when my graduate course work in nineteenth-century United States history intersected with my role as Humanities Librarian at Florida State University Libraries. As a student, I had recently conducted research on neo-Confederate organizations and how they shaped Southern universities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These groups, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), were very concerned about the history being taught in Southern schools and worked to influence the curricula and textbooks used in schools at all levels, including colleges and universities. This research was fresh in my mind when Dr. Laura McTighe, a professor of religion and frequent collaborator with the library, mentioned to me in conversation that she was reading about how, before the Civil War, Southern enslavers passed laws to punish people found with abolitionist books and pamphlets in an effort to prevent the spread of abolitionist ideas. Putting this conversation in context with my research and today’s book banning movement, I was beginning to see similarities between the censors of each time period.
The final catalyst arrived when a library colleague alerted me to a book that had just been returned with a note written on the inside cover page. (Fig. 1) My colleague wanted to know what we should do with a defaced book, and since it was a history book, it fell to me to make this collection development decision. When I saw that the “defacement” was a note saying, “Warning–this is a racist book,” complete with page numbers to the writer’s purported evidence, I was intrigued. As it happened, the writer was correct. The book was a reprint edition of History of Georgia, by Robert Preston Brooks, one of many examples of histories from Dunning School scholars of the early twentieth century. Named for Columbia University historian Archibald William Dunning, who trained many of the scholars who wrote in this tradition, it refers to an interpretation of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era critical of Black enfranchisement and officeholding while sympathetic to the white Southerners who overthrew the Reconstruction governments, often violently.9 Here in my hands was a physical manifestation of the neo-Confederate movement I had studied and a modern reader’s act of resistance to it. I decided that instead of deaccessioning the book because of the annotation and the book’s overall poor condition, it needed to go into an exhibit!
Fig. 1. “Defaced” inside cover page of History of Georgia. Photo by author.As I conducted further research on book banners in Florida history, I had to consider how I could represent my findings in a physical exhibit. There were several logistical issues to consider in the process. First, the only space available for my display was a small empty wall on the first floor of our main library building. I took measurements of the space to keep in mind as I selected objects and images to include in the exhibit and worked with colleagues to develop appropriate title banners and signs.
Assembling my exhibit required a bit of resourcefulness. The library did not have locking exhibit cases, so I resolved not to use any rare materials in the exhibit. Instead, most of the objects I displayed were either books from the circulating collection or high-quality scanned images. I borrowed an empty, unused glass-doored cabinet with shelves to place in the center of the exhibit space to hold most of the physical books. A colleague in the library’s technology department was able to lend me a computer monitor, which could be secured with a lock, in order to include a documentary film, played on loop, with permission from the creators.
I printed out scanned images of historical documents and photographs on regular copy paper using the library’s color printer. The quality of the images was high enough that professional printing or high-grade paper seemed unnecessary. I mounted the print outs on pieces of foam core board, cut to size, using double-sided tape. I then affixed these to the wall with adhesive putty. I created exhibit labels using the same process as the scanned images, paying close attention to the font, size, and amount of text on each label.10 All of the materials described here were easily procured from a local office supply store for about $70, which the FSU Libraries was able to reimburse. I did most of the printing, cutting, and mounting. The FSU Libraries Special Collections and Archives provided book stands and the mylar strips I used to hold open one of the books on display. My colleagues in the marketing and communication department designed the main logo and printed out the exhibit title sign on the department’s large format printer, so I did not have to account for those costs. Other colleagues helped me to move the cabinet into place, and to set up the computer screen for the documentary. I also created QR codes for some of the object labels with links to related content that couldn’t easily be incorporated into the physical exhibit. After several weeks of researching, final installation took about two days. The exhibit ran from September 19, the start of Banned Books Week 2022, until Thanksgiving break. (Fig. 2)
Fig. 2 “Against Liberty: A History of Book Banning in Florida” exhibit, Strozier Library, Florida State University, 2022. Photo by author.
Throughout Florida’s history, citizens and state agents have used book banning as a form of power to protect their cultural dominance and wealth. In the 1830s, where my exhibit began, enslavers attempted to censor abolitionist ideas in order to prevent slave revolts and other threats to their control of human property. Slave owners had convinced themselves that if enslaved people resisted, ran away, or revolted, as happened frequently throughout the Americas, then it must be because abolitionists had incited Black people to seek freedom. So, assuming that slave resistance was due to “outside agitators,” Southern state legislatures passed laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read, interfered with the US Postal Service, and restricted the movements of Black sailors and local free people of color who might distribute abolitionist books and pamphlets.11 Such measures reached a fever pitch in the 1830s in part because segments of the ruling class had come to embrace abolitionism on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the US North and in Great Britain among evangelical Protestants and the ascendent industrial elites.12 Enslavers in the US South had previously benefited from the general acceptance of slavery among merchants and manufacturers, at least when limited to the southern states. But beginning in the 1830s, the Slave Power encountered growing resistance in Northern and British newspapers, popular literature, and political speeches as slavery expanded into Florida and some of the western territories created out of the Louisiana Purchase.
One famous example of abolitionist literature that sparked such paranoia and repression was David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, to the Coloured Citizens of the World. (Fig. 3) Walker, the son of an enslaved man and free Black woman, used the US Postal Service to circulate his Appeal from his home in Boston. In it he denounced slavery, called on the “coloured citizens” of the world to rise up against their oppressors, and asked White, Christian enslavers to recognize their sins against God and against liberty.13
Fig. 3. Cover image of David Walker’s Appeal, 1830.Several Southern states passed laws banning such abolitionist literature. The Florida legislature drafted a similar ban (Fig. 4), but it was never enacted owing to Florida’s status as a federal territory at the time. Presumably the federal government wasn’t going to approve a law so prejudicial against its own Postal Service. There were also white Floridians who opposed the law because they felt it would give more legal protections to abolitionists than they deserved. One such group, meeting in 1835 at Shell Point, a coastal town south of Tallahassee, proclaimed that the proposed law against incendiary publications “dignifies the question…subjecting it to the operations of a Grand Jury,” when instead the citizens already have the right “to act in that summary and efficient way, according to the first great dictates which the God of nature has implanted in the bosoms of men.”14 In other words, a local vigilance committee could enact their own justice, likely by assaulting or lynching any suspected abolitionist.
Fig. 4. Draft of an Act to Prohibit the Circulation of Incendiary Publications, 1836, 1836. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. In the exhibit, I paired these attempts to restrict abolitionist literature in the 19th century with evidence of similar reading restrictions enforced by the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), which has banned over 20,000 publications from Florida prisons.15 The scale of the FDC’s book banning is considerable, but so too is the scale of incarceration in Florida. The FDC is Florida’s largest state agency and the third largest state prison system in the country, with an operating budget of $3.4 billion.16 According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2023 over 80,000 Floridians were incarcerated in state prisons. Add to that local jails and federal prisons, and over 157,000 Floridians were behind bars, equivalent to 795 prisoners for every 100,000 Floridians, an incarceration rate higher than the US as a whole.17
Among those books banned in Florida prisons is Tallahassee attorney Reggie Garcia’s book, How to Leave Prison Early, a guide to navigate the state’s clemency, parole, and work release laws and procedures. It may seem shocking that a guide to legal remedies available to incarcerated men and women should be kept from the very readers who could use it most, but to admit that those in prison deserve such relief seems to challenge the power and control of the prison system.
After the Civil War, societies like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) formed to protect the legacy of their Confederate ancestors and to reclaim their cultural power and social status by promoting the “Lost Cause,” a distorted memory of the antebellum South that helped to legitimize the social and racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. These Southern elites focused especially on schools and universities, where control of textbooks and curricula were essential to reestablishing ideological hegemony after the end of Reconstruction. Convinced that the “vindication of the South must come from the pens of southern writers,” the History Committee of the UCV established guidelines for selecting history textbooks to be used in southern schools. As reported in the UCV’s magazine, Confederate Veteran, all histories published in the North were suspected of sectional “prejudices” against the South and were excluded outright from consideration for school adoption.18 (Fig. 5)
Fig. 5. Cover image of Confederate Veteran magazine, June 1895 issue.Southern authors filled the void left by these banned books with histories of their own, justifying the Southern rebellion as both honorable and Constitutional, while also softening the image of plantation slavery. This project was not limited to the academic histories written by students of Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning, as mentioned above. Caroline Mays Brevard, a historian, author, and scion of two powerful Florida families, taught at Leon High School in Tallahassee and at the Florida State College for Women, predecessor of today’s Florida State University. Brevard’s 1904 book, A History of Florida, which romanticized plantation society and made heroes of the aristocratic enslaver class, was used as a textbook in Florida schools for two decades.19 The myth of the “Lost Cause” that this and many other books promoted took hold by the turn of the twentieth century and became the dominant historical interpretation of American history in white-controlled schools and in popular culture.20
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was particularly successful in controlling which histories were taught in schools. In addition to creating their own evaluation criteria and lists of approved textbooks for Southern schools, the UDC coordinated attacks on anyone who contradicted their Lost Cause mythology.21 When Enoch M. Banks, professor of history at the University of Florida published an academic article stating that the South was “relatively in the wrong” about slavery and the Civil War, the UDC led a public campaign against him. The Florida UDC President, Sister Esther Carlotta of St. Augustine, proclaimed that his “writings proved him so unjust to the South’s attitude in 1861 as to unfit him for that position.” In 1911, Banks was forced to resign his position and left the state.22
In the exhibit, I paired the work of neo-Confederate groups working to control the official history of the South with contemporary debates over American history and the role of slavery in the founding of the United States. The Pulitzer-Prize winning 1619 Project was a frequent target for conservative politicians and activists who resisted a more inclusive and honest accounting of the history of American slavery, and in November 2022, the Florida Board of Education finalized a rule that prohibits using any material from the 1619 Project in K-12 education. The Rule likens the historical interpretations put forth by 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and other contributors to Holocaust denial and goes on to say that K-12 instruction “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”23 Thus, just as the UCV and UDC worked to ban books deemed counter to their preferred narrative of the Civil War while filling the void with their own approved histories, so too has the Florida Board of Education excluded works that question the morality of existing racial power structures while limiting what Florida teachers may discuss in their classrooms.
In the mid-twentieth century, some Florida politicians invoked the threat of communist subversion in their efforts to resist racial desegregation and the expansion of civil rights, an existential threat to legal white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) led the charge, using McCarthy-style tactics to attack civil rights activists, especially those affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When the FLIC, better known as the Johns Committee after its chairman, State Senator Charley Johns, failed to slow the advance of Black civil rights in the law, the committee expanded its search for cultural and political subversives to Florida’s universities. Taking advantage of the so-called Lavender Scare, a nationwide panic over homosexuality and its alleged affinities with communism, the Johns Committee reframed their anti-civil rights crusade as an attempt to root out homosexuality from Florida schools and public life.24
The Johns Committee found a useful ally in September 1961 when Jane Stockton Smith of Tampa complained to the Dean of the College of Basic Studies at the University of South Florida (USF) that the textbooks her son, Skipper, brought home were anti-religious and emphasized sex and evolution. In an interview that year she identified several specific books that she found obscene, communistic, and “one-sided,” including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and The True Believer by philosopher Eric Hoffer, a book about mass movements that challenge the status quo.25 Smith was instrumental in bringing a Johns Committee investigation to USF. She participated in what the Tampa Tribune described as an “unorganized parents’ group” alarmed by what Smith claimed were “reams of evidence to concern every citizen” and USF course readings that she alleged to be pornographic and anti-religious. USF students were reportedly questioned about “political ideologies expressed on campus and about sex predominance in required reading assignments.”26
Fig. 6. From left are: Mrs. Stockton Smith; Mark Hawes, attorney for the Johns Committee; Fla. Rep. William G. O’Neill; and Fla. Sen. Charley Johns, who headed the committee. “Funds and future for Johns Committee gets approval,” May 7, 1963. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.In 2011, students taking a documentary film class at the University of Central Florida (UCF), created a documentary about the Johns Committee. Simply titled, “The Committee,” the film features interviews with two North Florida survivors and one investigator from the Committee’s attempt to root out LGBTQ teachers and students from state universities. In their research, they found that over 200 students and teachers were expelled or fired from Florida universities as a result of the Committee’s anti-LGBTQ efforts.27 After receiving permission from Lisa Mills, one of the course instructors, I included this award-winning documentary in my exhibit, played on a loop through a computer monitor positioned on a small table below the related images of documents and newspaper clippings. As of this writing, “The Committee” remains available for streaming online via PBS.
Florida libraries could also be complicit in the Lavender Scare by censoring materials in their own collections. A letter written in 1960 to then Director of FSU Libraries, Orwin Rush, asked that an intern working with the FSU Graduate School’s Institute of Human Development be permitted to check out some books on homosexuality and clinical problems related to his work which were held “under restriction” at the library.28 (Fig. 6) I did not find archival evidence that described the exact form of these access restrictions, but this kind of “protective storage” may still exist in some libraries. My colleague at FSU Libraries, Norman “Trip” Wyckoff, confirmed that Strozier Library still had a locked cabinet of restricted books in the early 2000s, though at the time of my exhibit it no longer existed and it was unclear when it had been removed. I remembered a similar locked cabinet at Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, my previous place of employment, which in the 2010s included, among other titles, the coffee table book Sex, by Madonna, and a book about foraging for psychedelic mushrooms.
Fig. 7. Wallace A. Kennedy to Orwin N. Rush, January 6, 1960. Florida State University Library Records, HUA 2020-006. Courtesy of the FSU Special Collections & Archives.The exhibit ended with the Johns Committee’s anti-LGBTQ crusade, but the parallels between today’s wave of book bans and Jane Stockton Smith’s “parents group” and its alliance with the Johns Committee are easy to see. While today’s Florida State Legislature has been an active participant in censorship, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, Moms for Liberty, has also played a key role. As an organization, Moms for Liberty has made book challenges one of their signature issues, providing resources on their website such as book reviews of disfavored titles and lists of their own approved book publishers, seeming to take a page directly from the playbook of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In addition to these resources, Moms for Liberty links members to the Leadership Institute’s “School Board Activism” training course, “designed to equip conservative leaders with tools and tactics to influence education,” alongside TurningPoint USA’s School Board Watch List, which purports to identify school board members who “support anti-American, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts.”29 Moms for Liberty also has ties to the Republican Party, evidenced by both the activities of the group’s founders and by the list of speakers that have attended their conferences, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and their endorsement of Donald Trump in 2024.30 As in the 1960s, local activists today have found support from powerful political players in the state and at the national level, fueling a coordinated effort to exert power over their communities by controlling access to reading materials and deciding which stories can be told in books and in school curricula.
It may be too soon to apply historical analysis to Moms for Liberty and the current book banning movement. However, when compared to my exhibit’s three major episodes of book banning in Florida history, we might conclude that the reactionary forces of the 2020s are responding to a similar social crisis and are seizing an opportunity to assert control. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement destabilized the ideological status quo of the nation, peeling back the veneer of multiculturalism to reveal persistent and often deadly racial disparities and discrimination in American society, especially in health care, labor conditions, and in the criminal justice system. The wave of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that followed in corporate and educational settings, however superficial they may have been, may have signaled to some conservative forces the opening of a new front in the ongoing culture wars. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was among the first political leaders to reframe COVID safety precautions and DEI trainings as infringements of individual liberties.31 Moms for Liberty amplified this message with demands that their individual parental rights be allowed to override pro-social institutional rules like school vaccination requirements and masking in classrooms. The policy solutions coming from these reactionary forces go well beyond banning books and suggest a broader ideological motivation. For example, at the same time that the state legislature imposes content restrictions on teachers and librarians in public schools and libraries, and as the book banners demonize librarians and teachers as groomers and pornographers, they are also in league with one another to expand school voucher programs to shift more public funds into private schools in the name of individual choice and personalized learning.32 Is the contemporary book banning movement part of an effort to delegitimize and defund public education and public libraries altogether? These preliminary ideas require further study, but it does seem clear that Moms for Liberty and their political allies are using the same tactics as Florida book banners of the past in order to control cultural institutions like schools and libraries and to impose their ideology on the rest of civil society.
Looking back, I think my first solo exhibit was successful in examining the motivations of Florida’s book banners and revealing the continuities of censors’ goals throughout Florida history. In this regard, the director of the History Department’s public history program was very complimentary of the exhibit design and content. Student engagement, on the other hand, was somewhat limited. The location wasn’t ideal for attracting attention; that space in the library wasn’t getting a lot of traffic in part because of service changes to the Starbucks café in the library. I only recorded about a dozen links to the QR codes, most of which came from the link to the prison book ban database. The location also made conducting observations in the space impractical, so I was not able to see how passers-by engaged with the exhibit. Had the exhibit been in view of the circulation desk, it might have been easier to unobtrusively see if students were stopping to engage with the content. That said, the exhibit was a hit with some of the faculty and I was asked to integrate both the exhibit and its subject matter into information literacy sessions for three different courses. Thus, the exhibit did serve as a vehicle for outreach to teaching faculty and generated three instructional opportunities.
In November 2023, I relocated and took a new position as Head of Research & Instruction at the Monroe Library of Loyola University New Orleans. When we celebrated Banned Books Week at Loyola in September 2024, I was able to draw upon my experience with the “Against Liberty” exhibit. The disruption of Hurricane Francine shortened our planning time, so we were not able to mount a full-scale historical exhibit similar to “Against Liberty,” but we augmented a traditional display of commonly banned books in the library lobby with a few examples of historically challenged books and accompanying exhibit labels for context. In addition to some examples I reused from the FSU exhibit, I added Monroe Library’s copy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which I found gathering dust in the stacks. Our copy was published in 1948, the last edition printed. The Church formally abolished the Index in 1966, though not as a move to exonerate the forbidden books, but rather to shift responsibility to individual readers to avoid immoral reading.33
Once again, the historical content seemed to create more opportunities for engagement with faculty than with students. The more successful initiative with students was a pop-up trivia table set up in the quad outside the library building, an initiative of Dr. Julia Miller in our Teacher Education program. The spread of commonly challenged children’s and young adult fiction on the table attracted plenty of attention from students walking by who recognized some of their favorite books. Once engaged, we asked them trivia questions about challenged books and music, largely drawing examples from the last 50 years. Students were surprised at some of the books on the table and examples from the trivia questions.
In conclusion, the success of my exhibit at FSU and the more recent activities at Loyola depended on the audience. I will include historical context in future banned books exhibits, but I am also convinced that this needs to be paired with some other interactive modes of engagement to capture students’ attention and start a conversation. While the standard Banned Books Week exhibit may draw attention to individual titles that students recognize, librarians and teachers must find ways to engage students in questions about who bans books and why. By recognizing the motivations of censors, students and educators together may more effectively resist attempts to limit access to information and a quality education. Understanding the historical context of book banning is also critical for librarians. Our work as educators and culture bearers will always be implicated in struggles for cultural dominance, and we must be prepared to defend ourselves and our values in this and future culture wars.34 We must find ways to refuse the authoritarian agenda of the book banners. Recognizing the political agendas and methods of potential book banners will help us to create library policies and procedures that remain responsive to our local communities while discouraging coordinated, bad faith assaults on our staff, collections, and the freedom to read.
Many thanks to my publishing editor, Jaena Rae Cabrera, and my peer reviewers, Ian Beilin and Niki Fullmer. This project was substantially improved in response to their insightful feedback. Special thanks to Dr. Laura McTighe, whose collaboration was critical to starting the exhibit project, and to Mimi Bilodeau, who found the “defaced” book that sparked so much inspiration. Thanks to history professors Dr. Katherine Mooney, for her input on the exhibit’s historical content, and Dr. Jennifer Koslow, for her expertise in exhibit design. I also want to acknowledge everyone at FSU Libraries who helped me assemble the original exhibit at FSU: Rachel Duke, Emory Gerlock, Devon McWhorter, Laura Pellini, and Dan “Brew” Schoonover. Special thanks to my wife, Sarah Withers, who inspires me every day and also helped me during final installation of the exhibit.
American Library Association, “Banned Books Week Display Ideas,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources/display.
American Library Association, “Censorship by the Numbers,” https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers.
Committee, The. “About the Film,” https://thecommitteedocumentary.org/.
Florida Department of Corrections, “About the Florida Department of Corrections,” https://fdc.myflorida.com/about.html.
Florida Department of Education, State Board of Education, “Required Instruction Planning and Reporting,” Florida Administrative Code Rule 6A-1.094124, https://www.flrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?id=6A-1.094124.
Florida Division of Historical Resources, “Caroline Mays Brevard,” https://dos.fl.gov/historical/museums/historical-museums/united-connections/women-in-history/caroline-mays-brevard/.
Moms for Liberty, “School Boards,” https://portal.momsforliberty.org/resources/other-topics/school-boards/.
Prison Policy Initiative, “Florida Profile,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html.
Bailey, Fred Arthur. “Free Speech at the University of Florida: The Enoch Marvin Banks Case.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1992): 1–17.
———. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1991): 507–33.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Braukman, Stacy Lorraine. Communists and Perverts under the Palms the Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.
Brevard, Caroline Mays. A History of Florida, by Caroline Mays Brevard, with Questions, Supplementary Chapters and an Outline of Florida Civil Government by H. E. Bennett. New York: American Book Company, 1904.
Burkholder, Joel M., Russell A. Hall, and Kat Phillips. “Manufactured Panic, Real Consequences: Why Academic Librarians Must Stand with Public and School Libraries.” College & Research Libraries News 85, no. 6 (June 7, 2024): 254-57. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.6.254.
Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Crockett, Hasan. “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (July 2001): 305–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/1562449.
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Friedman, Jonathan, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Sabrina Baêta. “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN America, September 19, 2022, https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/.
Giroux, Henry A. “Educators as Public Intellectuals and the Challenge of Fascism.” Policy Futures in Education 22, no. 8 (November 1, 2024): 1533–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103241226844.
Graves, Karen. And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Knox, Emily J. M. Book Banning in 21st-Century America. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Lenard, Max. “On the Origin, Development and Demise of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.” Journal of Access Services 3, no. 4 (July 26, 2006): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1300/J204v03n04_05.
Meehan, Kasey, Jonathan Friedman, Sabrian Baêta, and Tasslyn Magnusson. “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor.” PEN America, September 1, 2023, https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/.
Meehan, Kasey, Sabrina Baêta, Tasslyn Magnusson, and Madison Markham. “Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves.” PEN America, November 1, 2024. https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/.
Paulus, Carl Lawrence. The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2017.
Poucher, Judith G. State of Defiance: Challenging the Johns Committee’s Assault on Civil Liberties. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014.
Schoeppner, Michael A. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. Studies in Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695404.
Scott, Julius Sherrard. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. London: Verso, 2018.
Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Second edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Smith, John David, and J. Vincent Lowery. The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.
Vose, Robin J. E. The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God. London: Reaktion Books, 2022.
Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles : Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28th, 1829. Second edition. Boston: David Walker, 1830. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.69015000003166.
Weitz, Seth. “Campus of Evil: The Johns Committee’s Investigation of the University of South Florida.” Tampa Bay History 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2008). https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/tampabayhistory/vol22/iss1/5.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944].
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Win free books from the April 2025 batch of Early Reviewer titles! We’ve got 187 books this month, and a grand total of 3,309 copies to give out. Which books are you hoping to snag this month? Come tell us on Talk.
If you haven’t already, sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing/email address and make sure they’re correct.
The deadline to request a copy is Friday, April 25th at 6PM EDT.
Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Peru, Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and more. Make sure to check the message on each book to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!
| Akashic Books | Alcove Press | Anaphora Literary Press |
| Artemesia Publishing | Autumn House Press | Baker Books |
| Bellevue Literary Press | Bookmaker Books | Broadleaf Books |
| City Owl Press | Crooked Lane Books | Diego Costa |
| Egret Lake Books | eSpec Books | Flat Sole Studio |
| Gnome Road Publishing | Greenleaf Book Group | HarperCollins Leadership |
| Henry Holt and Company | Identity Publications | Inhabit Media Inc. |
| Prolific Pulse Press LLC | PublishNation | Purple Diamond Press, Inc |
| Purple Moon Publishing | Revell | Rootstock Publishing |
| Running Wild Press, LLC | Th3rd World Studios (3WS Books) | Tundra Books |
| Type Eighteen Books | Unsolicited Press | UpLit Press |
| Wise Media Group | WolfSinger Publications | YMAA Publication Center |
This text, part of the #ODDStories series, tells a story of Open Data Day‘s grassroots impact directly from the community’s voices.
Together with the local community, bring the ODD spirit through this activity
Pari Island, a gem in the Thousand Islands Regency, lies 232 kilometers from Jakarta. Renowned for its pristine beaches, vibrant coral reefs, and lush mangrove forests, Pari Island boasts incredible coastal and marine potential. However, beneath this natural beauty lies a heartbreaking reality: corporate interests, cloaked under the guise of tourism privatization, threaten the island’s delicate ecosystems.
Beach reclamation on Tengah Island for private tourism development. Credit: Yunsan.E
Large-scale corporations have continually encroached on Pari Island, engaging in land reclamation and sea dredging around Tengah Island and Kudus Island, two islands within the Pari Island cluster. These activities have resulted in the destruction of mangroves planted by local communities and the decimation of coral reef zones. The consequences of these actions are dire risking ecological disasters and threatening marine biodiversity.
In response, the local community of Pari Island has risen to demand climate justice, holding corporations accountable and advocating for the cessation of these environmentally destructive practices. Leading this grassroots movement are several local communities Forum Pulau Pari and Perempuan Pulau Pari (Women Group). Their fight for justice is a testament to the islanders’ resilience and deep connection to their environment.
Women Group of Pari Island
In celebration of Open Data Day, we joined the local community in investigating the impacts of reclamation on coral reefs using publicly accessible remote sensing data. Through a hands-on demonstration of open tools rooted in citizen science, we employed Coral Watch method that simplifies coral health monitoring. Our activities extended beyond data collection. We brought environmental education to the island’s youth through storytelling and coloring competitions, instilling a sense of environmental stewardship in the next generation.
Preparing the tools that will be used for the Coral survey
The Coral Watch observations revealed troubling results. Coral reefs near the reclamation sites were smothered by sediment, a consequence of dredging and land expansion. In some areas, corals showed signs of bleaching, particularly along the reef’s outer edges. However, not all findings were grim other stations exhibited healthy coral populations, offering a glimmer of hope.
One peculiar discovery emerged at a site favored by local fishers for snorkeling: a high concentration of sea urchins (Echinoidea). While sea urchins are natural reef inhabitants, excessive populations can hinder coral growth and disrupt reef balance. Such ecological shifts warrant further investigation to understand the long-term impacts.
1 – Two people take reef samples using snorkeling method and bring coral watch chart. One person stays on the boat to record coordinates and secure data sheet.
2 – This coral plate is in a state of concern because it is being hit by reclamation sedimentation.
3 – It is not uncommon to find coral that has shown signs of bleaching.
4 – Healthy corals have strong color pigments.
For Pari Island’s residents, these findings are more than data points; they serve as crucial evidence in their fight for climate justice. The observations gathered through citizen science empower the community, providing a scientific basis to advocate for the protection of their natural heritage.
Storytelling about marine life with children
The battle for Pari Island is far from over. Yet, through collective action and open data initiatives, local voices grow louder, demanding accountability and sustainable practices. This island, with its rich marine biodiversity and resilient community, stands as a symbol of hope and determination in the face of environmental injustice.
Images of Coralwatch Chart and tools used for survey
Image of community-led coral monitoring using Coral Watch, capturing local participation.
Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.
As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. In 2025, a total of 189 events happened all over the world between March 1st and 7th, in 57 countries using 15+ different languages. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.
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 Faris Mohammed on UnsplashThe free virtual summit open to all that is being sponsored by ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table (SSRT) “Building Spaces of Solidarity and Connection: A Historical, Theoretical, and Practical Lens on Libraries’ Commitment to Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Justice” will offer five sessions over the course of Monday, 7 April 2025. The sessions are entitled as follows: “Cultural Partnerships and Programming to Support Inclusive Communities;” “Toward Equity and Inclusion in Library Services and Professions;” “How Can Libraries Support Immigrant and Refugee Communities?;” “Institutional Disregard, Denial, and Disfranchisement: Treatment and Experiences of African Americans in LIS Professions and Practices;” and “Issues in School Librarianship, Children’s Literature, and Youth Services.” One must register separately for each individual session and each session will be recorded.
Speakers from across the United States will share how they and their institutions (including public libraries, academic libraries, and library-adjacent entities) have dealt compassionately with communities who have been marginalized and otherwise made vulnerable. Programming suggestions, tools to help provide more equitable services, and plans to develop inclusive spaces will be on offer. Full details on the schedule and each speaker can be found at https://www.ala.org/srrt/buildingspaces. Contributed by Jay Weitz.
The Yale Reparative Archival Description (RAD) Working Group has released their recommendations for addressing gender identity in archival description. This is the most recent addition to a set of guidelines that have recommendations for identifying how reparative descriptive practices have been applied, documentation for a project to identify full names for women previously referred to only by their husband’s names, and guidelines for addressing materials related to Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
I appreciate the work that the RAD Working Group has done over time and the guidelines for gender identity in archival descriptions are a great addition. The guidelines pertain not only to those engaging in description of collections but also those working in acquisitions, collection development and even donor relations. For collections acquired in the past, it can be difficult to know with certainty how a given person identified but for collections that are acquired now and in the future can be respectful of preferred identity, which may be nuanced. The work of the RAD Working Group, which has been ongoing since 2019, reflects how this work can take time and focused attention. Contributed by Merrilee Proffitt.
Academic librarians Amanda Clay Powers and Dustin Fife discuss how to create a psychologically safe team in the library workplace in the March 2025 issue of College & Research Libraries News. The article “Psychological Safety in Libraries: It’s a Team Sport” captures a conversation in which the librarians share their insights about what works. Powers explains the importance of inclusivity saying, “Part of this is the hard work of making diverse teams safe. For me, that has meant all library retreats around microaggressions, anti-racism, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, accessibility in libraries, and intersectional identities.” Fife recommends considering co-workers with curiosity rather than criticism, writing, “How we do things is rarely as important as why we do things together and curiosity will bolster that connectivity.”
This article is an important reminder for me of why institutions undertake DEI initiatives. Employees feel safer when they are accepted and understood by their peers and supervisors, creating a more positive and productive workplace culture. When people feel unsafe, there is an automatic physiological reaction called the “fight or flight response” that in the short term will cause people to be unable to focus on their work and in the long term can cause burnout and quitting. Creating a psychologically safe workspace is good for individuals and organizations. Contributed by Kate James.
The post Advancing IDEAs: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, 1 April 2025 appeared first on Hanging Together.
A monthly round-up of news, upcoming working group meetings and events, and CLIR program updates from the Digital Library Federation. See all past Digests here.
Hello and happy April, DLF community! It’s officially spring, and our community is staying quite busy with Working Group meetings and events. We’re particularly excited to share that the DLF Forum Call for Proposals is now open through the middle of April. Read on to learn how to be a part of all the great things happening in our world this month. We’ll see you around soon!
— Team DLF
For the most up-to-date schedule of DLF group meetings and events (plus NDSA meetings, conferences, and more), bookmark the DLF Community Calendar. Meeting dates are subject to change. Can’t find meeting call-in information? Email us at info@diglib.org. Reminder: Team DLF’s working days are Monday through Thursday.
DLF groups are open to ALL, regardless of whether or not you’re affiliated with a DLF member organization. Learn more about our working groups on our website. Interested in scheduling an upcoming working group call or reviving a past group? Check out the DLF Organizer’s Toolkit. As always, feel free to get in touch at info@diglib.org.
Below are some ways to stay connected with us and the digital library community:
The post DLF Digest: April 2025 appeared first on DLF.
This post is part of a growing series on the Library Beyond the Library.
Photo by Quino Al on UnsplashResearch institutions like those in the OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) are striving to meet growing demands for research support services that assist scholars and researchers throughout the research lifecycle. These services are distributed across a complex web of campus units at most institutions, creating an invisible barrier to access for researchers.
Montana State University (MSU) has addressed this challenge by establishing the Research Alliance: a centralized hub that co-locates several research support units within the main library, improving awareness, convenience, and usage by researchers. Additionally, co-location fosters improved knowledge sharing and collaboration among participating units.
The Research Alliance exemplifies how libraries are adapting to new operational structures and communicating an evolving value proposition. By hosting the Research Alliance, the MSU library is strategically positioned as a central research support hub for the entire campus, both physically and operationally. This initiative provides a robust framework for ongoing cross-unit engagement and partnership, increasing visibility and engagement with other units, and ensuring closer alignment with institutional priorities.
Creating this centralized research support hub required years of persistent and patient effort to socialize the idea, identify partners, and eventually secure institutional support. But making the institutional decision to establish the Research Alliance was just the first phase, which I roughly equate to the initiating or design phase in project management lingo. According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK),[1] project management is described in five discrete phases:
As any project manager knows, the work really begins with project approval, and this was certainly true for the Research Alliance.
I recently spoke with Doralyn Rossmann, Dean of the Library, and Jason Clark, Head of Research Analytics, Optimization, and Data Services (ROADS) at MSU. They expanded our understanding of the MSU Research Alliance story and offered a candid inside view of the significant challenges and frequently invisible library leadership presented by the project’s planning and execution stages.
Turnover in executive leadership. The leaders of all of the original units—the library, the center for faculty excellence, and the vice president of research—all left their positions after the agreement to form a partnership was made, but before any physical movement or logistics regarding shared spaces took place. And, while information technology’s research cyberinfrastructure was envisioned to have a role in the alliance, the chief information officer had been minimally involved in initial planning. In turn, subsequent leaders had to move a partially realized vision into being a reality.
Ill-defined scope and partners. When the Research Alliance concept was initially approved by the leaders of the involved units, it was still a loosely defined vision – even the name “Research Alliance” was not established. Details of the agreement were not captured in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at this phase of the project, resulting in significant uncertainty for subsequent leaders. The office for undergraduate research entered the alliance at the eleventh hour as the reality of the alliance became more visible, creating needs for scoping expectations for subsequent growth.
Poorly defined leadership roles. Working primarily on a handshake agreement, there was no clear articulation of goals, roles, or responsibilities. No one was assigned responsibility to lead the effort, and the project advanced largely due to the adoption of new work responsibilities by library leadership. The library was the implied leader in large part because the Research Alliance was to be housed there—this involved taking responsibility for architectural planning, remodeling, formulating an MOU, and convening ongoing committees of both executive sponsors and Alliance partners.
Internal pushback. Not everyone was excited about the idea of centralizing research support services in the library, and there was significant pushback from both students and library employees. Some students who protested the loss of study space even left hostile messages on a library whiteboard, visible to Research Alliance workers. Some library staff members who had little awareness about the strategic reasons for the partnership opposed the focus on a research support unit housing non-library personnel in what had been quiet library study spaces. Library leaders had to manage resistance, explain library and campus priorities, and provide sustained leadership on a project unpopular with some.
Enhanced and visible library value proposition. As I’ve described in an earlier blog post, the Research Alliance positions the library as the physical and strategic center for research support on campus. Just as physical collections have long demonstrated the library’s contribution to supporting scholarship, today the Research Alliance offers a tangible, compelling story about how the library is evolving to support research and campus priorities in new ways. It demonstrates the library’s evolving role in support for research that may not be recognized by other campus stakeholders, particularly those who have a role in decisions about library funding and autonomy.
Increased interaction with other campus leaders. Implementing the multi-tenant Research Alliance has required increased interaction between the library dean and other campus executives. While the work of sustaining this group has fallen to the library dean, it offers a significant opportunity for her to demonstrate how the work of the library aligns closely with institutional priorities. Busy campus leaders may still adhere to a collections-focused view of the library, failing to understand the important roles that research libraries now play in research support and student success. Ongoing engagement with these leaders—on a project that supports high priority campus research productivity—provides an opportunity for the university librarian to help other stakeholders better understand the library’s value. Additionally, the Research Alliance has brought numerous faculty and administrators into the library who had not regularly entered the building in recent years. This has had the added benefit of these people seeing how incredibly busy the library is and has created increased interactions between library employees and people coming into use Research Alliance services.
Improved services for researchers and students. And, of course, there is the intended benefit of the Research Alliance—to reduce friction for researchers navigating campus services. More researchers come together in this shared environment and this results in improved referrals and collaborations between units.
Doralyn and Jason have gained valuable insights from their experience implementing the Research Alliance at MSU, including these recommendations that can help other libraries undertaking similar collaborative efforts:
Assemble executive sponsors and convene regularly. Executive sponsors play a crucial role in decision-making and removing project obstacles. They should meet regularly—at least quarterly—to receive updates, offer advice, and make joint decisions. Establishing their oversight role early in the project planning can significantly reduce project friction. Ideally, a member of this group would meet regularly with members of the alliance to communicate between the executives and members to understand needs and communicate priorities.
Establish an MOU. Drafting an MOU requires a thorough examination of roles, responsibilities, leadership, decision-making authority, and partner expectations. It also involves defining the collaboration’s objectives, scope, and efforts, serving as an important project planning document. Finally, it should delineate equitable financial responsibilities; given the situation of the Research Alliance in the library, it was, de facto, responsible for space and furniture costs. This MOU should be revisited annually to accommodate needed adjustments.
Create goals and an assessment plan. Part of planning the partnership is also determining how team members will monitor and track progress. Ideally, the partnership has clearly established goals and all members of the partnership have annual goals that set expectations to participate in meeting the goals of the partnership. Assessment planning can be integrated into the MOU process and provide resources for measuring success, resourcing, and evaluating whether the partnership should continue.
Prepare for internal pushback. Resistance is almost a certainty, particularly in university environments characterized by decentralized, independent agents who often work at cross-purposes and have the freedom to openly oppose institutional initiatives. Universities are “complex adaptive systems” that make collaboration and change particularly challenging.
Relentlessly communicate the project (and library) value proposition. Establishing a new offering like the Research Alliance provides a visible, ongoing way to sell the library’s value to a wide range of stakeholders. Leverage this in storytelling, personal narratives, and metrics that demonstrate the central role the library plays in supporting campus strategic priorities.
Ensure the library receives financial recognition. While the library reaps significant benefits by hosting a research support hub, it also incurs costs, including the reallocation of valuable campus space. Libraries should seek remuneration by leveraging funding from participating research partners and through facilities and administration (F&A) monies. This isn’t just about the budget—it’s also about other units recognizing and rewarding the library’s value.
The MSU Research Alliance represents a shift in library operational structures, as libraries forge new partnerships with other campus units to support research and institutional priorities. OCLC Research describes this shift as extending “the library beyond the library.” A current research project examines increasing library interactions with the broader campus, and how library expertise and capacities are combined with those of other campus units. By documenting the transformation of collaborative operational structures and value propositions, this project will provide valuable insights and recommendations for library leaders navigating the expanding landscape of cross-campus partnerships.
Writing this blog post was a collaborative effort. Many thanks to Doralyn Rossmann and Jason Clark for their input and for inviting us to continue the conversation. Special thanks also to Merrilee Proffitt.
[1] The PMBOK is maintained by the US-based Project Management Institute (PMI) professional organization which offers the Project Management Profession (PMP) certification.
The post Lessons learned from implementing a research support hub in the library appeared first on Hanging Together.
I don't know how many there were at the protest today in front of the Easton Tesla store, but for the first time we covered all four corners of the intersection.
I think there were at least 600 people...maybe more. Some observations:
There was no live music this time, but that was okay because there was definitely more noise from the sidewalks and more energy in the air. The Proud Boys made noise about coming in counter-protest, but I didn't see them. One of the event marshals said they were there early, but the police effectively separated them. As the panorama picture shows, though, we had all four corners covered and we were raucous.
This week's #TeslaTakedown protest sign.I went off-script this week with a sign about the political nonsense we have at the moment. It is a play on the phrase "The call is coming from inside the house!" — a play on a famous movie trope where the police tell the person in a home that they have traced the antagonist's call to that home. In this case, the danger to democracy is coming from inside the Whitehouse! Or, at least, that is what I was aiming for. This sign probably only get's one week's use; let's hope by next week, one or more people on this sign are fired because of the released of what sure looks like classified information on a Signal group chat.
If you want to use this 26" by 16" sign for yourself, I've made it available for download. Ping me on Mastodon or Bluesky if you use it, and include a picture if you'd like!
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown.Two years ago this month, I wrote a DLTJ Thursday Threads article on the copyright implications of foundational AI models. A lot has happened in those 24 months. This issue mostly focuses on lawsuits, plus an announcement of a service offering image generation from licensed content. These articles highlight the growing tension between content creators and technology companies as AI technologies increasingly rely on large datasets that include licensed and, in some instances, pirated content.
Also on DLTJ this past week:
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, follow me on Mastodon where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday over the tech companies’ use of its copyrighted articles to train their artificial intelligence technology, joining a growing wave of opposition to the tech industry’s using creative work without paying for it or getting permission. OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions” of Times articles to help build their tech, which is now extremely lucrative and directly competes with the Times’s own services, the newspaper’s lawyers wrote in a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.—New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for using articles to train AI, Washington Post, 27-Dec-2023
We're starting with the lawsuits, and this is one of the bigger ones. At the time the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI announced deals with content providers to use their backfiles of content, but the New York Times was a holdout. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of Times articles, which directly competes with the newspaper's services. While OpenAI maintained that it respects content creators' rights and believes its practices fall under fair use, the lawsuit cites instances of AI reproducing Times articles verbatim. This case has had many twists and turns, including a report last year that OpenAI intentionally trashed the research of the Times' lawyers. You can follow along with the court case in the Southern District of New York.
LATE BREAKING NEWS: As I was finishing the edits on this issue, I saw the judge issued a brief ruling on the defendant's motion to dismiss. In short, the lawsuit continues, but the portions on "common law unfair competition by misappropriation claims" are dismissed. The full version of the opinion hasn't been released yet, but should be coming soon!
A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission. By allegedly repackaging original works as ChatGPT outputs, authors alleged, OpenAI&aposs most popular chatbot was just a high-tech "grift" that seemingly violated copyright laws, as well as state laws preventing unfair business practices and unjust enrichment. According to judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, authors behind three separate lawsuits—including Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay—have failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement.—Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors, Ars Technica, 13-Feb-2024
A US judge has largely sided with OpenAI in a lawsuit brought by authors alleging that ChatGPT was trained using pirated copies of their books. The judge dismissed most claims except for direct copyright infringement. While authors failed to show ChatGPT outputs were substantially similar to their works, one unfair competition claim was allowed to proceed based on OpenAI allegedly using copyrighted works without permission. This case has been quiet for a while because I think the remaining claims were consolidated into the Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc. case being overseen by the same judge.
Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.—Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US, Wired, 11-Feb-2025
Last month, Thomson Reuters achieved a significant legal victory by winning the first major AI copyright case in the United States. Notably, the court rejected the notion that using content to train a foundational language model was not fair use. This case sets a precedent in the ongoing discussions surrounding copyright laws and artificial intelligence, and its outcome may influence how AI-generated content is treated under copyright law.
Some customers are concerned about the risk of IP infringement claims if they use the output produced by generative AI. This is understandable, given recent public inquiries by authors and artists regarding how their own work is being used in conjunction with AI models and services. To address this customer concern, Microsoft is announcing our new Copilot Copyright Commitment. As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.—Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers, Microsoft, 7-Sep-2023
In mid-2023, Microsoft announced a "Copilot Copyright Commitment" to address customer concerns regarding potential copyright infringement when using its AI-powered tools. The commitment includes indemnity in cases where customers are sued for copyright infringement, provided they have implemented necessary guardrails and content filters. The company acknowledges the need to respect authors' rights and aims to balance innovation with protecting creative works. This either says something about how Microsoft trained its foundational models with all copyright-free and licensed content, or that Microsoft believes its lawyers are better than everyone else's.
Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.—The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem, The Atlantic, 10-Mar-2025
The article discusses the ethical and legal implications of Meta's use of pirated books from Library Genesis (LibGen) to train its AI model, called Llama 3. Faced with high costs and slow licensing processes for acquiring legal texts, Meta employees opted to access LibGen, which contains over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Internal communications revealed that Meta acknowledged the medium-high legal risks of this strategy and discussed methods to mask their activities, including avoiding the citation of copyrighted materials. The communications were part of a motion for partial summary judgement in a lawsuit against Meta. And Meta is not going quietly—in response to that motion, it has filed dozens of documents on the court docket.
Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia&aposs AI platform NeMo. That list includes some of the most "notorious" shadow libraries—Bibliotik, Z-Library (Z-Lib), Libgen, Sci-Hub, and Anna&aposs Archive, authors argued. However, Nvidia hopes to invalidate authors&apos copyright claims partly by denying that any of these controversial websites should even be considered shadow libraries.—Nvidia denies pirate e-book sites are “shadow libraries” to shut down lawsuit, Ars Technica, 28-May-2024
Nvidia is the company making the news for creating the GPUs that are so popular with companies training foundational models. In creating their own model, they say that using "shadow libraries" like Z-Library and Library Genesis does not necessarily violate copyright law, and that its AI training process is a "highly transformative" fair use of the content. On the other hand, authors have argued that the AI models are derived from the protected expression in the training dataset without their consent or compensation. Nvidia's position seems pretty gutsy...admit that you are using copyrighted content, and arguing that such use is okay. A ruling against them would take a bit bite out of their sky-high stock market valuation. The case is currently in the discovery phase.
Generative AI by Getty Images (yes, it’s an unwieldy name) is trained only on the vast Getty Images library, including premium content, giving users full copyright indemnification. This means anyone using the tool and publishing the image it created commercially will be legally protected, promises Getty. Getty worked with Nvidia to use its Edify model, available on Nvidia’s generative AI model library Picasso.—Getty made an AI generator that only trained on its licensed images, The Verge, 25-Sep-2023
In 2023, Getty Images launched a AI image generation tool that uses its vast library of licensed images. The company says users of its output have full copyright indemnification for commercial use. Developed in partnership with Nvidia (yes—the same Nvidia mentioned in the article above) and leveraging the Edify model, this tool allows users to create images while being protected legally. Getty plans to compensate creators whose images are used to train the AI model and will share revenues generated from the tool. Unlike traditional stock images, AI-generated photos will not be included in Getty’s existing content libraries.
The eminent physicist Enrico Fermi was visiting his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that summer, and the mealtime conversation turned to the subject of UFOs. Very quickly, the assembled physicists realized that if UFOs were alien machines, that meant it was possible to travel faster than the speed of light. Otherwise, those alien craft would have never made it here. At first, Fermi boisterously participated in the conversation, offering his usual keen insights. But soon, he fell silent, withdrawing into his own ruminations. The conversation drifted to other subjects, but Fermi stayed quiet. Sometime later, long after the group had largely forgotten about the issue of UFOs, Fermi sat up and blurted out: “But where is everybody!?”—All by ourselves? The Great Filter and our attempts to find life, Ars Technica, 26-Mar-2025
This retelling of the Fermi Paradox coms from this story about why, despite the vastness of the universe, we have yet to encounter evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. Enrico Fermi famously posed the question, "Where is everybody?" suggesting a disconnect between the expectation of abundant intelligent life and the lack of observable evidence. The concept of the Great Filter is introduced, proposing that there may be significant barriers preventing intelligent life from becoming spacefaring. The article goes on to speculate where we are relative to the "Great Filter" — are we past it, or is it yet in front of us? In other words, have we survived the filter or is our biggest challenge ahead of us?
What did you learn this week? Let me know on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Joel Wallenberg interviewed me on 14th February for his article in the 28th February edition of Grant's Interest Rate Observer entitled Memo to the bitcoiners. Alas, it is paywalled, but among the many quotes from me Wallenberg used was that blockchain-based systems "are very vulnerable to supply-chain attacks".
Among the countries the US recently voted with in the UN General Assembly is the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK). The US administration may have been impressed with the DPRK's innovative, diversified business model. This includes divisions responsible for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine with soldiers and arms, counterfeiting $100 bills, drug smuggling, and trafficking wildlife and humans. One of the most profitable divisions is responsible for stealing cryptocurrencies, and on 21st February it had a major success by stealing Ethereum with a notional value of $1.5B from the Bybit exchange.n 2023 North Korean hackers made away with a total of $661m, according to Chainalysis, a crypto-investigations firm; they doubled the sum in 2024, racking up $1.34bn across 47 separate heists, an amount equivalent to more than 60% of the global total of stolen crypto. The ByBit operation indicates a growing degree of skill and ambition: in a single hack, North Korea swiped the equivalent of $1.5bn from the exchange, the largest-ever heist in the history of cryptocurrency.
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Crypto-thievery is a more efficient way to earn hard currency than traditional sources, such as overseas labourers or illegal drugs. The United Nations Panel of Experts (UNPE), a monitoring body, reported in 2023 that cyber-theft accounted for half of North Korea’s foreign-currency revenue. North Korea’s digital plunder last year was worth more than three times the value of its exports to China, its main trade partner. “You take what took millions of labourers, and you can replicate that with the work of a few dozen people,” says Mr Carlsen.The attribution of the Bybit theft to the DPRK is convincing, because the modus operandi was very similar to last October's theft of $50M from Radiant Capital's multisig cold wallet. Radiant reported:
Attackers were able to compromise the devices of at least these three core contributors through a sophisticated malware injection. These compromised devices were then used to sign malicious transactions.This is kind of like Obi-Wan Kenobi's "These aren't the droids you're looking for".
Although three compromised devices have been confirmed, it is likely that more were targeted — the means by which they were compromised remains unknown and under investigation. The devices were compromised in such a way that the front-end of Safe{Wallet} (f.k.a. Gnosis Safe) displayed legitimate transaction data while malicious transactions were signed and executed in the background.
Each transaction was simulated for accuracy on Tenderly and individually reviewed by multiple developers at each signature stage. Front-end checks in both Tenderly and Safe showed no anomalies during these reviews.
To underscore the significance of this point, the compromise was completely undetectable during the manual review of the Gnosis Safe UI and Tenderly simulation stages of the routine transaction.
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The UI for a Safe is clean and intuitive. You can browse the assets in the safe easily, as well as check and manage the participating addresses.The nature of the Ethereum ecosystem means that this user interface has some issues:
Front-end verification of all three multi-signature transactions showed no signs of compromise, aside from Safe App transaction resubmissions due to failures. It is important to highlight that resubmitting Safe transactions due to failures is a common and expected occurrence. Transactions submitted on the Safe front-end can fail due to gas price fluctuations, nonce mismatch, network congestion, insufficient gas limit, smart contract execution errors, token insufficiency, pending transactions, front-end synchronization issues, timeouts, or permission/signature errors in multi-signature setups. As a result, this behavior did not raise immediate suspicion. The malicious actors exploited this normalcy, using the process to collect multiple compromised signatures over several attempts, all while mimicking the appearance of routine transaction failures.It is important to note that, at the time they were writing, Radiant did not know how the developer's devices were compromised to sign the malicious transactions. They did set out a list of precautions which, I believe, would have prevented the subsequent Bybit heist, in particular:
Take raw transaction data out of your wallet provider when a signature is prompted (e.g., Metamask, Rabby) and plug it into https://etherscan.io/inputdatadecoder. Confirm that the function you are calling, and the ToAddress all match up with the intended behavior. If a device were to be compromised, like in the case above, it would either not decode at all, call a different function than the one you thought you were calling, or it would result in a different owner address than the one you intended.The most comprehensive analysis of the Bybit heist I found was Cyfrin's The Safe Wallet Hack That Led to Bybit’s $1.4B Heist. In summary, the attackers:
Because the attackers had access to the Safe developer's machine, they had access to one of Safe's S3 buckets, from which the Safe code running on the machines at Bybit downloaded the malware....
- Compromised a developer machine at Safe
- Injected malicious JavaScript into a development container
- Specifically targeted Bybit exchange to stay undetected longer
- Manipulated what Bybit signers saw in the Safe interface
This represents a sophisticated supply chain attack rather than a direct compromise of end-user devices.
This attack followed an almost identical pattern to recent attacks on WazirX Exchange and Radiant Capital. This suggests that the same threat actors are repeatedly using this technique successfully.
It's now believed that the Safe UI was the compromise point in all these cases rather than end-user machines, which explains the similar attack patterns.
By examining the machines of three Signers from Bybit, malicious JavaScript payload from app.safe.global was discovered in the Google Chrome cache files.The malware was planted on 19th February around 17:29 GMT, and removed about 2 minutes after the heist on 21st February at 14:15 GMT.
There are two javascript files that were modified: _app-52c9031bfa03da47.js and 6514.b556851795a4cbaa.js.
...
From the Wayback Archive (https://web.archive.org/), we also identified an instance of this malicious JavaScript file dating back to Feb 19, 2025 17:29:05
At 19:09 UTC today, @zachxbt submitted definitive proof that this attack on Bybit was performed by the LAZARUS GROUP.Cyfrin agrees with Radiant's key precaution:
His submission included a detailed analysis of test transactions and connected wallets used ahead of the exploit, as well as multiple forensics graphs and timing analyses.
The submission has been shared with the Bybit team in support of their investigation. We wish them all the best.
Bybit’s team trusted what they saw on their screens, and Safe’s engineering team trusted that their systems were secure.It is likely that the Safe developer's machine was compromised via a phishing attack. That was the modus operandi for the Radiant heist:
“Don’t trust, verify” has become a blockchain mantra for a reason.
When the signers reviewed the transaction but did not verify the calldata on their physical hardware devices, everything appeared correct. This underscores the critical need for thorough transaction verification beyond what’s displayed on the screen.
To spell it out, the computers showed a spoofed transaction that tricked them, but their wallets showed the malicious transaction. They could have caught this on the hardware wallet, but as of today, calldata can be tricky to verify on a wallet.
The attack began on Sept. 11, when a Radiant Capital developer received a Telegram message from someone impersonating a trusted former contractor. According to the message, the contractor was looking for a new job opportunity in smart contract audits. It requested comments on the contractor’s work and provided a link to a compressed PDF detailing their next assignment. The hackers even mimicked the contractor’s legitimate website to add credibility.The security of a multi-billion dollar exchange depended upon the developers at a software supplier not clicking on a link in a Telegram message.
The zip file contained a disguised executable named INLETDRIFT. Upon opening, it installed malware on the developer’s macOS device, granting attackers access to the developer’s system. The malware was designed to communicate with a hacker-controlled server.
Tackling the problem requires multilateral efforts across governments and the private sector, but such collaboration has been fraying. Russia used its UN veto to gut the UNPE last year. President Donald Trump’s cuts to American development aid have hit programmes aimed at building cyber-security capacity in vulnerable countries.Update 27th March
By contrast, the North Korean regime is throwing ever more resources at cybercrime. South Korea’s intelligence services reckon its cybercrime force grew from 6,800 people in 2022 to 8,400 last year. As the crypto-industry expands in countries with weaker regulatory oversight, North Korea has an increasingly “rich target environment”, says Abhishek Sharma of the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think-tank. Last year, Mr Sharma notes, North Korea attacked exchanges based in India and Indonesia.
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| © Grant's Interest Rate Observer |
Crypto prices are prone to crashes — one could say that crypto exchanges are designed to facilitate them. It would be strange if the immensity of the market caps involved did not introduce a new element of risk into a world that hardly needs more. As for America’s multitasking president, he boasted (through his lawyer) in 2019 that he could commit murder on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and not be charged with a crime. A conflict of interest is no capital crime, but Trump continues to mix the business of state with the pleasures and temptations of money-making.The article features extensive quotes from the wonderful Prof. Carol Alexander about the problem of "rehypothecation" in DeFi:
One can borrow up to 78.5% loan-to-value on Aave against the special tokens and make an interest spread of 29 basis points by staking the newly borrowed ether. Starting with 100 ETH, for instance, one could stake them (earning 3%), use the automatically generated liquid staking tokens to borrow 78 more ETH, stake those to earn a net 29 basis points, use the resulting 78 more liquid staking tokens to borrow 78% of 78, i.e., 61, more ether, stake them for another 29 basis points and so on. ... In fact, an enterprising decentralized financier will need to iterate the borrowing and staking process 12 times until he is levered 4.5 times, having borrowed 3.5 ether tokens for each originally laid out, before the resulting digital hoard will even break 4% in yield,This all sounds great until the price of the collateral drops, perhaps in one of the flash crashes to which cryptocurrencies are subject:
On May 19, 2021, a flash crash in multiple cryptocurrencies briefly knocked more than 25% off the price of bitcoin and 34% off the price of ether before the prices recovered somewhat, all inside of an hour.In minutes the collateral will be liquidated automatically, and if that doesn't clear the position, so will any other assets the exchange can get its hands on. The article quotes Alexander:
the entire portfolio, not just in ether, but all the other positions, will get taken out by the exchange. The exchange is not supposed to sell these things straight away. They have things called “guarantee funds” or “insurance funds,” which are supposed to absorb the liquidated positions [and hold them]. But they don’t. They dump them into the market. I’ve got all the data to show that.This is the business into which Trump's World Liberty Financial wants to get:
“With World Liberty Financial [Trump] stands to make billions. . . . They want to provide lending and borrowing services like Aave. Aave is the biggest shadow bank [in decentralized finance],” Alexander explains, representing a market for crypto-token deposits and loans worth $29.1 billion.
There's a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can to preserve their outlets while trying to remain true to the mission of providing the digital lifeblood of science and culture to the world.
Yes, many of these beloved institutions are under financial pressures in the current political environment, but politics swings back and forth. The AI armies are only growing more aggressive, more rapacious, more deceitful and ever more numerous.
I'm talking about the voracious hunger of AI companies for good data to train Large Language Models (LLMs). These are the trillion-parameter sets of statistical weights that power things like Claude, ChatGPT and hundreds of systems you've never heard of. Good training data has lots of text, lots of metadata, is reliable and unbiased. It's unsullied by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practitioners. It doesn't constantly interrupt the narrative flow to try to get you to buy stuff. It's multilingual, subject specific, and written by experts. In other words, it's like a library.
At last week's Code4lib conference hosted by Princeton University Library, technologists from across the library world gathered to share information about library systems, how to make them better, how to manage them, and how to keep them running. The hot topic, the thing everyone wanted to talk about, was how to deal with bots from the dark side.
Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get "script kiddies" trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.
The old style bots were rarely a problem. They respected robot exclusions and "nofollow" warnings. The warning helped bots avoid volatile resources and infinite parameter spaces. Even when they ignored exclusions they seemed to be careful about it. They declared their identity in "user-agent" headers. They limited the request rate and number of simultaneous requests to any particular server. Occasionally there would be a malicious bot like a card-tester or a registration spammer. You'd often have to block these based on IP address. It was part of the landscape, not the dominant feature.
The current generation of bots is mindless. They use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests. They use randomly generated user-agent strings. They come from large blocks of IP addresses. They get trapped in endless hallways. I observed one bot asking for 200,000 nofollow redirect links pointing at Onedrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. (which of course didn't work, but Onedrive decided to stop serving our Canadian human users). They use up server resources - one speaker at Code4lib described a bug where software they were running was using 32 bit integers for session identifiers, and it ran out!
The good guys are trying their best. They're sharing block lists and bot signatures. Many libraries are routinely blocking entire countries (nobody in china could possibly want books!) just to be able to serve a trickle of local requests. They are using commercial services such as Cloudflare to outsource their bot-blocking and captchas, without knowing for sure what these services are blocking, how they're doing it, or whether user privacy and accessibility is being flushed down the toilet. But nothing seems to offer anything but temporary relief. Not that there's anything bad about temporary relief, but we know the bots just intensify their attack on other content stores.
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| The view of MIT Press's Open-Access site from the Wayback Machine. |
Thousands of developer hours are being spent on defense against the dark bots and those hours are lost to us forever. We'll never see the wonderful projects and features they would have come up with in that time.
The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)
We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries.
Or maybe we can find ways to destroy the bad bots from within. I'm thinking a billion rickrolls?
Notes:
Photo: Lucas Pretti/OKFN
As Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation, I have been selected to join and work in the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) Working Group on Data Governance at All Levels and the Working Group on Universal Safeguards for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
We have led the open movement towards a rights-enhancing and inclusive digital society for over two decades. Our legal tools in the Open Data Commons have enabled unrestricted data sharing, empowering global communities to innovate and collaborate. The Open Definition sets a standard for openness, guiding countless individuals and institutions to share their data, knowledge and tools. The School of Data, one of our flagship projects, has provided thousands worldwide with skills to turn data into actionable insights. As members of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, we have actively advocated for open, interoperable, sustainable, and lasting technology that serves all. Through CKAN—a digital public good that was created by our technical teams —we have provided hundreds of governments and organisations with a platform for open data sharing, fostering economic opportunities, accountability and innovation all over the world. We are not only thinkers but doers, and it is such accumulated experience that I am bringing to the groups.
In changing times, when multilateral cooperation mechanisms are questioned, when the word openness is being abused to mask extractive businesses, and when technology and data are used to commit injustices at large scale, it is urgent to be present in the spaces where key actors convey to explore solutions to break such dynamics and build together feasible paths towards a different digital society, breaking down data monopolies and delivering unprecedented access to knowledge, for all —unlocking pathways for innovation and growth. That is why principles of open knowledge, open data, open collaboration and open standards should guide the data governance in every area, and our examples and experiences can lead to better, more effective data governance systems.
In the Working Groups, I will suggest the “open by design” principle, for datasets and systems to become the backbone of our future. Highly digitised societies—such as digital identities and payment platforms—, if designed with opacity, without meaningful participation and accountability, these risk entrenching exclusion, corruption and control; if they are discussed openly with the people they intend to serve and if they are developed open and kept open, they can enable accountability, interoperability and the ability to build upon, while also reducing the risks for the most vulnerable in society. Through my role in the Digital Public Goods Alliance and stewardship of CKAN, I have gained experience and a better understanding of the urgency of building Digital Public Infrastructure rooted in open standards, open-source software (ideally free software) and open data. Open technologies, standards, and practices remove barriers, ensuring that infrastructure enables participation and economic advancement rather than perpetuating disparities.
As the work progresses in these groups, I will share as many insights into its progress as I am permitted and seek advice and guidance from our valuable community and international network, which is closely in touch with the latest challenges and progress achieved in these areas.
We’ve recently added more than ten thousand freely readable recent books from academic publishers to the extended shelves of The Online Books Page. These online titles are provided by JSTOR’s Open Access Books collection, and represent the first large-scale automated inclusion of new monographs to our catalog. We’ll be updating the listings from this collection on a regular basis. (Most of our extended shelves imports, which also include collections like HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, get refreshed about once a month.)
We’ll also continue to add individual recent academic books of interest, both from that collection and others, to our curated collection. (You’ll see individually-chosen additions in our new books listing.) Automated addition of JSTOR’s open access books will let us include many more new titles than we’d be able to do manually by ourselves. They’ll help our site’s readers find up to date information from experts on many subjects, complementing the historical sources and other older books also available in our catalog. (As always, I recommend that information seekers also consult their local libraries to get a fuller understanding of the subjects our collection covers, since local libraries have many copyrighted books we can’t offer for free reading on The Online Books Page. But we now also have a growing number of recent books you’re not likely to find, or obtain as easily, in your local library.)
A growing number of academic and peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes are now available through open access. The Directory of Open Access Books now lists over 90,000 of them, and the related OAPEN site offers direct downloads of many such books as well, as do many individual publisher sites. We may expand our automated listings in the future to cover a wider array of open access academic titles. But I consider JSTOR’s collection to be a good starting point for automated imports, both because it includes over 140 high-quality publishers, and because it provides high-quality metadata. That makes it relatively easy to integrate their offerings with the other books in our catalog, using similar author and subject headings, and avoiding redundant listings. As always, our “extended shelves” imports are subject to change and not guaranteed to be as persistent as the “curated collection” listings we catalog ourselves. But you can always request that we add specific titles you’re interested in to our curated collection, whether from JSTOR’s offerings or elsewhere.
JSTOR has a growing collection of information resources that are freely and openly available to all readers (as well as resources they offer by subscription or by registered access). Along with JSTOR’s open access books, we also link to issues of many of the serials JSTOR offers, sometimes via JSTOR’s own Early Journal Content offerings, sometimes via other online providers. We’re also continuing to document the public domain status of serials from JSTOR and other providers in our Deep Backfile knowledge base, (You can use the “Contact us” links in our Deep Backfile tables to let us know about particular serials you’re interested in, or for which you have information that we could use.)
My thanks to JSTOR, and to a growing number of publishers and authors, for making current scholarship freely available and discoverable!
Part of our goal in developing the Open Data Editor (ODE) this year is to increase digital literacy among key communities through the application. We’re thrilled to introduce our latest learning resource: Quality and Consistent Data with the Open Data Editor – a free, hands-on course designed to help non-technical users improve their data skills with the Open Data Editor (ODE).
Developed in partnership with Open Knowledge Brazil and Escola de Dados, this course is part of our mission to increase digital literacy and empower communities with practical tools for working with data—no coding required.
The course follows a learn-by-doing approach, covering essential topics like:
Learn to work with tabular data
Don’t get lost when validating your spreadsheet
Clean up your spreadsheets to gain valuable insights
Understand how to guarantee the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets
Master all about metadata
Understand the Open Definition and the principles of open data
Follow in the footsteps of an exclusive instructor
Get hands-on and learn from your mistakes and successes
Learn how to handle databases without writing code
The Open Data Editor (ODE) isn’t just a tool for spotting mistakes in tables—it’s a gateway to open data literacy. Pilot organisations have shared that taking this course was key for their teams to advance their data knowledge, helping them not only clean datasets but also understand how to handle, share, and use open data effectively. Whether you’re new to data or looking to refine your skills, ODE makes the process intuitive and accessible.
This course is specially designed for:
Non-technical users who work with data but lack advanced technical training Journalists, researchers, and civil society members looking to handle data more effectively Anyone interested in improving data consistency and reliability
The Open Data Editor (ODE) simplifies data work, making it accessible to everyone. Whether you’re cleaning up a dataset, checking for errors, or preparing data for analysis, this course will give you the confidence to do it efficiently and and knowledge of the principles that govern good practices in open data management.
Enroll now and start mastering data quality with ODE!
The course will soon be translated into Portuguese and Spanish. If you would like to contribute to the translation into other languages, please contact us at info@okfn.org.
Join us in making data more open, usable, and reliable for all. Happy learning!
In collaboration with Patricio Del Boca
This post discusses Open Knowledge Foundation’s (OKFN) approach to integrating AI into the Open Data Editor (ODE), our new open source desktop application for data practitioners to detect errors in tables.
To ensure thoughtful AI integration, we are emphasising the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, user feedback, and ethical considerations rather than just technical implementation. We are prioritising user needs, such as limiting data shared with OpenAI to metadata and making AI features optional, while acknowledging practical constraints like deadlines and resource limitations.
Learn more about the lessons learned during the process, including the value of asking critical questions, avoiding perfectionism, and balancing innovation with ethical and practical considerations.
OKFN is convinced that AI integrations cannot be approached solely from the technical side. There are conversations and reflections that teams must have both internally and with the community to ensure that such integrations are targeted to help with specific problems, and at the same time ensure that they are communicated in a clear and transparent way. These conversations not only helped us define what kind of implementation we were going to do, but also allowed us to build internal capacity and new soft skills to be able to answer key questions or be aware of possible red flags when working with AI.
As in any project, our work had certain external and internal deadlines and constraints. On the one hand, we had a limited period of time for implementation. Initially, we defined a workflow of two months, four work calls and asynchronous revision of a document with guidelines and ideas. However, as we progressed with the reflections, we called Madelon Hulsebos (our AI Consultant) to resolve doubts and validate the integration angle. It should be noted that the first general conversation was not only between Madelon and Romina Colman (Product Owner). The meeting was also attended by part of the project’s technical team and our UX designer. Why? Not only to address the integration from all angles, but also to de-centre the idea that working with AI is something that is solved at the code level and avoid the current disconnect seen in the ecosystem where there are conversations between technical people on the one hand and academia, activists and NGOs on the other.
The current AI integration of ODE uses OpenAI. This decision was a practical one: it was easy to implement and it is the current state-of-the art when integrating LLMs to applications.
The quick integration of Open AI provided useful feedback:
Based on the feedback we made two decisions:
In 2025, we are working on:
Back in November, I posted about ManoWhisper, where I briefly introduced the work I was doing with the UWaterloo team for the Digital Feminist Network. Today, I’ll delve a bit more into that work and provide a closer look at some of the tools and their output in the context of a broader research project I’m working on. For that project, we have compiled an ever-growing dataset of podcast transcripts comprising over 11,000 episodes from 20 podcasts associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, conspiracy theories, QAnon, the Alt-Right, White Supremacist/Nationalist movements, and the Manosphere.
What’s the purpose of this thing and all it’s utilities with silly names? Let’s start here. Nobody – and I mean nobody – wants to sit down and closely read over 11,000 transcripts of material from these communities. It can get real traumatic real quick. So, what are some ways we can do macro and micro-level readings of the content? Or give us the ability to ask the data some questions, perform information retrieval, and allow us to do close reading to see things in full or fuller context? I’ll walk through a few of the ManoWhisper utilities below, and hopefully that’ll provide some insight into them. If you just want to see a bunch of the visualizations produced with the utilities, jump over here.
Broad overviews are a good way to get some basic understanding of a given podcast in our dataset. They’ll help us get a good perspective on each host or team, and provide us with some comparators for the entire corpus. But also us to look at some apples and oranges together since not every podcast is the same format, style, or length. Still, they might share some underlying commonalities.
Red Pill Caliper takes a directory of transcripts (WebVTT files), and outputs six different histograms
Usage: red-pill-caliper.py [OPTIONS] TRANSCRIPTS
Analyze a directory of podcast transcripts (WebVTT) and generate histograms.
TRANSCRIPTS: Path to the directory of WebVTT files.
Options:
-p, --podcast-name TEXT Name of the podcast for graph titles.
--help Show this message and exit.
As an example, we let’s take a look at “The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast” corpus.
Next, one entry point for analysis is keyword searching the corpus. Since they’re all text files, grep or ag works well here, but you might also want to examine how many times a given keyword or phrase (these are “wildcardable” as well) appears in a given podcast compared to others. Red Pill Resonator generates a keyword frequency graph of a comma separated list of terms or phrase for our corpus of podcasts.
Additionally, because not all episode lengths are the same, we should normalize the data by looking at the rate at which a keyword or phrase appears per episode. For instance, an Andrew Tate episode might only be 8 minutes long, while a Nick Fuentes episode might be 2 hours. If we simply count the occurrences of a term, the results could be distorted due to differences in episode lengths. That’s why I chose the per-episode metric as the default. You’ll see below that there is also a mode flag to compute overall counts if needed.
Usage: red-pill-resonator.py [OPTIONS] OUTPUT_IMAGE
Generate keyword frequency graphs across a corpus of WebVTT files.
Arguments:
OUTPUT_IMAGE Filename of the graph.
Options:
--keywords TEXT Comma-delimited list of keywords. [required]
--mode [overall|episode] Choose whether to display overall keyword counts
(--mode overall) or average counts per episode
(--mode episode). [required]
--width INTEGER Width of the graph in pixels. [default: 800]
--height INTEGER Height of the graph in pixels. [default: 600]
--title TEXT Title of the graph. [default: Keyword Frequency
Graph]
--help Show this message and exit.
This example looks at the keywords “trump, vance, biden, harris, walz” in the entire corpus of materials at the time, which included “Candace Owens”, “Loomer Unleashed”, “The Culture War Podcast with Tim Pool”, “The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast”, “The StoneZONE with Roger Stone”, and “The Tucker Carlson Show”.
The remainder of the functionality I’ll go over in this post uses three different text classification models to classify sentence segments and plot those classifications.
Emotional Rollercoaster breaks a given podcast episode transcript into sentence segments and feeds each sentence to j-hartmann/emotion-english-distilroberta-base to generate an emotion classification. The classifications are then plotted in a heatmap over time. I think this provides valuable insight into the vibe of a given episode and is well complemented by the Hate Speech and Misogynistic Speech classification utilities documented below.
Usage: emotional-roller-coaster.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_VTT_FILE OUTPUT_HTML_FILE
Generate a heatmap of emotions for a given WebVTT transcript.
Options:
-t, --title TEXT Title of the heatmap
This example takes a look at an “America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes” episode where Nick Fuentes reviews the 2023 Barbie movie.
Wave of Misogyny breaks a given podcast episode transcript into sentence segments and feeds each sentence to MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny to generate a misogyny classification. The classifications are then plotted in a dual-axis chart over time.
Usage: wave-of-misogyny.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_VTT_FILE OUTPUT_HTML_FILE
Generate a dual-axis chart of misogyny scores for a given WebVTT transcript.
Options:
-t, --title TEXT Title of the chart
--help Show this message and exit.
This example takes a look at the same “America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes” episode mentioned above.
Dicks Hate the Police breaks a given podcast episode transcript into sentence segments and feeds each sentence to facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target to generate a hate speech classification. The classifications are then plotted in a dual-axis chart over time.
Usage: dicks-hate-the-police.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_VTT_FILE OUTPUT_HTML_FILE
Generate a dual-axis chart of hate scores for a given WebVTT transcript.
Options:
-t, --title TEXT Title of the chart
--help Show this message and exit.
This example takes a look at a “Get Off My Lawn Podcast with Gavin McInnes” episode titled, “COMPOUND CENSORED 160 - TACS 1796: GOD IS A NATIONALIST”.
The final two examples take a look at the corpus of an entire podcast instead of just an episode, and generate a donut chart.
Donut Hate Women breaks a given podcast’s transcripts into sentence segments and feeds each sentence to MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny to generate a misogyny classification for the entire corpus. The classifications are then plotted in a donut chart.
Usage: donut-hate-women.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_PATH OUTPUT_HTML_FILE
Generate a pie chart of misogynist vs non misogynist classifications for
WebVTT transcripts.
Accepts either a directory of VTT files or a single VTT file.
Options:
-t, --title TEXT Title of the chart
--help Show this message and exit.
This example takes a look the “Fresh & Fit Podcast” corpus.
Finally, Donut Hate breaks a given podcast’s transcripts into sentence segments and feeds each sentence to facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target to generate a hate speech classification for the entire corpus. The classifications are then plotted in a donut chart.
Usage: donut-hate.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_PATH OUTPUT_HTML_FILE
Generate a pie chart of hate vs not hate classifications for WebVTT
transcripts.
Accepts either a directory of VTT files or a single VTT file.
Options:
-t, --title TEXT Title of the chart
--help Show this message and exit.
This example takes a look “The Roseanne Barr Podcast” corpus.
If you’ve found useful the many mid-20th century serials that are now freely readable online through The Online Books Page, you can thank the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The IMLS (as it’s generally known) funded the completion in 2018 of a survey of copyrights I led for serials published before 1950. The completed survey made it possible for the first time to quickly ascertain the public domain status of decades of serials. It also laid the groundwork for our bigger Deep Backfile project that now documents rights and free online availability for well over 10,000 serials. I’d say that’s a pretty good return on a $25,000 IMLS investment.
The IMLS has made that kind of investment many times over, with libraries and museums across all 50 states. The IMLS makes a lot of mostly modest grants for projects and programs that make a big difference in the communities libraries and museums serve. You can read about a sampling of them in Devon Akmon’s recent Conversation article. Or you can ask your local librarian or museum curator. They may tell you how the IMLS supports them providing access to information online, promoting literacy, preserving unique parts of our country’s cultural heritage, and many other functions. They do it with a budget that requires less than $1 per American per year. It’s hard to imagine a more efficient use of government funds.
Despite its efficiency, the IMLS has been a recurrent target for elimination. The first Trump administration proposed eliminating the IMLS starting with its first budget request. But Congress listened to its constituents and continued to fund it. This time, however, Trump has tried to shut it down on his own, without involving Congress. He issued an executive order for IMLS’s activities to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”, aiming to “effectuate an expected termination” of the agency. He also appointed a new acting director who’s pledged to act “in lockstep with this Administration” to carry out the president’s wishes.
So far, Trump has been unable to completely shut down the organization, as he has managed with some other agencies. When IMLS remote staffers got word that the new acting director and some of Elon Musk’s DOGE workers were going to come to the IMLS office last Thursday, they reported to the office in person, many of them dressed in formal (or funereal) black. Faced with more people than DOGE expected, an anonymous staffer related that “instead of laying everybody off immediately they left the building, because they didn’t want to create a scene with us there. Otherwise, they would have locked the doors and taken over our systems and sent a mass notification out to everyone.”
As I write this, IMLS is still operating. But in the next week, the new acting director may try to cut off its funding to libraries and museums. Or, he could try to make libraries and museums receiving funds to change their programs and collection policies to conform to his preferences, or Trump’s. The acting director has already issued a press release expressing his intent to”restore focus on patriotism”. And the president has not been hesitant to cut funding to institutions to make them change their programs to his liking, as some have now agreed to.
But right now, there’s still time for us who value libraries and museums to make our voices heard. We can tell our lawmakers that the IMLS should continue to be fully supported, and should support all the libraries and museums whose diverse programs and collections help make our country great. If you want to participate, see the calls to action at EveryLibrary and the American Alliance of Museums.
My protest sign for the #TeslaTakedown today.I'm a long way from a career change to graphic design or protest communications, but this week was a definite improvement. About a half dozen people asked for pictures of my sign. That's a good signal, so I'm including instructions below on printing and making one yourself.
It was another windy, gloomy day at the Easton Tesla store, but the number of people increased from last Saturday. One organizer said between 450 and 500 people, which seemed about right to me. It was just a little more than we had last week. The weather forecast for next week is about 15 degrees warmer, so it will be interesting to see if the families with young children come out again like on March 8th.
The entertainment definitely improved. Someone set up an amplified acoustic guitar and a microphone, and people took turns singing. We marched two laps around the block, and there were many more honks and cheers from the cars driving by. Promptly at 5:30, the organizers walked around and asked people to leave to be respectful of the Columbus police dialogue team that had been called out for what was advertised as a one hour protest. That seemed reasonable.
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown.Back to basics, I thought. People are driving by quickly, so too much text won't be read. So this was the idea.
And that seemed to work.
Refer to the March 8th blog post for instructions on creating the sign. If you want one too, I've uploaded the 6-page PDF of page tiles to make the sign. When you print them, line them up with three on top and three on the bottom. Then, trim the bottom and right edges of each page. For the two right-most pages, there will be a lot of extra, unused space to cut off, and there are crop marks you can use to trim at just the right spot. There are a few millimeters of overlap between pages, so your trimming doesn't have to be exact. Then line up the pages and tape them to a poster board (or, as in my case, a recycled campaign yard sign.) This is set up to make a 26" by 16" sign — the exact dimensions of a typical campaign yard sign! Ping me on Mastodon or Bluesky if you use it, and include a picture if you'd like!
So now that I've shown improvement week-by-week, I need to figure out how to step up my game for next Saturday...
This text, part of the #ODDStories series, tells a story of Open Data Day‘s grassroots impact directly from the community’s voices.
For Open Data Day 2025, Thailand is spotlighting disasters as a key theme under the title:
“Floods, Smog, Wildfires: Decoding Thailand’s Endless Disaster with Data.”
We recognize disasters as part of a polycrisis—a web of interconnected crises that cannot be solved in isolation. In Thailand, floods, smog, and wildfires are not isolated events; they are deeply linked to socio-economic vulnerabilities, political decisions, and environmental degradation. We believe that better data and effective data use are key to tackling these challenges.
This year, WeVis (Civic Tech), in collaboration with partners ThaiPBS, theactive_net, Policy Watch – Thai PBS, and 101_pub, organized an Open Data Day onsite event on 2 March 2025 at Siam Paragon as a half-day, open-access, free-to-attend gathering, livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube. The event was not only part of the global celebration of International Open Data Day but also a reaffirmation of our commitment to transparency and civic engagement through open data. With around 100 attendees, including both registered participants and walk-ins, we welcomed a diverse audience—ranging from those familiar with Open Data to newcomers who had never heard of it before but were drawn in by the event’s format and discussions.
ActivitiesThe event was structured into three main segments:
This panel discussion tackled Thailand’s ongoing disaster management challenges through a data-driven lens. We invited leading experts in disaster management to analyze floods, smog, and wildfires, exploring how data could improve policy and response strategies.
The takeaway from this session:
This year, we introduced a new interactive approach to data interpretation: sonification—the process of converting data into sound, allowing attendees to listen to trends instead of reading graphs or statistics.
We showcased three datasets:
More than 10 projects from 9 organizations shared their experiences in using data-driven approaches to tackle Thailand’s disaster challenges. The discussion emphasized how data can be leveraged for disaster prevention, response, and long-term resilience.
At WeVis, our commitment to Open Data Day remains unwavering. We see this as an opportunity to advocate for open data policies and push Thailand closer to a future where transparency, accessibility, and data-driven decision-making are the norm. We hope to see Thailand fully embrace open data in the near future!
Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.
As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. In 2025, a total of 189 events happened all over the world between March 1st and 7th, in 57 countries using 15+ different languages. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio released an opinion in the case of OCLC v. Anna's Archive. As you may recall, the case stems from an accusation that Anna's Archive—a search engine for 'shadow libraries'—scraped the content of OCLC's WorldCat. Anna's Archive itself is an anonymous effort, and OCLC named one person in the lawsuit—Maria Matienzo—with a weak and dubious connection to Anna's Archive.
Here are bits of the court's order from its introduction (the start of the order) and conclusion (at the end):
This case is about data scraping. Plaintiff Online Computer Library Center, Inc. ("OCLC") is a non-profit organization that helps libraries organize and share resources. In collaboration with its member libraries, OCLC created and maintains WorldCat-the most comprehensive database of library collections worldwide. OCLC alleges that a "pirate library" named Anna's Archive along with Maria Matienzo, and other unknown individuals (collectively, "Defendants") scraped WorldCat's data. OCLC claims that, in doing so, Defendants violated Ohio law. Specifically, OCLC invokes causes of action arising under the Ohio common law of tort, contract, and property, as well as a provision of the Ohio criminal code.
But whether Ohio law prohibits the data scraping alleged here poses "novel and unsettled" issues. No Ohio court has ever applied its law as OCLC would have this Court do (as far as the Court is aware). Nor have courts uniformly applied analogous laws of other jurisdictions that way. So, to resolve this case, the Court would need to answer "novel and unsettled" questions about Ohio law.
When that is true-when a federal court faces "novel and unsettled" state-law issues-the federal court may certify those issues to the state's high court. Unwilling to sleepwalk into a drastic expansion of Ohio law, this Court thus resolves to certify the issues presented here.
[...]
The Court is sympathetic to OCLC's situation: a band of copyright scofflaws cloned WorldCat's hard-earned data, gave it away for free, and then ignored OCLC when it sued them in this Court. But mindful that bad facts sometimes make bad law, the Court requests that an Ohio court intervene before this Court makes any new state tort, contract, property, or criminal law.
The Court resolves to CERTIFY the novel Ohio-law issues identified above to the Supreme Court of Ohio. Plaintiff's counsel and Matienzo's counsel are ORDERED to propose an order containing all the information Ohio Supreme Court Practice Rule 9. 02 requires by April 11, 2025. The parties may file their proposed orders separately, or, if they so choose, they may file one joint proposed order. The Court will finalize a certification order afterward.
OCLC's motion for default judgment is DENIED without prejudice. See Lammert v. Auto-Owners (Mut. ) Ins., 286 F. Supp. 3d 919, 928-29 (M. D. Tenn. 2017) (adopting this same disposition). Because the answers to the certified questions may also determine Matienzo's motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), ECF No. 21, the Court DENIES without prejudice that motion too. See id. The Court invites the parties to reraise their motions after the certification proceeding. See id.
The Court also grants OCLC leave to amend its Complaint to correct any of the above-identified pleading deficiencies.
OCLC has brought twelve claims against the defendants, including breach of contract, unjust enrichment, tortious interference, criminal violations under Ohio law, trespass to chattels (a fancy way of saying "breaking and entering", I think), and conversion of property to deny benefits to OCLC. Almost every claim raises novel legal questions that have not been definitively addressed by Ohio courts. As is the practice of federal courts in such cases, the judge decides to certify several "novel and unsettled" legal questions to the Supreme Court of Ohio, given the absence of clear precedent in state case law. Interestingly, this includes a question about the enforceability of "browserwrap" contracts—or terms of service that appear as links on the bottom of web pages. (This is contrasted with "clickwrap" contracts where the user must affirmatively click an "I agree" button or link.) Other questions include the definition of unjust enrichment in the context of data scraping and the interpretation of Ohio Revised Code § 2913.04 regarding unauthorized access to computer systems. If it were only that simple, though...the order also discusses potential preemption by federal copyright law, suggesting that OCLC’s claims may conflict with federal statutes, which complicates the legal landscape further.
There is a curious footnote at the end that makes me wonder if the judge is signalling to Matienzo's lawyers that there may be a way to get their client out of this sticky mess (legal citations removed):
As an aside, the Court also wonders whether the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine bars OCLC's conspiracy claims. Under that doctrine, an agreement between agents of the same legal entity is not an unlawful conspiracy. OCLC's conspiracy counts allege, in effect, that Matienzo is an agent of Anna's Archive who conspired with other agents of Anna's Archive to scrape WorldCat's data. If Anna's Archive is a legal entity, then OCLC may have alleged an intracorporate conspiracy. The Court pulls this thread no further (because it decides to certify). But, after the certification proceeding, the Court expects the parties will brief whether the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine applies here.
So it would seem that this case is not done, and the focus now shifts to Ohio's top state court. I don't know what the odds are that Ohio's court system will take up these questions or what happens if it declines to do so.
Mark your calendars! Next Friday, 28 March 2025, the Open Knowledge Foundation will host a new iteration of The Tech We Want initiative — our ambitious effort to reimagine how technology is built and used. This time we’ll focus on our decade-long Frictionless Data project, a progressive open-source framework for building data infrastructure – data management, data integration, data validation and data flows. The goal is to bring together maintainers, users, and contributors to discuss challenges, priorities, and governance for the project moving forward.
The Frictionless Data project aims to make it easier to work with data by reducing common data workflow issues (what we call friction). Its software and standards are the basis of many projects developed by the community all over the world, ranging from climate scientists, to humanities researchers, to government data centres.
At the summit, we want to promote successful cases and projects, and collectively discuss how such a long-running project adapts to the current context and Open Knowledge’s current vision of technology.
We will start the event with short presentations of Frictionless use cases, in order to have some examples of how Frictionless is used today.
Open Knowledge’s Tech Lead, Patricio del Boca, will then briefly present The Tech We Want initiative, to share the current vision of technology that is driving all development efforts at OKFN today.
Following that, we will have a genuine community discussion on how to envision the future of the project with selected active members of the community leading the discussion.
15:00 CET – Frictionless Today (demos)
Here’s how we are using Frictionless today.
Confirmed speakers and projects:
16:30 CET – The Tech We Want Vision
A presentation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting and focused on solving people’s real problems.
16:45 CET – Frictionless Tomorrow (community discussion)
What will Frictionless be like tomorrow and how will the current tech changes impact it?
Confirmed discussion leaders:
Although it’s an event with and for the Frictionless community, the event is open to anyone interested, especially the open data community (technical and non-technical). If you use Frictionless Data or the Data Package in any project, please come along. If you want to learn more about how to optimise your data workflow and learn more about the future of the project, please come along too.
For updates, follow the Open Knowledge Foundation on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and LinkedIn.
We can’t wait to see you there! 
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Bitcoin blocks now have a theoretical maximum size of 4 megabytes and a more realistic maximum size of 2 megabytesThus the rate at which transactions are included in blocks is limited to an average of around 7 per second. The chart shows the number of transactions included in a block each day for the same period. Note that the day of the fee spike Bitcoin processed 42% of the average of the three days before and three days after. The variance of the transaction rate is high. For example, on 7th September the blockchain processed 76% more transactions than the average of the three following days.
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Professional bitcoin OTC traders FT Alphaville spoke with see this as an alarming development and one of the drivers of rival cryptocurrency ether’s growing popularity. The views of one trader:Almost 8 years later these problems remain.
It definitely tempts people into ether. This is the biggest problem with bitcoin, it’s not just that it’s expensive to transact, it’s uncertain to transact. It’s hard to know if you’ve put enough of a fee. So if you significantly over pay to get in, even then it’s not guaranteed. There are a lot of people who don’t know how to set their fees, and it takes hours to confirm transactions. It’s a bad system and no one has any solutions.Transactions which fail to get the attention of miners sit in limbo until they drop out. But the suspended state leaves payers entirely helpless. They can’t risk resending the transaction, in case the original one does clear eventually. They can’t recall the original one either. Our source says he’s had a significant sized transaction waiting to be settled for two weeks.
The OCLC Research Library Partnership Metadata Managers Focus Group met in January 2025 to explore community cases for the use and re-use of linked data URIs found in MARC records. Members were invited to bring examples of work they are doing or have seen that activates linked data augmentations to MARC records in their discovery systems and integrations.
The round-robin of three separate discussions included 38 participants from 25 RLP institutions in 5 countries:
| British Library | Rutgers University | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | Smithsonian Institution | University of Kansas |
| Cornell University | Tufts University | University of Leeds |
| National Gallery of Art | University of Arizona | University of Pittsburgh |
| National Library of Australia | University of Calgary | University of Southern California |
| National Library of New Zealand | University of California, Los Angeles | University of Sydney |
| New York University | University of California, Riverside | University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
| Princeton University | University of Chicago | Virginia Tech |
| Radboud University | Yale University |
These discussions explored the technical and social challenges of transitioning to next-generation metadata formats. This blog post synthesizes the key topics that came up in the discussions, concerning URIs in MARC, the use of AI, and more general aspects of getting started with linked data in library metadata.
Like many complex systems, our transition to the next generation of metadata has both technical and social challenges. Over the past decade, the metadata community has been on a journey to transform the way we work from “strings” of description in MARC records toward knowledge graph structures that identify different entities and their relationships. Because building a graph structure is a bit like building an arch—you need all the pieces in place for it to be self-supporting—we’ve also had to deploy scaffolding to temporarily support our transition. One piece of this scaffolding is “linky MARC,” that extends the MARC format to include linked data URIs. Emerging from the PCC Task Group on URIs in MARC, the inclusion of these URIs facilitates the move toward next-generation metadata formats such as BIBFRAME.
New London Bridge under construction. © The Trustees of the British Museum / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 As part of OCLC’s linked data strategy, we have added more than 500 million WorldCat Entities URIs to WorldCat records for five entity types: Persons, Organizations, Places, Events, and Works. Enriching WorldCat bibliographic records with WorldCat Entities URIs establishes a bridge between MARC data and linked data, providing a starting point for connecting data across local systems and workflows and for using linked data functionality, such as in local discovery systems. These URIs and associated WorldCat Entities data are free for anyone to retrieve and use, through our website or via API, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC4.0) license. (Meridian subscribers also have creating/editing privileges).
While generative AI may be pulling at our attention, it’s important to remember that linked data also emerged from an earlier era of symbolic artificial intelligence systems—developers of the semantic web needed to present factual metadata statements and a mechanism for machines to interpret them in reasoning activities. In current conversations about AI, this has largely been replaced by the kinds of stochastic prediction methods offered by large-language models. However, the work the community has done on linked data over the last decade remains significant. A recent paper highlighted the strengths of knowledge graphs (aka linked data), search engines, and large-language models in addressing specific user needs. The authors suggest that integrating these technologies could lead to more effective solutions and emphasize the importance of considering the diverse information needs of users. They believe “that research on their combination and integration—with users in mind—will be particularly fruitful.”
The January 2025 Metadata Managers Focus Group round-robin session focused on the following discussion prompts:
The discussions revealed that members are navigating many issues:
While all participants were eager to learn about the benefits of URIs in MARC, most shared that there was little time to think about linked data. The immediate focus for many of them was the implementation of a new library service platform or the preparation for one. The latter would require prepping existing metadata for migration to the new platform in addition to keeping up with regular workflows, leaving little room for anything else.
This raises an important question about how the presence of linked data URIs in the metadata could make platform migrations smoother in the future.
Participants also shared that, at this point in time, linked data is not yet a driver for switching LSPs.
Few attendees had a clear vision for how they would use OCLC URIs in their systems and workflows, and how linked data features in their chosen LSP would take advantage of them. Also, there was some confusion about why OCLC is adding URIs, and under which license terms these could be used.
However, participants noted the need to provide linked data entities for institutional repositories, data repositories, and cultural collections, and felt that WorldCat Entities could be useful in this area. Person and organization entities were of particular interest, less so subject or classification URIs.
A more modern LSP could be an opportunity to use MARC encoded URIs in new cataloging workflows or user-facing discovery features. However, several participants noted challenges of working with currently available linked data features. They are seeking seamless tools and finding disjointed environments that aren’t ready for production use.
For example, URIs could be used to expand information on a particular entity and expose that information to users in a knowledge card. This can be an easy configuration change in systems where this is a feature. According to our attendees who are exploring this, metadata quality is still a significant part of making such a feature accurate and useful. Anecdotally, they shared examples where Person cards pointed to the wrong entity or contained incorrect information. Since these may rely on external sources, such as Wikidata, it requires skill and knowledge to update the sources. Even then, it may take time for those changes to propagate to local environments and become visible to end users.
Organizations who have adopted open-source discovery layers may need to dedicate local resources to develop workflows and interfaces that take advantage of linked data URIs.
Even where linked data features are available, if the underlying metadata is not aligned, users may still need to navigate between silos to find what they are looking for. A common example is that it is not always possible to look across both monographs and article-level publications for the same person. Even when ORCIDs and ISNI persistent identifiers are available, they may not be integrated into a single entity. When expanding beyond just bibliographic materials to include art and special collections, similar challenges remain when entity information hasn’t been unified.
This lack of linked data integration with current systems, tools, and workflows is a barrier to adoption, as is the lack of trust in existing linked data features or sources.
Participants also desire to better understand user needs to inform their work. None of our participants actively pursued systematic studies of how their users take advantage of entity information or browse, and there was a consensus that user studies are needed in this area. In addition, much of what we’ve previously learned about users that inform current discovery experiences is being shaken up by access to interactive AI chatbots. We flagged this topic as something to explore in a future session.
An ongoing concern among metadata managers is the role that AI will play in future cataloging and metadata workflows, especially as we move toward linked data approaches. During our discussion, metadata managers wanted to better understand how we can leverage AI’s advantages responsibly, in part by considering how best to inform others (catalogers, users, etc.) about the provenance of metadata records.
Participants with access to emerging AI cataloging assistants shared how these tools can help bootstrap brief records that are augmented in later human-centered workflows. Especially given that both general and special collections face significant backlogs (see our previous discussion about this in Keeping up with next-generation metadata for special collections and archives), having an AI assistant do the initial work of transcribing information from print would save time. Whether we can trust that these agents produce records of sufficient quality remains an area of study and interest.
A significant question that emerged in our conversation about the use of AI is how we are providing data provenance statements and at what level of granularity they are needed. For the agents mentioned above and in other early AI-driven MARC workflows, a consensus has developed around using a 588 Source of Description note to indicate that AI was used to create the description.
Because linky-MARC enables us to record a URI alongside textual labels, these URIs can also serve as a guide to data provenance. Participants noted that an LC/NACO Authority File record contains a great deal of information about how the authority was established and provides human-readable information that catalogers can use to make judgments about whether to trust it. This kind of trust can easily be extended to the linked data entities and URIs at id.loc.gov. How, then, can we express our confidence in different linked data sources in a way that replicates catalogers’ professional judgments, especially if those judgements were made by an AI agent? When presented with repeated entities that use different URIs, how do we choose among them? As one participant suggested, there may not be one single answer to this question. Rather, we may need to develop application profiles that express different levels of trust for different environments and use cases.
This blog post started by talking about how we’re building a linked data ecosystem that requires some scaffolding to support emergent data structures and workflows. In addition to shepherding their organizations onto new platforms, LLM-powered AIs are disrupting how we think about discovery and meeting user needs. Just as Google search upturned our concept of the OPAC and ushered us into an era of modern discovery layers, AI is challenging us to reimagine what we are doing with linked data. An example of this is the Library of Congress’ “Modern MARC” approach, which will further extend “linky” MARC by including additional identifiers and embracing linked data modeling choices that are better suited for translation into knowledge graphs. Beyond displaying knowledge cards in user interfaces, knowledge graph structures can fulfill their original promise by minimizing LLM hallucinations through metadata trusted by the humans in the loop.
Writing this blog post was a collaborative effort. Many thanks to all those who contributed, in particular my colleagues Rebecca Bryant, David Heimann, Erica Melko, Mercy Procaccini, Merrilee Proffitt and Chela Weber.
The post Activating URIs in linky MARC: an OCLC RLP discussion summary appeared first on Hanging Together.
During my sabbatical last year, one of the projects I worked on involved collecting images and videos from Instagram daily. I focused on US and Canadian political leaders, aiming to align this project with the 2024 US presidential election and the upcoming 2025 Canadian Federal Election.
My UWaterloo DigFemNet colleagues and I were looking to track misogyny and hate via hashtags associated with candidates and party leaders, so I created a small Python utility that I called digfemig. It grabbed the top 100 media for a given Instagram hashtag, and I ran it each day on a cron job. The utility is basically a wrapper around some core functionality in instagrapi.
It worked for a time – August to mid-December 2024 – until Instagram/Meta banned my collecting account and my dog’s account for a short period of time 😅. We’d hoped to collect at least through the inauguration in January 2025 (at which time I quit social media which is another story), and possibly through the 2025 Canadian Federal Election. But alas, after being banned multiple times, I decided to give up.
The awesome team of folks I’m working with find the juxtas I’ve created in the past really useful, so I pulled together the images I was able to grab, and updated juxta to work with the csv files I produced with digfemig. If you’re curious, you can check them all out on the “Insta-Politics: Visualizing Political Leaders via Collages” page I created for the project.
Hopefully we’ll have more to say about these images in the future!
Rest easy Toke. I miss you buddy 😭.
Social media saturates nearly every facet of our lives, and understanding its effects on society has never been more critical. This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads delves into recent studies and discussions of why misinformation is spread on platforms and ways to counteract it. As platforms continue to shape the way we communicate and process information, they also spark moral outrage and other intense emotions that can lead to the further spread of false content. Researchers are exploring how these dynamics unfold, as well as the roles of opportunists who exploit these platforms for personal or political gain.
As we navigate these challenges, there are things that individuals can do and things that we could expect platforms to do to reduce the impact of misinformation. While individuals can adopt practices to avoid contributing to misinformation, there is also a call for platforms to refine their moderation strategies, such as combining fact-checking with community-driven initiatives. Amidst these discussions, the potential impact of social media on adolescent wellbeing remains a concern, with experts debating its true role in rising mental health issues among young adults.
Also on DLTJ this past week:
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, follow me on Mastodon where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
“The vast majority of misinformation studies assume people want to be accurate, but certain things distract them,” says William J. Brady, a researcher at Northwestern University. “Maybe it’s the social media environment. Maybe they’re not understanding the news, or the sources are confusing them. But what we found is that when content evokes outrage, people are consistently sharing it without even clicking into the article.” Brady co-authored a study on how misinformation exploits outrage to spread online. When we get outraged, the study suggests, we simply care way less if what’s got us outraged is even real.—People will share misinformation that sparks “moral outrage”, Ars Technica, 2-Dec-2024
The article discusses the phenomenon of misinformation spreading online, particularly when it evokes "moral outrage." It starts with a fabricated quote attributed to Rob Bauer, chair of a NATO military committee, suggesting that NATO should preemptively strike Russia, which garnered significant attention despite being untrue. The misinformation received nearly 250,000 views on social media, amplified by figures like Alex Jones. This research challenges the common assumption that misinformation is primarily shared by mistake; rather, it suggests that outrage drives people to share content without verifying its accuracy. Because of that, traditional solutions aimed at promoting accuracy in sharing have proven ineffective.
There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content. They are opportunists. These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.—Some online conspiracy-spreaders don’t even believe the lies they’re spewing, The Conversation, 4-Oct-2024
The article explores the phenomenon of individuals who share conspiracy theories online without genuinely believing in them. The study identified various types of conspiracy-spreaders, including extremist groups that use conspiracies as a gateway for radicalization, governments that manipulate narratives for political gain, and others who do it for profit or to gain influence. Many everyday users even share conspiracies for attention or social validation, often without verifying the information. The article warns that these opportunists can eventually convince themselves of their own lies.
Emerging psychology research has revealed some tactics that can help protect our society from misinformation. Here are seven strategies you can use to avoid being misled, and to prevent yourself – and others – from spreading inaccuracies.—7 ways to avoid becoming a misinformation superspreader when the news is shocking, The Conversation, updated 15-Jul-2024
Whether your social media feed is filled with content driven by moral outrage, attempts to influence you, or schemes to profit from you, there are ways that you can break the cycle of spreading this misinformation. The strategies are: educate yourself about common disinformation tactics, recognize your own vulnerabilities and biases, carefully evaluate the credibility of information sources, pause before sharing content, be aware of how emotions can influence the spread of misinformation, gently challenge the misinformation you see, and stand with others when you see someone else challenge it. The article emphasizes that while there is no perfect solution, these steps can help protect individuals and their social networks from the harmful effects of false and misleading information.
Even before Meta’s announcement that it was ending fact-checking in favor of a Twitter-style community notes approach or Musk’s tweet in relation to the war in Ukraine, researchers at CITP were looking at the pluses and minuses of both systems.... [Princeton Computer Science Ph.D student Madelyne] Xiao thinks that the political turmoil surrounding Meta’s announcement hardened people into two camps. The debate has “…unhelpfully positioned (human) fact-checking as a content moderation strategy contra notes-like systems.” They should be used in conjunction: “Neither system is flawless! Both have much room for improvement!”—Fact-checking or Community Notes? Why not both!, Center for Information Technology Policy Blog, 26-Feb-2025
This is just a brief article from the Center for Information Technology Policy, but one to go to for links to other research and researchers. It was published around the same time as the next article that highlights deficiencies in the community-notes approach. Researchers from CITP suggest that both fact-checking and community notes can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the discussion reflects a need for a more nuanced understanding of these moderation strategies in combating disinformation effectively.
The billionaire leaders of social media giants have long been under pressure to quell the spread of mis- and disinformation. No system to date, from human fact-checkers to automation, has satisfied critics on the left or the right. One novel approach winning plaudits recently has been Community Notes. The crowdsourced method, first introduced by Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it and rebranded it as X, allows regular users to submit additional context to posts, offering up supporting evidence to set the record straight.... The system has advantages over the alternatives, but its limits as an antidote to misinformation are clear. So are its benefits for executives who have been dogged by intense scrutiny over misinformation and censorship for the better part of a decade. It allows them to outsource responsibility for what happens on their platforms to their users. And also the blame.—Community Notes on X and Meta Can’t Save Social Media From Itself [opinion], Bloomberg, 18-Mar-2025
This article is marked as an opinion piece in Bloomberg, but it is well researched with lots of hyperlinks to source material. It discusses the limitations of the Community Notes system implemented by social media platforms like Ex-Twitter and Meta to combat misinformation. Community Notes allows users to provide context and evidence to posts, promoting a sense of democratized information sharing. However, the article argues that this approach falls short of addressing the deeper issues inherent in social media's structure. The authors suggest that without significant changes to how these platforms operate, even innovative systems like Community Notes cannot resolve the ongoing challenges of misinformation. Ultimately, the piece highlights the struggle between user-generated content and the need for reliable information in digital spaces.
Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.—The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?, Nature (book review), 29-Mar-2024
This is a review of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which was published a year ago. The article suggests that while social media can foster connections, it often fails to provide genuine social interaction, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and mental distress. Various studies are cited to examine the relationship between social media usage and mental health outcomes, indicating that the effects are complex and multifaceted. The discussion also addresses the need for further research to understand the nuances of this relationship.
Littering is responsible for a very small percentage of the overall plastic in the environment. Based on this graph from the OECD, you can see littering is this teeny-tiny blue bar here, and mismanaged waste, not including littering, is this massive one at the bottom. Mismanaged waste includes all the things that end up either in illegal dump sites or burned in the open or in the rivers or oceans or wherever. The focus on littering specifically, it's an easy answer because obviously there's nothing wrong with discouraging people from littering, but it focuses on individual people's bad choices rather than systemic forces that are basically flushing plastic into the ocean every minute. Mismanaged waste includes everything that escapes formal waste systems. So they might end up dumped, they might end up burned, they might end up in the environment.—You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic, Business Insider via YouTube, 26-Sep-2024
Contrary to popular belief, most plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch stems from the fishing industry, with only a small fraction linked to consumer waste. The video highlights that mismanaged waste, rather than individual littering, is the primary contributor to plastic pollution, with 82% of macroplastic leakage resulting from this issue. It emphasizes the ineffectiveness of recycling as a solution, noting that less than 10% of plastics are currently recycled, and the industry has perpetuated the myth that recycling can resolve the plastic crisis. Microplastics, which are increasingly recognized as a major problem, originate from various sources, including tires and paint, with new data suggesting that paint is a significant contributor. The video stresses the need for systemic changes, including reducing plastic production and simplifying the chemicals used in plastics, as current efforts and pledges from corporations and governments have not effectively curbed plastic pollution.
What did you learn this week? Let me know on Mastodon or Bluesky.
This text, part of the #ODDStories series, tells a story of Open Data Day‘s grassroots impact directly from the community’s voices.
In a groundbreaking event held in Owerri, Imo State, journalists from various media organizations gathered for the Open Data Day 2025 workshop, aimed at equipping them with the necessary skills to utilize open data in climate and agricultural reporting. The workshop, hosted by Harriet Ijeomah, Managing Director of Harsco Media & Communications, was supported by Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Dataopian.
The event began with Harriet Ijeomah introducing the key supporters and emphasizing the crucial role of open data in tackling climate change and agricultural challenges in Nigeria. In her opening speech, she highlighted how Imo State has been severely impacted by extreme weather events, including flooding, excessive rainfall, and soil erosion. She referenced data from 2024, which showed that flooding displaced 7,832 people and affected 60,761 others in the state, while 16% of erosion incidents in Owerri were directly linked to intense rainfall.
Speaking on the significance of Open Data Day 2025, Ijeomah underscored the importance of open data in investigative journalism, stating, “Access to accurate and well-structured data is essential for journalists to tell compelling and solution-driven stories that can influence policy changes and drive sustainable development.”
The first session was led by Udochukwu Chukwu, a research and data expert, who delivered an extensive lecture on data reporting for agriculture and climate issues. He introduced participants to various sources of open data, with a strong emphasis on the Open Data Editor, showcasing its functionality and practical applications for journalists. Chukwu explained how data-driven journalism can help uncover hidden trends in climate change and agricultural production, making reference to real-world examples.
To reinforce the learning process, he facilitated a group exercise where journalists analyzed open datasets and developed reports on climate-related challenges in Imo State. These reports were designed to serve as a foundation for further investigative stories, bridging the gap between raw data and impactful storytelling.
Renowned development journalist Chinedu Hardy Nwadike took the stage to share his expertise on open data’s role in solution journalism. He stressed the need for journalists to harness available data in holding policymakers accountable and addressing key societal challenges. Hardy illustrated practical strategies for integrating data visualization into reports, ensuring that complex information is easily understood by the public.
The final session featured an insightful presentation by Adanna Ononiwu, who spoke on “How Journalists Can Position Themselves for International Opportunities” and “Leveraging Development Reporting as a Community Journalist.” She highlighted how data-driven journalism not only enhances the credibility of a journalist but also opens doors to global collaborations and funding opportunities. Adanna encouraged journalists to explore grants, fellowships, and networking platforms that support investigative and development reporting.
Beyond the technical sessions, the event provided a platform for networking and collaboration among media professionals. The interactive discussions allowed participants to share their experiences, ask questions, and exchange ideas on innovative approaches to data journalism.
As the workshop concluded, journalists expressed their appreciation for the training, emphasizing how it broadened their perspective on using data to drive impactful storytelling. A key takeaway from the event was the realization that open data is a vital tool in investigative journalism, and when properly utilized, it can influence policies, raise awareness, and drive sustainable solutions in climate and agriculture.
The event ended with a call to action for journalists to actively incorporate open data in their reporting and explore further training opportunities. The organizers assured continued engagement with participants through follow-up sessions, access to online resources, and mentorship programs to ensure sustained impact beyond the workshop.
With Open Knowledge and Dataopian supporting the initiative, the event marked a significant step toward strengthening the capacity of journalists in Imo State to use data for meaningful storytelling, ultimately contributing to informed decision-making and policy advocacy in Nigeria’s climate and agricultural sectors.
Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.
As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. In 2025, a total of 189 events happened all over the world between March 1st and 7th, in 57 countries using 15+ different languages. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.
DLF is pleased to announce that we have opened the Call for Proposals for the in-person DLF Forum and Learn@DLF, happening in Denver, Colorado, November 16-19, 2025.
We encourage proposals from members and non-members; regulars and newcomers; digital library practitioners from all sectors (higher education, museums and cultural heritage, public libraries, archives, etc.) and those in adjacent fields such as institutional research and educational technology; and students, early- and mid-career professionals and senior staff alike. We especially welcome proposals from individuals who bring diverse professional and life experiences to the conference, including those from underrepresented or historically excluded racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, immigrants, veterans, those with disabilities, and people of all sexual orientations or gender identities.
Learn more about our event and session formats, view the Call for Proposals, and submit.
The submission deadline for all proposals is Monday, April 14, at 11:59pm Mountain Time.
If you have any questions, please write to us at forum@diglib.org. We’re looking forward to seeing you in Denver this fall.
All best,
Team DLF
P.S. Want to stay updated on all things #DLFforum? Subscribe to our Forum newsletter.
The post Be a Part of the 2025 DLF Forum: Submit Your Proposal Today 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 Delaram Bayat on UnsplashIn the United States, March has been commemorated as Women’s History Month since 1987. Shorter observances go back to at least 1911, when 8 March was first declared as International Women’s Day. Each March, Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE), the blog from ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), collects all kinds of resources to keep libraries — especially but not just those that serve higher education — informed about important ideas and initiatives. “Commemorating Women’s History Month with TIE and Choice Content” brings together recent book reviews, blogs, webinars, podcasts, interviews, and other resources to help librarians, researchers, and other interested readers to prepare, learn, and study.
This annual service provided by ACRL’s Choice publishing unit may be more consequential than ever. “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating and Inspiring Generations” is the 2025 theme of National Women’s History Month as declared by the National Women’s History Alliance. Under its former name, the National Women’s History Project, NWHA was instrumental in establishing the commemorative month in 1987. Then as now, the organization has been devoted to “writing women back into history.” As part of that effort, OCLC worked with NWHA in 2023 to create the ”Women’s History” topic page on WorldCat.org. Thanks to the dynamic nature of the WorldCat bibliographic database, the preprogrammed searches are as up-to-date as WorldCat itself. Contributed by Jay Weitz.
When I read “Because I am Old” in the title of an academic journal article, it caught my attention–as it was intended to do. I know that older adults makeup a sizeable portion of active public library users and catering programs and services for them makes sense. The article describes the specific motivation for seniors to attend digital literacy training programs, which are all the things you would expect like feeling connected to society and family members and feeling ill-equipped to proficiently use information technology. Giving older adults a safe space to experiment is key to their success and boosts confidence. Libraries being that safe space feels natural, and many are already committed to serving this population. ALA’s new Elder Justice Task Force (EJTF) brings together librarians and advocates to centralize resources and learning around the myriad issues facing older adults. The EJTF will support librarians to create safe spaces for digital literacy and health and wellness courses that are sensitive to societal and internalized age discrimination. As noted in the Public Libraries Online article about the EJTF, serving older adult populations is often skipped in library science education and with the expected growth in this demographic the task force wants to aid librarians as they transition to a service model that cares for older adults at higher rates than children, young adults or adults.
There is a part of me that always has patience for people who need extra help. Sometimes that is people with disabilities, sometimes that is children and older adults. It’s a desire to be inclusive and caring in ways that society often moves past and forgets about, especially in the development of information technology. The EJTF fills a major gap in our social and library instruction, one that will affect the library profession in major ways. My hope is that the legacy of EJTF is that the library profession becomes more caring and inclusive of older adults in library programming. Contributed by Lesley A. Langa.
A new report from the American Library Association and Gallup, Empowering Voices, Inspiring Change: Advancing Diversity Within Librarianship, spotlights one of the profession’s most persistent issues, diversity in the library workforce. Based on interview and survey data (and drawing on previous research as well as workforce data), the report presents a nuanced view of the profession as it stands and makes recommendations for improvement.
One of the things I appreciated most about this report is that it digs into the concept of diversity as a nuanced and complex issue. The library workforce is not only white, but also overwhelmingly female, aging and lacking socioeconomic diversity. The profession faces issues around retention, degree attainment for new workers, and also faces issues due to persistent stereotypes around who librarians are, but what library work entails. One interviewee commented, “There’s this misconception that librarians are agreeable, nice, they drink tea and like cats.” As a dog-loving, non-tea drinker this resonates with me; similarly, my work had fallen outside of what the public would imagine as library work. I also appreciated the report’s focus on the intersectional experiences and the need for representation from multiple facets including neurodiversity. Contributed by Merrilee Proffitt.
American Library Association (ALA) president Cindy Hohl shared that that she is one of the millions of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in her 3 March 2025 message Spectrum of Leadership. The World Health Organization estimates that one child in 100 is autistic. It does not provide estimates on how many autistic adults there are in the world, but it seems reasonable to assume a similar figure for adults. Autistic adults may not disclose their status because of the social stigmas. ALA’s Reference and User Services Association has a webpage about ASD designed to provide information about providing services to ASD. While the page uses “may” language as in “a person with ASD may be unusually sensitive to smells,” this description of ASD patrons does not mention a single trait that might be seen as positive. It has instructions about contacting security or police to remove a person with ASD “in extreme cases” and informing law enforcement “that this person has a developmental disability and is not a criminal.” The tone of this page is a sharp contrast to Hohl’s description of ASD. Describing how she struggled with school, she writes, “I was not prepared to see my place in this world since I was focused on living in my own space and time, far from the societal pressures to be perfect. Turns out, I’m okay, and so are you.”
Hohl’s message is an important reminder that autistic people can be successful in a variety of careers, may communicate effectively with individuals and large groups, and may have any of the personality strengths that a neurotypical person does. As Hohl notes, the adversity she has experienced has taught her to use empathy when interacting with others. Hohl’s message reminded me of this quotation from the character Raymond Holt in the television show Brooklyn Nine-Nine: “Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place.” Contributed by Kate James.
The post Advancing IDEAs: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, 18 March 2025 appeared first on Hanging Together.
I work at a non-profit academic institution, on a site that manages, searches, and displays digitized historical materials: The Science History Institute Digital Collections.
Much of our stuff is public domain, and regardless we put this stuff on the web to be seen and used and shared. (Within the limits of copyright law and fair use; we are not the copyright holders of most of it). We have no general problem with people scraping our pages.
The problem is that, like many of us, our site is being overwhelmed with poorly behaved bots. Lately one of the biggest problems is with bots clicking on every possible combination of facet limits in our “faceted search” — this is not useful for them, and it overwhelms our site. “Search” pages are one of our most resource-constrained category of page in our present site, adding to the injury. Peers say even if we scaled up (auto or not) — the bots sometimes scale up to match anyway!
One option would be putting some kind of “Web Application Firewall” (WAF) in front of the whole app. Our particular combination of team and budget and platform (heroku) makes a lot of these options expensive for us in licensing, staff time to manage, or both. Another option is certainly putting the the whole thing behind (ostensibly free) CloudFlare CDN and using its built-in WAF, but we’d like to avoid giving our DNS over to CloudFlare, I’ve heard mixed reviews of CloudFlare free staying free, and generally am trying to avoid contributing to CloudFlare’s monopoly unaccountable control of the internet.`
Although ironically then, the solution we arrived at is still using CloudFlare, but Cloudflare’s Turnstile “captcha replacement”, one of those things that gives you the “check this box” or more often entirely interactive “checking if you are a bot” UXs.
[If you’re a tldr look at the code type, here’s the initial implementation PR in our open repo, there are some bug fixes since then
Update March 18 2025: There is now a gem implementation, bot_challenge_page. It is pre-1.0 and still evolving as we learn more about the problem space]
While this still might unfortunately lock people using unconventional browsers etc out (just the latest of many complaints on HackerNews), we can use this to only protect our search pages. Most of our traffic comes directly from Google to an individual item detail page, which we can now leave completely out of it. We have complete control of allow-listing traffic based on whatever characteristics, when to present the challenge, etc. And it turns out we had a peer at another institution who had taken this approach and found it successful, so that was encouraging.
While typical documented Turnstile usage involves protecting form submissions, we actually want to protect certain urls, even when accessed via GET. Would this actually work well? What’s the best way to implement it?
Fortunately, when asking around on a chat for my professional community of librarian and archivist software hackers, Joe Corall from Lehigh University said they had done the exact same thing (even in response to the same problem, bots combinatorially exploring every possible facet value), and had super usefully written it up, and it had been working well for them.
Joe’s article and the flowchart it contains is worth looking it. His implementation is as a Drupal plugin (and used in at least several Islandora instances); the VuFind library discovery layer recently implemented a similar approach. We have a Rails app, so needed to implement it ourselves — but with Joe paving the way (and patiently answering our questions, so we could start with the parameters that worked for him), it was pretty quick work, bouyed by the confidence this approach wasn’t just an experiment in the blue, but had worked for a similar peer.
Joe allow-listed certain client domain names based on reverse IP lookup, but I’ve started without that, not wanting the performance hit on every request if I can avoid it. Joe also allow-listed their “on campus” IPs, but we are not a university and only have a few staff “on campus” and I always prefer to show the staff the same thing our users are seeing — if it’s inconvenient and intolerable, we want to feel the pain so we fix it, instead of never even seeing the pain and not knowing our users are getting it!
I’m going to explain and link to how we implemented this in a Rails app, and our choices of parameters for the various parameterized things. But also I’ll tell you we’ve written this in a way that paves the way to extracting to a gem — kept everything consolidated in a small number of files and very parameterized — so if there’s interest let me know. (Code4Lib-ers, our slack is a great place to get in touch, I’m jrochkind).
Here’s the implementing PR. It is written in such a way to keep the code conslidated for future gem extraction, all in the BotDetectController class, which means kind of weirdly there is some code to inject in class methods in the controller. While it does turnstile now, it’s written with variable/class names such that analagous products could be made available.
We were already using rack-attack to rate-limit. We added a “track” monitor with our code to decide when a client had passed a rate-limit gate to require a challenge. We start with allowing 10 requests per 12 hours (Joe at Lehigh did 20 per 24 hours), batched together in subnets. (Joe did subnets too, but we do smaller /24 (ie x.y.z.*) for ipv4 instead of Joe’s larger /16 (x.y.*.*)).
Note that rack-attack does not use sliding/rolling-windows for rate limits, but fixed windows that reset after window period. This makes a difference especially when you use such a long period as we are, but it’s not a problem with our very low count per period, and it does keep the RAM extremely effiicent (just an integer count per rate limit bucket).
When the rate limit is reached, the rack-attack block just sets a key/value in the rack_env to tell another component that a challenge is required. (setting in the session may have worked, but we want to be absolutely sure this will work even if client is not storing cookies, and this is really only meant as this-request state, so rack env seemed the good way to set state in rack-attack that could be seen in a rails controller)
There’s a Rails before_action filter that we just put on the application-wide ApplicationController, that looks for the “bot challenge key” required in the rack env — if present, and there isn’t anything in the session saying they have already passed a bot challenge, then we redirect to a “challenge” page, that will display/activate Turnstile.
We simply put the original/destination URL in a query param on that page. (And include logic to refuse to redirect to anything but a relative path on same host, to avoid any nefarious uses).
One action in our BotDetectController just displays the turnstile challenge. The cloudflare turnstile callback gives us a token we need to verify server-side with turnstile API to verify challenge was really passed.
the front-end does a JS/xhr/fetch request to the second action in our BotDetectController. The back-end verify action makes the API call to turnstile, and if challenge passed, sets a value in Rails (encrypted and signed, secure) session with time of pass, so the before_action guard can give the user access.
if the JS in front gets a go-ahead from back-end, it uses JS document.replace to go to original destination. This conveniently removes the challenge page from the user’s browser history, as if it never happened, browser back button still working great.
In most cases the challenge page, if non-interactive, wont’ be displayed for more than a few seconds. (the language has been tweaked since these screenshots).
We currently have a ‘pass’ good for 24 hours — once you pass a turnstile challenge, if your cookies/session are intact, you won’t be given another one for 24 hours no matter how much traffic. All of this is easily configurable.
If the challenge DOES fail for some reason, the user may be looking at the Challenge page with one of two kinds of failures, and some additional explanatory text and contact info.
This particular flow only works for GET requests. It could be expanded to work for POST requests (with an invisible JS created/submitted form?), but our initial use case didn’t require it, so for now the filter just logs a warning and fails for POST.
This flow also isn’t going to work for fetch/ajax requests, it’s set up for ordinary navigation, since it redirects to a challenge then redirects back. Our use case is only protecting our search pages — but the blacklight search in our app has a JS fetch for “facet more” behavior. Couldn’t figure out a good/easy way to make this work, so for now we added an exemption config, and just exempt requests to the #facet action that look like they’re coming from fetch. Not bothered that an “attacker” could escape our bot detection for this one action; our main use case is stopping crawlers crawling indiscriminately, and I don’t think it’ll be a problem.
To get through the bot challenge requires a user-agent to have both JS and cookies enabled. JS may have been required before anyway (not sure), but cookies were not. Oh well. Only search pages are protected by the bot challenge.
The Lehigh implementation does a reverse-lookup of the client IP, and allow-lists clients from IP’s that reverse lookup to desirable and well-behaved bots. We don’t do that, in part because I didn’t want the performance hit of the reverse-lookup. We have a Sitemap, and in general, I’m not sure we need bots crawling our search results pages at all… although I’m realizing as I write this that our “Collection” landing pages are included (as they show search results)… may want to exempt them, we’ll see how it goes.
We don’t have any client-based allow-listing… but would consider just exempting any client that has a user-agent admitting it’s a bot, all our problematic behavior has been from clients with user-agents appearing to be regular browsers (but obviously automated ones, if they are being honest).
We could possibly only enable the bot challenge when the site appears “under load”, whether that’s a certain number of overall requests per second, a certain machine load (but any auto-scaling can make that an issue), or size of heroku queue (possibly same).
We could use more sophisticated fingerprinting for rate limit buckets. Instead of IP-address-based, colleague David Cliff from Northeastern University has had success using HTTP user-agent, accept-encoding, and accept-language to fingerprint actors across distributed IPs, writing:
I know several others have had bot waves that have very deep IP address pools, and who fake their user agents, making it hard to ban.
We had been throttling based on the most common denominator (url pattern), but we were looking for something more effective that gave us more resource headroom.
On inspecting the requests in contrast to healthy user traffic we noticed that there were unifying patterns we could use, in the headers.
We made a fingerprint based on them, and after blocking based on that, I haven’t had to do a manual intervention since.
def fingerprint
result = “#{env[“HTTP_ACCEPT”]} | #{env[“HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING”]} | #{env[“HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE”]} | #{env[“HTTP_COOKIE”]}”
Base64.strict_encode64(result)
end
…the common rule we arrived at mixed positive/negative discrimination using the above
request.env["HTTP_ACCEPT"].blank? && request.env["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"].blank? && request.env["HTTP_COOKIE"].blank? && (request.user_agent.blank? || !request.user_agent.downcase.include?("bot".downcase))
so only a bot that left the fields blank and lied with a non-bot user agent would be affected
We could also base rate limit or “discriminators” for rate limit buckets on info we can look up from the client IP address, either a DNS or network lookup (performance worries), or perhaps a local lookup using the free MaxMind databases that also include geocoding and some organizational info.
Too early to say, we just deployed it!
I sometimes get annoyed when people blog like this, but being the writer, I realized that if I wait a month to see how well it’s working to blog — I’ll never blog! I have to write while it’s fresh and still interesting to me.
But encouraged that colleagues say very similar approaches have worked for them. Thanks again to Joe Corral for paving the way with a drupal implementation, blogging it, discussing it on chat, and answering questions! And all the other librarian and cultural heritage technologists sharing knowledge and collaboration on this and many other topics!
I can say that already it is being triggered a lot, by bots that don’t seem to get past it. This includes google bot and Meta-ExternalAgent (which I guess is AI-related; we have no particular use-based objections we are trying to enforce here, just trying to preserve our resources). While Google also has no reason to combinatorially explore every facet combination (and has a sitemap), I’m not sure if I should exempt known resource-considerate bots from the challenge (and whether to do so by trusting user-agent or not; our actual problems have all been with ordinary-browser-appearing user-agents).
Our original config — allowing 10 search results per IP subnet before turnstile challenge — was not enough to keep the bot traffic from overwhelming us. Too many botnets had enough IPs making apparently fewer than 10 requests each.
Lowering that to 2 requests was enough to reduce traffic enough. (Keep in mind that a user should only get one challenge per 24 hours unless IP address changes — although that makes me realize that people using Apple’s “private browsing” feature may get more, hmm).
Pretty obvious on these heroku dashboard graphs where our succesful turnstile config was deployed, right?
I think I would be fine going down to challenge on first search results, since a human user should still only get one per 24 hour period — but since the “success passed” mark in session is tied to IP address (to avoid session replay for bots to avoid the challenge), I am now worried about Apple “private browsing”! In today’s environment with so many similar tests, I wonder if private browsing is causing problems for users and bot protections?
You can see on the graph a huge number of 3xx responses — those are our redirects to challenge page! The redirect to and display of the challenge page seem to be cheap enough that they aren’t causing us a problem even in high volume — which was the intent, nice to see it confirmed at least with current traffic.
We are only protecting our search result page, not our item detail pages (which people often get to directly to google) — this also seems succesful. The real problem was the volume of hits from so many bots trying to combinatorially explore every possible facet limit, which we have now put a stop to.
When envisioning a high-tech makerspace, you might first think about younger customers; however, since opening in December 2021, Carroll County Public Library’s Exploration Commons at 50 East has created a place of learning and sharing that knows no age limit. From programs designed for seniors, resources for entrepreneurs, and opportunities for volunteering, Exploration Commons provides a center for intergenerational knowledge exchange where our community’s senior population thrives.
The open movement at large is one of radical redistribution of power. However, as it currently stands, access advocacy often falls short when it comes to individuals within the prison industrial complex. The pervasive assumption that open means accessible inhibits scholarship, especially for justice-impacted scholars who do not have "regular" internet access. While this is especially difficult for students experiencing incarceration, a lack of equitable access is an issue for all library users. This is a reflection on open access, intellectual freedom, digital equity, and the duty of librarians to be mindful of access barriers in conversations surrounding these topics, as well as an overview of the technology and scholarship access within the prison industrial complex. It's informed based on my own experience with justice-impacted scholars in California State Prisons as well as current literature around education programs and digital (in)equity issues for those currently and recently incarcerated. It is a call for furthering our discussions and advocacy by acknowledging current limitations in order to appreciate the full potential of openness as an equalizer, a philosophy and practice that promotes information equity for all.
This paper presents a case study about opportunities for libraries to elevate reporting on their organization's financial status, transactions, and available funds using data visualization, specifically with Power BI, based on work at University of Oregon Libraries. The Power BI dashboard aggregates data from the university’s financial system and integrated library system to provide a consolidated view, and to tell the library's story in a more engaging way. The author proposes using this type of business intelligence technology to provide a transformative impact on financial operations of libraries.
This viewpoint article explores Scopus AI—Elsevier’s innovative add-on to the Scopus database—which allows users to engage with Scopus in natural language rather than via Boolean operators. Scopus AI’s strength lies in combining the communication properties of a large language model with the information integrity of peer-reviewed sources. It does not substitute the need to review the literature but can be helpful in search, especially if stakes are low and a systematic approach is unnecessary. Because of increased sophistication of tools and information systems, the degree of competencies required from users also increases. Reasonable understanding of how AI works, as well as search expertise, a critical approach to source evaluation, and scientific skepticism remain essential. With these in place, and with a clear understanding of the purpose of various information tasks, users can be better positioned to decide how best to employ various tools to get the job done.
The British Library is a flagship library that plays a pivotal role in the UK learning and research infrastructure, in addition to being a central conduit for international library linkages. However, in late October 2023, this premier institution was the subject of a cyberattack that has left it crippled. The Rhysida group perpetrated this catastrophic ransomware attack. Underfunding and threat identification are explored as potential weaknesses resulting in deficiencies in the British Library’s online security systems. To help prevent further such assaults in libraries, this Commentary also details what is known about the attack and how such breaches might be prevented in the future.
With the rapid development of information technology, automated systems in Chinese academic libraries have undergone a process from inception to maturity. This study aims to review the development history of automated systems in Chinese academic libraries and provide a forward-looking analysis of their future trends. Through the review of historical data, this paper summarizes the development characteristics of automated systems in Chinese academic libraries. By conducting a survey of automated systems in the libraries of 39 Double First-Class universities in China, the current status of automated systems in Chinese academic libraries is analyzed. The article concludes by proposing future directions for the development of automated systems in Chinese academic libraries.
As board game collections continue to grow in popularity at academic institutions, the University of Idaho Library wanted to establish an accessible and easy-to-use discovery tool for its physical game collection. At the collections’ origins, a LibGuide was created by librarians for this purpose, but as the collection records continued to grow into the triple digits, something more adaptable and customizable was necessary. In the summer of 2023, a team of librarians came together to build a custom site to house the game collection’s information using CollectionBuilder, an open-source framework for digital collections and exhibits websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology. Creating this site came with unique challenges and considerations specific to the University of Idaho Library’s needs in displaying their board games. CollectionBuilder’s ability to support iterative and agile development, ample instructional documentation, and seemingly endless customizations makes it a suitable solution for a growing and changing collection discovery tool.
My protest sign for the #TeslaTakedown today.There was another #TeslaTakedown march today. It was a windy, gloomy day; despite that, lots of spirit at the Easton Tesla store. I was expecting the weather would keep people away, but there were about 400 people — 50 or so more than last Saturday.
There were three differences that I noticed. First, there weren't as many families with young children. I would chalk that up to the weather; if it were nicer, there probably would have been more. A week out, next Saturday's weather forecast is slightly cooler but sunny. We'll see what happens then.
The second difference was the increased police presence. They probably were expecting more people, and so had a bigger group there. Most wore pale blue "Columbus Police Dialogue Team" high-vis vests and walked behind us. The only interaction with them that I saw was when a young adult walked along the sidewalk shouting "Trump 2028!" with his phone up recording. As far as I could tell, the Dialogue Team was the only one to engage with this person.
The third difference was the support from the cars driving by...much more supportive with honking and thumbs up. I counted three middle fingers, which is one more than last weekend. Not a bad ratio for an hour-long protest.
I think the construction of my protest sign is improving. I noticed when I got there that I still had too many words in the sign to make it easy to read and understand at a distance. At least this one didn't require a blog post to fully explain.
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown.I've had to ask people to take these pictures of me with the protest sign in front of the Tesla store. And everyone says they don't know how to use a camera anymore. Even people my age and older!
I brought an old point-and-shoot camera because it doesn't have any radios in it. One of the guidelines I've read for attending a protest is not to bring devices that can identify you, although I might be the only person following that guidance. If I were a technical Elon-ite, I'd recommend that the Tesla store's WiFi and Bluetooth hotspots capture metadata of every device they encounter. Although both Android and iOS use network address randomization, those are not foolproof for preventing devices from being tracked.
Now, admittedly, I'm not hiding from Elon Goons by posting this on my personal blog. Still, I'm also not going to make it easy for them to automate finding me either.
| Month | Media | Good | Bad | Vendor |
| 01/04 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 05/04 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | Memorex |
| 02/06 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 11/06 | DVD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 12/06 | DVD-R | 1x | 0 | GQ |
| 01/07 | DVD-R | 4x | 0 | GQ |
| 04/07 | DVD-R | 3x | 0 | GQ |
| 05/07 | DVD-R | 2x | 0 | GQ |
| 07/11 | DVD-R | 4x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 08/11 | DVD-R | 1x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 05/12 | DVD+R | 2x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 06/12 | DVD+R | 3x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 04/13 | DVD+R | 2x | 0 | Optimum |
| 05/13 | DVD+R | 3x | 0 | Optimum |
with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 20 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 18 years old.But the DVD-R media lifetime is not why I'm writing backups to them. The attribute I'm interested in is that DVD-Rs are write-once; the backup data could be destroyed but it can't be modified.
Archival-only media such as steel tape, silica DVDs, 5D quartz DVDs, and now DNA face some fundamental business model problems because they function only at the very bottom of the storage hierarchy. The usual diagram of the storage hierarchy, like this one from the Microsoft/UW team researching DNA storage, makes it look like the size of the market increases downwards. But that's very far from the case.IBM's Georg Lauhoff and Gary M Decad's slide shows that the size of the market in dollar terms decreases downwards. LTO tape is less than 1% of the media market in dollar terms and less than 5% in capacity terms. Archival media are a very small part of the storage market. It is noteworthy that in 2023 Optical Archival (OD-3), the most recent archive-only medium, was canceled for lack of a large enough market. It was a 1TB optical disk, an upgrade from Blu-Ray.
A Silica library is a sequence of contiguous write, read, and storage racks interconnected by a platter delivery system. Along all racks there are parallel horizontal rails that span the entire library. We refer to a side of the library (spanning all racks) as a panel. A set of free roaming robots called shuttles are used to move platters between locations.
...
A read rack contains multiple read drives. Each read drive is independent and has slots into which platters are inserted and removed. The number of shuttles active on a panel is limited to twice the number of read drives in the panel. The write drive is full-rack-sized and writes multiple platters concurrently.
The Silica read drives use polarization microscopy, which is a commoditized technique widely used in many applications and is low-cost. Currently, system cost in Silica is dominated by the write drives, as they use femtosecond lasers which are currently expensive and used in niche applications. ... As the Silica technology proliferates, it will drive up the demand for femtosecond lasers, commoditizing the technology.
 |
| The voyage |
Much of the attraction of cloud technology for organizations, especially public institutions funded through a government's annual budget process, is that they transfer costs from capital to operational expenditure. It is easy to believe that this increases financial flexibility. As regards ingest and dissemination, this may be true. Ingesting some items can be delayed to the next budget cycle, or the access rate limit lowered temporarily. But as regards preservation, it isn't true. It is unlikely that parts of the institution's collection can be de-accessioned in a budget crunch, only to be re-accessioned later when funds are adequate. Even were the content still available to be re-ingested, the cost of ingest is a significant fraction of the total life-cycle cost of preserving digital content.
| Archival Services | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service | In | Store | Out | Total | Lock-in |
| AMZN Glacier | $2,821 | $60,182 | $69,260 | $132,263 | 13.8 |
| GOOG Coldline | $4,514 | $105,319 | $105,144 | $214,977 | 12.0 |
| MSFT Archive | $7,962 | $30,091 | $20,387 | $58,440 | 8.1 |
| Archival Services | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service | In | Store | Out | Total | Lock-in |
| AMZN Glacier Deep Archive | $500 | $10,900 | $49,550 | $60,950 | 50.0 |
| GOOG Archive | $500 | $13,200 | $210,810 | $224,510 | 175.6 |
| MSFT Archive | $100 | $22,000 | $40,100 | $62,200 | 20.0 |
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| Original Logo |
Replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work. If we have 30,000 drives and 2 percent fail, it takes 150 hours to replace those. In other words, one employee for one month of 8 hour days. Getting the failure rate down to 1 percent means you save 2 weeks of employee salary - maybe $5,000 total? The 30,000 drives costs you $4m.
The $5k/$4m means the Hitachis are worth 1/10th of 1 per cent higher cost to us. ACTUALLY we pay even more than that for them, but not more than a few dollars per drive (maybe 2 or 3 percent more).
Moral of the story: design for failure and buy the cheapest components you can. :-)
Today, we are delighted to announce the selected organisations for a new pilot programme of the Open Data Editor (ODE), Open Knowledge’s new open source desktop application for data practitioners to detect errors in tables. Since we opened the call for applications last January, we’ve received 71 applications in total, and we couldn’t be more inspired by the level of interest in testing it.
The applications came from 41 different countries and organisations with a wide range of data practices. The Open Data Editor has the potential to be a useful tool for working with different types of datasets, such as climate, gender, infrastructure, health, genomic, GLAM, digital literacy, public sector data and government accountability, among others.
Our goal this year is to enhance digital literacy through no-code tools. Using Open Data Editor helps to fill the literacy gap for people and teams in non-technological sectors. The selected organisations will work closely with our team from March to June 2025, integrating the application into their internal workflows and thus informing the next development steps through their use. And while doing so, they will gain lasting data skills across their institutions.
We are impressed by the vital work those organisations are doing in their fields. We hope that better data will enhance this work through no-code tools like the Open Data Editor. We’re looking forward to seeing ODE in action to help solve real-life problems.
Read more about the pilot organisations below, in alphabetical order:
Country: 
Kenya
Area of Knowledge: Computational Biology
Targeted Datasets: Genomic data and metadata, and Community data
Staff and students at the BHKi campus outreach at the University of Nairobi. Photo: BHKi (source)
Pauline Karega, Coordinator
“We will explore the use of ODE to curate and harmonise genomic data and metadata, and community data. Additionally, we will gather information on bioinformatics/computational biology learners, who collect and use this data, and their experiences with the data. Our goal is to track their needs and interests across East Africa, to better inform outreach activities.”
“We have a big community of students and researchers doing fieldwork who are new to data collection and have minimal resources, but need to accurately collect, store and communicate data to others. This tool can be a gentle introduction to practice as they learn advanced coding skills to curate and work on the data.”
Country: 
Croatia
Area of Knowledge: Public Administration
Targeted Datasets: Infrastructure data
ZG HACKL – Hackathon for Open Zagreb 2024 (source)
Kristian Ravic, Senior advisor
“ODE will be used for bridging interoperability challenges within our existing (open) data infrastructure, ensuring frictionless data exchange between various data platforms, data sources and data formats. We will use ODE to standardise open data processes and data management procedures by improving data transformation and data validation processes and publishing of open data on multiple data platforms.”
“Currently, we have a non-technical data team with low or no-coding skills. So, there is a skill-gap within our organization and a tool like ODE would help us be more efficient in connecting various data (re)sources and, thus publishing more high value datasets on our central open data platform.”
Country: Kenya
Area of Knowledge: Environmental Justice
Targeted Datasets: Water and Air quality data, and Electoral data
Flagging off of the 2024 Ondiri Wetlands Conservation Run in Kikuyu Municipality. Photo: The Demography Project (source)
Richard Muraya, Executive Director
“ODE is a welcome opportunity for enhanced data quality of our environmental monitoring projects as well as our electoral/parliamentary monitoring project. We intend to deploy ODE to analyse large open government and citizen-generated datasets on atmospheric (air quality) and freshwater resources for enhanced personal and collective responsibility over rapidly degrading natural resources in Kenya.”
“We are a small team of determined volunteer citizen scientists, environmental journalists and innovators with inadequate technical expertise in programming or advanced computing techniques. A no-code tool will truly be a game-changer in how my team reviews and validates our tabulated environmental datasets to identify trends and errors and ultimately publish our outputs for collective climate action.”
Country: 
France
Area of Knowledge: Weapon Monitoring
Targeted Datasets: Arms and defence expenditure databases
Act for nuclear disarmament in partnership with several organisations. Photo: Guy Dechesne (source)
Sayat Topuzogullari, Coordinator
“We are setting up a monitoring network of arms companies, the Weapon Watch Open Data Environment platform to monitor public and private spending on defence and armaments. It will be used by researchers, journalists, investigators, parliamentarians, whistleblowers and activists across Europe. In this context, we need a simple data entry tool, suitable for people who are not computer literate.”
“Our monitoring network aims to involve as many people as possible in defense and security issues, a taboo subject in France. For this reason, it’s essential to offer an easy tool for finding errors in databases and improving data quality.”
Country: 
Nepal
Area of Knowledge: Government Data
Targeted Datasets: Infrastructure data (local governments)
Moment of the Data Hackdays 2024 in Kathmandu. Photo: OKNP (source)
Nikesh Balami, CEO
“We plan to integrate ODE into the IDMS project workflow, a system that allows local governments to store, update, and access ready-to-use data. We will use it to audit existing system datasets, identify errors, and enhance data quality. The goal is to ensure that citizens have access to high-quality datasets. Additionally, we will localise ODE user guides in the Nepali language to assist local government and non-technical users in learning how to use the tool effectively.”
“ODE will empower non-technical staff to identify, clean, and validate data without requiring coding skills. By allowing municipal staff to handle data errors directly, it will reduce the burden on technical teams and improve data efficiency. The current manual data cleaning process is time-consuming, and introducing a no-code tool like ODE will simplify and streamline workflows, saving time and resources while ensuring high-quality datasets.”
Above you learned what these organisations will do with ODE. But you can also download it now and try it out for yourself. ODE is an open, free desktop application, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Here are a few tasks that ODE can help you with:
If you have huge spreadsheets with data obtained through forms with the communities you serve, ODE helps you detect errors in this data to understand what needs to be fixed.
If you manage databases related to any social issue, ODE can quickly check if there are empty rows or missing cells in the data collected by different social workers and help you better allocate assistance.
If you monitor and review government spending or public budgets for a particular department, ODE helps you find errors in the table and make the data ready for analysis.
The Open Data Editor helps you find errors in your tables and spreadsheets
A big thanks again to all organisations that applied for the pilot programme! We will be launching another call for a second cohort in May 2025, and we strongly encourage those who were not selected to apply again. We know a lot of you spend much more time than you desire cleaning up the data before starting to do the work that is really of interest to you. ODE is here to help.
If you have any questions or want any additional information about ODE, you can contact us at info@okfn.org.
All of Open Knowledge’s work with the Open Data Editor is made possible thanks to a charitable grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Learn more about its funding programmes here.
This week's thread of articles looks at the ever-evolving landscape of digital security and privacy through end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption is a method of securing communication where only the people communicating can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers — including telecom providers, Internet providers, and even the provider of the communication service — from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation. In practice, governments and others want to be able to put themselves in the middle of those conversations for both noble and dishonorable reasons. From unprecedented cyberattacks leading US officials to urge citizens to use encrypted messaging apps, to tech companies like Apple butting heads with the UK government over data privacy, the balance of power and privacy is under constant tension.
Also on DLTJ this past week:
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, follow me on Mastodon where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.—U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid cyberattack, NBC News, 3-Dec-2024
Late last year, the U.S. announced a significant attack against telecommunication companies. This hacking campaign, known as Salt Typhoon, is one of the largest intelligence breaches in U.S. history, with officials stating that the full extent of the compromise has not been resolved. The attackers accessed various types of sensitive information, including call metadata and live conversations of specific targets, notably around Washington, D.C. In light of that, the FBI and CISA recommended that Americans use messaging apps that feature end-to-end encryption. There is more than just a touch of irony here because federal law enforcement pushed for the passage of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in the mid-1990s that put backdoors into telecommunications equipment for law enforcement. It was these backdoors that were used by the Salt Typhoon attackers. There is no such thing as an encryption backdoor that will only be used by authorized law enforcement.
Apple is taking legal action to try to overturn a demand made by the UK government to view its customers&apos private data if required... It is the latest development in an unprecedented row between one of the world&aposs biggest tech firms and the UK government over data privacy. In January, Apple was issued with a secret order by the Home Office to share encrypted data belonging to Apple users around the world with UK law enforcement in the event of a potential national security threat. Data protected by Apple&aposs standard level of encryption is still accessible by the company if a warrant is issued, but the firm cannot view or share data encrypted using its toughest privacy tool, Advanced Data Protection (ADP). ADP is an opt-in feature and it is not known how many people use it.—Apple takes legal action in UK data privacy row, BBC News, 4-Mar-2025
In response to the UK order, Apple removed ADP from the UK market rather than create a "backdoor" for access. The UK Home Office maintains that privacy is only compromised in exceptional cases related to serious crimes. But, as the previous article points out, there is no such thing as a law-enforcement-only capability; if there is a weakness in an encryption system, it will eventually be exploited by someone with the time or talent to break it.
Sweden’s law enforcement and security agencies are pushing legislation to force Signal and WhatsApp to create technical backdoors allowing them to access communications sent over the encrypted messaging apps.... The bill could be taken up by the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, next year if law enforcement succeeds in getting it before the relevant committee, SVT Nyheter reported. The legislation states that Signal and WhatsApp must retain messages and allow the Swedish Security Service and police to ask for and receive criminal suspects’ message histories, the outlet reported. Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer told the Swedish press that it is vital for Swedish authorities to access the data.—Swedish authorities seek backdoor to encrypted messaging apps, The Record, 25-Feb-2025
A few paragraphs down in the article, the Swedish Armed Forces are mentioned as opposing the bill because they routinely use Signal, and a backdoor could introduce vulnerabilities that bad actors could exploit.
—Stop playing games with online security, Signal president warns EU lawmakers, TechCrunch, 17-Jun-2024
The open source Signal messaging app is considered the gold standard for end-to-end encrypted messaging. Meridith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation, and she has strong words for lawmakers' efforts to weaken encryption algorithms. Ms Whittaker was also quoted in the previous article about Sweden's efforts. The European Commission originally proposed legislation to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, but the European Parliament has rejected the approach. Experts like Whittaker argue this would create vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and hostile states. The EU's data protection supervisor has also voiced concerns that the plan threatens democratic values.
The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that’s never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today. The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users.—The Signal Protocol used by 1+ billion people is getting a post-quantum makeover, Ars Technica, 20-Sep-2023
I don't know if quantum computing will be what breaks the current generation of encryption protocols, but progress in faster hardware and more research into encryption means that the day will come at some point. The Signal protocol revision uses a "post-quantum cryptography algorithm" adopted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There are researchers on both sides of this divide: those working to advance encryption protocols and those seeking to break them.
While practical quantum computing technology may still be years or decades away, security officials, tech companies, and governments are ramping up their efforts to start using a new generation of post-quantum cryptography. These new encryption algorithms will, in short, protect our current systems against any potential quantum computing-based attacks. Today Cupertino is announcing that PQ3—its post-quantum cryptographic protocol—will be included in iMessage.—iMessage Gets Post-Quantum Encryption in New Update, WIRED, 21-Feb-2024
Apple follows Signal's lead in deploying its own quantum-safe encryption protocol for iMessage. Apple is using the same Kyber algorithm tha Signal adopted. Deploying post-quantum encryption now aims to limit the impact of "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, where encrypted data is collected and held until quantum computers can break it.
Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.”... I was particularly happy to see people thinking about this topic, since it’s been on my mind in a half-formed state this past few months. On the one hand, my interest in the topic was piqued by the deployment of new AI assistant systems like Google’s scam call protection and Apple Intelligence, both of which aim to put AI basically everywhere on your phone — even, critically, right in the middle of your private messages. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about the negative privacy implications of AI due to the recent European debate over “mandatory content scanning” laws that would require machine learning systems to scan virtually every private message you send.—Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption, Matthew Green, 17-Jan-2025
This blog post discusses the implications of AI technologies on the security and privacy of encrypted communications. The author emphasizes the importance of maintaining robust encryption standards in the face of evolving AI capabilities that could potentially undermine these protections. Take, for example, the need for AI agents to be snooping in on your conversations so it has the context to take actions on your behalf: "Agent, book a two-person reservation at the restaurant Dave just messaged me about." The author advocates for a collaborative approach between cryptographers and AI developers to ensure that AI advancements do not compromise encrypted data security.
This is where pollen comes in. Like sperm, pollen contains one DNA set from its parent, but unlike sperm, pollen itself is actually its own separate living plant made of multiple cells that under the right conditions can live for months depending on the species... So this tiny male offspring plant is ejected out into the world, biding its time until it meets up with its counterpart. The female offspring of the plant, called an embryosac, which you're probably less familiar with since they basically never leave home. They just stay inside flowers. Like again, they're not part of the flower. They are a separate plant living inside the flower. Once the pollen meets an embryosac, the pollen builds a tube to bridge the gap between them. Now it's time for the sperm. At this point, the pollen produces exactly two sperm cells, which it pipes over to the embryosac, which in the meantime has produced an egg that the sperm can meet up with. Once fertilized, that egg develops into an embryo within the embryosac, hence the name, then a seed and then with luck a new plant. This one with two sets of DNA.—Pollen Is Not Plant Sperm (It’s MUCH Weirder), MinuteEarth, 7-Mar-2025
What did you learn this week? Let me know on Mastodon or Bluesky.
The University of Michigan Library's "Everything" results page after the changes described in this post were implemented.
Last Friday, we wrapped up another edition of Open Data Day with the feeling that despite recent backlashes and new structural and geopolitical challenges to open data and technologies, the open data community remains active and resilient in every corner of the planet.
In 2025, we saw powerful bottom-up energy across 189 events in 57 countries and more than 15 languages. We are small data teams within public institutions, enthusiast collectives working with communities, innovative academics, mappers, and makers from around the world. And together we make a difference!
Before starting the #ODDStories 2025 series, with stories of impact from events around the world, here’s a high-level report with the main figures and data on the 2025 edition.
We at the Open Knowledge Foundation would like to thank Datopian and the Communauté d’Afrique Francophone des Données Ouvertes (CAFDO) for their support in sponsoring the mini-grants. This financial support allows us to expand local open data networks in places that often don’t receive any form of funding (such as Francophone Africa, the focus of an exclusive stream in this year’s edition).
Let’s move on to 2026 with an even bigger, more diverse and impactful event!
Open Data Day (ODD) is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. Groups from many countries create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. ODD is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and the Open Knowledge Network.
As a way to increase the representation of different cultures, since 2023 we offer the opportunity for organisations to host an Open Data Day event on the best date over one week. All outputs are open for everyone to use and re-use.
For more information, you can reach out to the Open Knowledge Foundation team by emailing opendataday@okfn.org. You can also join the Open Data Day Google Group or join the Open Data Day Slack channel to ask for advice, share tips and get connected with others.
The NDSA Levels Steering Group has been diligently keeping tabs on how the Levels get deployed “in the wild” at our monthly meetings. The task is a way to understand the needs of the digital preservation community, and to document the usefulness of the NDSA’s signature digital preservation tool.
Levels sightings occur in a variety of formats, ranging from their use in program assessment, to specific applications for “niche” digital preservation adjacent activities, to vendors employing them as a yardstick to gauge their service offerings. They’ve been spotted in numerous published articles on digital preservation, including the oft-cited “How to Talk to IT about Digital Preservation”, and in preservation reports that range from presentations on cyber-security to a graduate student assessing the state of digital preservation for the College Park Maryland Aviation Museum. The NDSA Levels are not just used in the United States, but are an international presence as well. The Bibliothèque et Archives nationales de Québec has used the NDSA levels to help define their information model, as shared at iPres 2024; and the UK Archives Accreditation standards suggest using the NDSA Levels or DPC-RAM for self-assessment.
The scholarly literature on digital preservation is fertile ground for sightings, too, with several articles invoking the Levels just in the past year:
Have you seen an example of the NDSA Levels being used by colleagues or referenced in a presentation or even by a vendor? We’d love to hear about it! As always, we also encourage the whole community to provide feedback on the Levels – including Levels sightings! – at any time.
The post NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation ‘Sightings in the Wild’ appeared first on DLF.
My protest sign for the #TeslaTakedown today.I made a sign for today's #TeslaTakedown, and I should have listened to my family. They suggested that the initial version, without the "How much do you have in common with Elon Musk?" at the bottom, was too confusing. Adding that sentence improved understanding, but now there was too much to read in a protest sign for cars whizzing past. My point was that me and the person driving by giving me a middle finger have far more in common than what either of us have with Elon Musk (and Donald Trump).
My son is taking a gen-ed psychology class in his first year of college, and he was describing a class exercise demonstrating the difficulty people have with probabilities and proportions. That got me thinking about the "cosmic distance ladder". The cosmic distance laddercosmic distance ladder is a series of methods astronomers use to determine the distances to celestial objects, acting as a tool to map the universe. It's called a ladder because each step relies on the previous one, starting with measurements to nearby galaxies and progressing to farther objects.
Let's suppose the median net worth of an American—the point at which half the people in the country have more and half the people in the country have less—is $100,000. So, standing there in the middle of the protest, the 10 people around me have a total net worth of $1,000,000—a million dollars. And the 100 people or so between and the street corner? That is ten million dollars. And the 1,000 people walking and driving by the #TeslaTakedown protest? That's a hundred million dollars.
The capacity of a triple-A minor league baseball stadium is about 10,000 people; the median net worth of that crowd is a billion dollars. The capacity of Ohio Stadium, where the Ohio State University football team plays, is 100,000, and the net worth is ten billion dollars. It is only at this point that reach Donald Trump's net worth. The population of Franklin County, Ohio—the seat of the state capitol—is just over 1,000,000 people, and the total median net worth is $100,000,000. Elon Musk's net worth is about $350,000,000—so three Franklin-county's-worth of people.
So when I said that the person throwing the middle finger at me has more in common with me than Musk, that's what I meant.
The actual median net worth of an American household is just short of $200,000, so we are not that far off with this economic prosperity ladder (assuming two earners per household). And the really perverse part? Remember that the median is the point at which half the population is above that amount and half the population is below. Don't confuse that with the average...that'll be the sum of everyone's net worth divided by the number of people in the country. That number is just over $1,000,000 per household. The highest highs have skewed the average that much.
Now, at the risk of reducing a person's value to a dollar amount, that is what I was trying to say in my sign. Wealth is a tool, not an identity; a person's kindness, resilience, and hope for a better world hold real value...and I saw a lot of kindness, resilience, and hope at the protest today. Yet, despite the immense kindness and resilience I was in the middle of, it's disheartening how wealthy people are overriding the collective interests of the country.
And that is far too much to put on a sign.
I'm adding my notes here about creating the protest sign, because clearly I'll need to make a different one for next week. The base of the sign is an old campaign yard sign—about 26 inches by 16 inches. Using a graphics program, I made an image at those dimensions. My plan was to print it out as a set of tiles on letter-sized paper and then tape them together. Unfortunately, the MacOS printer driver doesn't do this (...anymore? I thought it did at one point). Fortunately, a free web service called Rasterbator will make a PDF of tile pages for me. I uploaded the sign, selected US-Letter paper in landscape orientation, then selected an output size of "2.45 sheets wide". That will output 6 sheets for a final size of 24.98" x 15.38"...pretty close! This is what it looked like in the end.
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown. |
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In the earlier share price chart RELX was the lower of the three lines but given its higher dividend payouts its overall shareholder returns have paced with its peers, and it is one of the best-performing large-cap stocks in the UK. The following chart shows that it is now in the top five largest in the UK by stock market value and bigger than BP. Its price-to-earnings multiple of around 30x is more like a tech giant.Well, it is only 3/4 of Nvidia's or Apple's PE but around the same as Microsoft.
The second largest listed player is Thomson Reuters worth around $80 billion (and this trades on a much higher price-to-earnings multiple than RELX). Add in Wolters Kluwer, and the much smaller Springer Nature which was listed late last year, and the combined stock market value of the four firms is more than $215 billion.Thomson Reuters' PE is around 36, a bit less than Apple's. The $215B market cap is pricing in massive growth, which given the uncertain economic conditions and the finances of their customers seems optimistic.
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The following chart illustrates the revenues and operating profits of the four firms in 2024. RELX generated as much operating profits as its two largest peers combined.Ghose explains how the oligopoly publishers can extract so much rent by quoting Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine:
Firstly, the customer base is captive and highly vulnerable to price gouging. A university library has to have access to the best journals, without which the members of the university can’t keep up with their field or do their own research. Secondly, although the publishers who bought the titles took over the responsibility for their administration and distribution, this is a small part of the effort involved in producing an academic journal, compared to the actual work of writing the articles and peer-reviewing them. This service is provided to the publishers by academics, for free or for a nominal payment (often paid in books or subscriptions to journals). So not only does the industry have both a captive customer base and a captive source of free labour, these two commercial assets are for the most part the same group of people.Ghose then comments:
In essence, the academics fight to help the publishers extract monopoly profits. The whole process depends on the value of having your articles appear or receive citations in the best journals. This becomes an unaccountability sink to which universities outsource their whole system of promotion and hiring. Davies compares this to the PageRank algorithm used by Google.The big four publishers' $25B in revenue doesn't come exclusively from publishing content they get for free from academics, but about half of it does:
This market for academic publishing generates around $20 billion of revenue per year with half of the market controlled by the five largest firms: Elsevier (part of RELX), John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE.The distinctive feature of the market over the last decade or more has been the publishers failing to exercise their gate-keeping role, and the resulting flood of low-quality papers.
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the chart below illustrates that RELX-owned Elsevier is not only the clear market leader, but it has also grown significantly in volume.Does anyone think there is 70% more high-quality research than there was a decade ago? The graph comes from Excessive growth in the number of scientific publications by Benoît Pier and Laurent Romary:
The first result concerns the total number of articles published, which follows very closely an exponential growth (+5.6% per year). Even taking into account the increase in the number of researchers over this period, we can deduce that the time spent on obtaining the results, validating and peer reviewing them has decreased significantly.This growth has been powered by the rise of Article Processing Charges (APCs). A journal that lives on APCs rather than subscriptions has a strong disincentive to reject papers
By computing the average annual number of articles published per journal, the authors observe that the growth (significant, but not overwhelming) of the traditional publishers is mainly due to the expansion of the number of journals in their catalogues, whereas the very strong growth of Frontiers and MDPI is the result of an explosive increase in the number of articles per journal. It should be noted that these two publishers, which appeared more recently, are thriving through publication fees paid by authors.Pier and Romary conclude:
The triad (MDPI, Frontiers, Hindawi) increasingly use special issues to publish more and more articles, and this phenomenon is accompanied by a significant shortening of the time allotted to the peer-review process.Pier and Romary base their article upon The strain on scientific publishing by Mark A. Hanson et al whose abstract reads:
Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was approximately ~47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth - if any - in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.
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RELX Elsevier has over 3,000 journals including leading brands like the Lancet. These journals published more than 720,000 articles in 2024. This is almost one-fifth of all scientific articles. Elsevier’s online platform ScienceDirect has tens of millions of pieces of peer-reviewed content from tens of millions of researchers. Its citation database has content from tens of thousands of journals.But is it growing fast enough to justify a P/E of 30?:
The scientific, technical, and medical information division is RELX’s second largest with revenues of around $4 billion of revenues, roughly equally split between articles/research content vs databases, tools, and electronic reference solutions. The business is largely subscription fee driven and 90% of its revenues are from electronic products rather than print publishing and face-to-face events.
Despite the growth in the number of articles, this is RELX’s slowest-growing division with 3-4% revenue growth and 4-5% profit growth in recent years. They are expanding in line with our faster than the industry. But it is a very healthy cash cow with $1.5 billion of operating profits in 2024. This circa 40% operating margin is the best in the RELX group and far superior to other professional and business information businesses. The number two player Springer Nature has lower operating margins of around 30% in their academic publishing business, but this is much higher than their other products.30-40% operating margins demonstrate the oligopoly's rent extraction. Four of every ten dollars Elsevier extracts from the world's education and research budgets goes straight to their shareholders. And more goes to their executives' salaries and bonuses.
