February 2023 – DigitalKoans

Library Web Developer & Technologies Specialist at University of Toronto Mississauga

Reporting to the Library Technologies & Liaison Librarian, the Library Web Developer & Technologies Specialist is responsible for providing technical expertise, systems support, and original programming in the areas of website development, website design and digital scholarship project support by investigating, testing, implementing, maintaining, updating, and documenting web-based applications and server-side solutions. The incumbent will also be responsible for the testing, setup, and maintenance of various computer hardware and peripherals, doing demonstrations, and answering questions from library patrons. In addition, the incumbent will be responsible for setting up and maintaining various development environments for iOS and Android app development, development workstations for video game development, including augmented and virtual reality, and setting up and maintaining various audio and video equipment and various computer hardware and software relating to digitization.

bit.ly/3Y4BLBN

79.3 Exabytes Capacity Sold in 2022: "Magnetic Tape Storage Is Seeing Cloud Go Back to the Future for Its Archival Data Needs"

Even then [in 1981], says Goodwin, people were saying tape was not long for this world. Those critics appear to have been silenced by recent sales figures, which show year-on-year shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) sink by 34% in 2022, while consignments of magnetic tape drives rose by 14% — a total of 79.3 exabytes, or roughly equivalent to the entirety of data created on the internet every 32 days.

bit.ly/3ky5Trv

Digital Historian & Archivist at Washington College (Term)

The Digital Historian and Archivist will work closely with campus and community partners to grow and manage the digital archive for Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project, while participating in an interpretative planning process for the enhancement of the project’s website and interpretive tools. . . . The Digital Historian and Archivist will serve as a key digital strategist and architect for the project, helping to maintain, populate, design, and implement digital tools with which members of the public — including digital novices — can curate, interpret, and share their history.

bit.ly/41wlvMH

Paywall: "An Investigation of Gold Open Access Publications of STEM Faculty at a Public University in the United States"

This study investigated Gold Open Access journal publication by science and engineering faculty at the authors’ university from 2013 to 2022. Specifically, did Gold Open Access (OA) by these faculty increase, and did the publication rate vary between disciplines? The authors found that Gold OA publication increased by 176% over the past 10 years, and that an important factor was the Libraries’ creation of an Open Access Publishing Fund in 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2023.2175103

Senior Digital Records and Information Manager at Harvard University

The Harvard University Archives (HUA) seeks a Senior Digital Records and Information Manager (SDRIM) to support the Archives’ goal of transitioning to a digital-first records management environment. Reporting to the Associate University Archivist for Collection Development and Records Management Services (AUACDRMS), the SDRIM will play a principal role in developing and leading a born-digital records and information management program designed to ensure appropriate and secure identification, classification, storage, retrieval, and preservation or destruction of Harvard University’s digital content and electronic records in compliance with federal, state, and local laws and regulations.

bit.ly/41uLqVf

Google May Need a $80 Billion Upgrade: "Meet the $10,000 Nvidia Chip Powering the Race for A.I."

For example, an estimate from New Street Research found that the OpenAI-based ChatGPT model inside Bing’s search could require 8 GPUs to deliver a response to a question in less than one second. . . .

"If you’re from Microsoft, and you want to scale that, at the scale of Bing, that’s maybe $4 billion. If you want to scale at the scale of Google, which serves 8 or 9 billion queries every day, you actually need to spend $80 billion on DGXs." said Antoine Chkaiban, a technology analyst at New Street Research.

bit.ly/3ZnsSnY

"The Future of the Monograph in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Publisher Perspectives on a Transitioning Format"

A web-based survey of academic publishers was undertaken in 2021 by a team at Oxford International Centre for Publishing into the state of monograph publication in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 25 publishing organisations responded, including many of the larger presses, representing approximately 75% of monograph output. Responses to the survey showed that the Covid 19 pandemic has accelerated the existing trend from print to digital dissemination and that Open Access (OA) titles receive substantially greater levels of usage than those published traditionally. Responses also showed that for most publishers OA publication stands at under 25% of output and that fewer than 10% of authors enquire about OA publication options. Continuing problem areas highlighted by respondents were the clearing of rights for OA publication and the standardisation of title and usage metadata. All responding organisations confirmed that they expect to be publishing monographs in ten years’ time, but that they anticipate the format and/or the model will be different, with open access expected to play a key part in the future, perhaps in the context of a mixed economy of OA and ‘toll access’ publication.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-023-09937-1

Data Management Specialist at Weill Cornell Medical College

Under direction, provides assistance to the Weill Cornell Medicine Library efforts and coordinates technical and accounting aspects of the Data Core. This role also assists in management of library scientific software licensing and subscriptions.

bit.ly/3IxzqcT

Affordable Course Content [OER] Librarian at University of Kentucky Libraries

The Affordable Course Content Librarian will be responsible for providing support and assessment of the Libraries’ open educational resources (OER) and affordable course content initiative. This position will design and provide workshops and events related to OER and open pedagogy. Additionally, this position will serve as a liaison to academic departments.

https://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/449069

"Research Data Management Needs Assessment for Social Sciences Graduate Students: A Mixed Methods Study"

The complexity and privacy issues inherent in social science research data makes research data management (RDM) an essential skill for future researchers. Data management training has not fully addressed the needs of graduate students in the social sciences. To address this gap, this study used a mixed methods design to investigate the RDM awareness, preparation, confidence, and challenges of social science graduate students. A survey measuring RDM preparedness and training needs was completed by 98 graduate students in a school of education at a research university in the southern United States. Then, interviews exploring data awareness, knowledge of RDM, and challenges related to RDM were conducted with 10 randomly selected graduate students. All participants had low confidence in using RDM, but United States citizens had higher confidence than international graduate students. Most participants were not aware of on-campus RDM services, and were not familiar with data repositories or data sharing. Training needs identified for social science graduate students included support with data documentation and organization when collaborating, using naming procedures to track versions, data analysis using open access software, and data preservation and security. These findings are significant in highlighting the topics to cover in RDM training for social science graduate students. Additionally, RDM confidence and preparation differ between populations so being aware of the backgrounds of students taking the training will be essential for designing student-centered instruction.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282152

Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College

The Digital Scholarship Librarian is responsible for facilitating and supporting faculty and student digital research projects, ranging from short and long-term consultations (e.g., helping to identify appropriate methods, tools, and training resources) to more intensive, hands-on assistance with technology, project design, and project management. For faculty, they offer a range of teaching support, from providing one-shot instruction sessions to teaching multiple sessions and collaborating on curriculum design. Additionally, our DS Librarians are responsible for managing the Digital Studio in collaboration with the department head and will heavily influence how the space functions and the direction a potential redesign will take.

bit.ly/41q9Ted

"Changes in the Absolute Numbers and Proportions of Open Access Articles from 2000 to 2021 Based on the Web of Science Core Collection: A Bibliometric Study"

Purpose:

The ultimate goal of current open access (OA) initiatives is for library services to use OA resources. This study aimed to assess the infrastructure for OA scholarly information services by tabulating the number and proportion of OA articles in a literature database.

Method:

We measured the absolute numbers and proportions of OA articles at different time points across various disciplines based on the Web of Science (WoS) database.

Results:

The number (proportion) of available OA articles between 2000 and 2021 in the WoS database was 12 million (32.4%). The number (proportion) of indexed OA articles in 1 year was 0.15 million (14.6%) in 2000 and 1.5 million (48.0%) in 2021. The proportion of OA by subject categories in the cumulative data was the highest in the multidisciplinary category (2000–2021, 79%; 2021, 89%), high in natural sciences (2000–2021, 21%–46%; 2021, 41%–62%) and health and medicine (2000–2021, 37%–40%; 2021, 52%–60%), and low in social sciences and others (2000–2021, 23%–32%; 2021, 36%–44%), engineering (2000–2021, 17%–33%; 2021, 31%–39%) and humanities and arts (2000–2021, 11%–22%; 2021, 28%–38%).

Conclusion:

Our study confirmed that increasingly many OA research papers have been published in the last 20 years, and the recent data show considerable promise for better services in the future. The proportions of OA articles differed among scholarly disciplines, and designing library services necessitates several considerations with regard to the customers’ demands, available OA resources, and strategic approaches to encourage the use of scholarly OA articles.

https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.296

Systems and Analytics Librarian at Middle Tennessee State University

The librarian leads a unit responsible for the implementation, maintenance, repair, upgrades, and support of the James E. Walker Library’s library systems and servers. Through leadership, support, project management, and workflow analysis, the librarian works collaboratively to advance the library’s resources and services to the MTSU community and beyond. The unit engages in collaborative projects related to digital scholarship, the Library’s LSP, discovery, and access.

bit.ly/3xMcHVk

"Librarians and Academic Libraries’ Role in Promoting Open Access: What Needs to Change? "

Profound changes due to Open-Access (OA) publications lead to organizational changes in universities and libraries. This study examined Israeli librarians’ perceptions regarding their role and the academic library’s role in promoting OA-publication, including the barriers, challenges, needs and requirements necessary to promote OA publishing. Lack of a budget for OA-agreements and cooperation with university management, and researchers’ unawareness of OA were among the most prominent barriers. Librarians see great importance in their role of advising researchers regarding OA. However, they insisted on a regulated OA-policy at the national and institutional levels, which would strengthen their status as change-leaders of the OA-movement.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/shqnv

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Head Create/Innovate or Principal Librarian at Miami University

The Head of the Create and Innovate department/Associate or Principal Librarian leads a department supporting and enabling student and faculty collaboration, scholarship, creativity and innovation. The department is charged with development and coordination of services supporting creativity and experiential learning, provision of innovative spaces for learning and collaboration support for digital scholarship and digital humanities. . . . [this role] will oversee the Provision of a wide range of creativity and innovation services for the University community including copyright consulting and instruction, Digital Scholarship services; and Maker/DIY literacy instruction; develop and manage learning and teaching spaces, media production studios, augmented and virtual reality lab, photogrammetry lab, Makerspace, and future collaborative learning and doing environments.

bit.ly/3m35C0f

"Benefits of Open Access (OA) to Researchers from Lower-Income Countries: Tracing Evidence through an Analysis of Reference Patterns"

Making scientific literature freely available to everyone is a main objective of the open access (OA) movement. This may be of particular importance to researchers in lower-income countries, where access to literature is often hindered by high subscription costs. This study addresses this issue by analyzing reference lists of the world’s output of scientific publications over time. The core issues addressed include whether researchers from lower-income countries refer to fewer previous publications when they publish and how this pattern develops over time. Moreover, whether researchers from lower-income countries rely more on literature that is openly available through different OA routes than other researchers is explored. The study shows that the proportion of OA references increases over time for all publications and country groups. However, the main finding is that publications from lower-income countries have a higher growth rate of OA references. This suggests that an increase in OA publishing has been particularly beneficial to researchers in lower-income countries.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ecgzh

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Head of Open Scholarship at Clemson University

Clemson Libraries seeks a dynamic, driven, and collaborative Department Head for Open Scholarship to provide leadership and expertise at Clemson Libraries. The Open Scholarship Department includes services such as open educational resources, scholarly communications, experiential learning, research data services, and digital humanities/scholarship. The department also houses learning spaces including the Scholars’ Lab, the Adobe Studio and Makerspace. The Department Head of Open Scholarship (OS) will be responsible for planning, implementing, and managing a newly created open scholarship department that provides support for digital scholarship, digital literacy, data literacy, digital preservation, faculty research, Open Access initiatives and advocacy, and scholarly communication.

bit.ly/3Eyc59N

"How and Why Do Researchers Reference Data? A Study of Rhetorical Features and Functions of Data References in Academic Articles"

Data reuse is a common practice in the social sciences. While published data play an essential role in the production of social science research, they are not consistently cited, which makes it difficult to assess their full scholarly impact and give credit to the original data producers. Furthermore, it can be challenging to understand researchers’ motivations for referencing data. Like references to academic literature, data references perform various rhetorical functions, such as paying homage, signaling disagreement, or drawing comparisons. This paper studies how and why researchers reference social science data in their academic writing. We develop a typology to model relationships between the entities that anchor data references, along with their features (access, actions, locations, styles, types) and functions (critique, describe, illustrate, interact, legitimize). We illustrate the use of the typology by coding multidisciplinary research articles (n=30) referencing social science data archived at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We show how our typology captures researchers’ interactions with data and purposes for referencing data. Our typology provides a systematic way to document and analyze researchers’ narratives about data use, extending our ability to give credit to data that support research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08477

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Digital Preservation Specialist at University of Oxford

The Digital Preservation Specialist is based within Open Scholarship Support, Bodleian Libraries and provides a central point of expertise, advice and guidance on matters relating to Digital Preservation. . . . You will work alongside experts in a number of complementary areas—copyright and licensing, open access, research data management and digital innovation—to provide a joined-up service to Bodleian and University staff and academics. You will contribute to the development and establishment of digital preservation capabilities, and the implementation of tools and procedures for digital preservation activities.

bit.ly/3EvEM7s

"W3C Sun-Setting Online Unified Validator; Community May Fork Unicorn"

W3C plans to stop providing the on-line unified validator service Unicorn as of 31 March 2023, due to lack of resources to maintain the project. We encourage interested people in the community to fork Unicorn. We have many other developer tools such as the markup and CSS validators, and checkers like the Internationalization checker, link and feed checkers.

https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9826

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Applications Developer Programmer Analyst II at University of Arizona

In this role you’ll discover user needs and develop and implement creative solutions that support the success of students, faculty, and staff. Initially you’ll launch a new GeoBlacklight (Ruby on Rails)-based portal and plan for its sustainability. You’ll also help build and maintain our portfolio of LAMP-stack based applications, content management systems, and library-specific software. Agile and lean software development approaches are fundamental to our culture, and you’ll have opportunities to influence how we manage our day-to-day workflow with Kanban and user stories. You will be encouraged to explore and test new tools, technologies, and methods to continuously improve the efficiency of the unit and the quality of its products, and you’ll have regular opportunities to share and refine ideas with other team members.

bit.ly/3INKT9w

"Measuring the Concept of PID Literacy: User Perceptions and Understanding of Persistent Identifiers in Support of Open Scholarly Infrastructure"

The increasing centrality of persistent identifiers (PIDs) to scholarly ecosystems and the contribution they can make to the burgeoning ‘PID graph’ has the potential to transform scholarship. Despite their importance as originators of PID data, little is known about researchers’ awareness and understanding of PIDs, or their efficacy in using them. In this article we report on the results of an online interactive test designed to elicit exploratory data about researcher awareness and understanding of PIDs. This instrument was designed to explore recognition of PIDs and the extent to which researchers correctly apply PIDs within digital scholarly ecosystems, as well as measure researchers’ perceptions of PIDs. Our results reveal irregular patterns of PID understanding and certainty across all participants, though statistically significant disciplinary and academic job role differences were observed in some instances. Uncertainty and confusion were found to exist in relation to dominant schemes such as ORCID and DOIs, even when contextualized within real-world examples. We also show researchers’ perceptions of PIDs to be generally positive but that disciplinary differences can be noted, as well as higher levels of aversion to PIDs in specific use cases and negative perceptions where PIDs are measured on an ‘activity’ semantic dimension. This work therefore contributes to our understanding of academics’ ‘PID literacy’ and should inform those designing PID-centric scholarly infrastructures, that a significant need for training and outreach to active researchers remains necessary.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07367

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Library Publishing Developer at University of Oklahoma

The University of Oklahoma Libraries seeks to recruit a creative, mission-driven applications developer to join our Cloud Infrastructure & Development team in the Digital Strategies and Innovation Division. Reporting to the Technical Manager, the successful candidate will be responsible for the development and operation of our library publishing and digital repository platforms.

bit.ly/3KynWZq

"Library Futures Releases Policy Paper: Digital Ownership for Libraries and the Public"

In response, Library Futures recommends policymakers adopt an approach of digital ownership that extends the current paradigm for print works and allow libraries to both maintain the benefits of print collections and innovate even further toward providing new methods of access, preservation, and education by creating new lending models, equitizing access for underserved communities, and contributing to a more democratic balance. To that end, we have outlined some approaches to solving this issue through structural, community-based, and technical means:

Legal reform: This can include judicial remedies through the courts, legislative action on the part of Congress, or regulatory intervention by an authority such as the Federal Trade Commission.

Collective action: Community intervention can be a powerful way to act concertedly to stand against entities that are prohibiting libraries from exercising their rights, such as boycotts and grassroots action, state legislative initiatives, and the collective use of incentives and accountability measures for publishers.

Library-owned infrastructure: The library community can build its own infrastructure to ensure that it is oriented towards the needs of their users and provides libraries with the choice to own their digital content. This is not without its challenges (practical and resource-wise), but sustainable infrastructure can put control of digital content back into the hands of libraries and users.

Policy Paper

https://www.libraryfutures.net/post/digital-ownership-for-libraries-and-the-public

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Copyright Officer and Head, Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright at Penn State

This librarian will be an expert on matters of copyright and scholarly communication and develop and lead an outreach, education, and consultation program that will help students, faculty, and staff understand how copyright and scholarly communications affect their work. The successful candidate will work closely with the Office of General Counsel, Risk Management, Federal relations, and the Office of Technology Management, and others to help develop and apply polices for intellectual property at the University. The librarian will advise the Libraries on national and international copyright and scholarly communications matters and help craft policies that enable the fullest possible access to the Libraries’ collections. The Office supports Penn State’s Open Access (OA) Policy, promotes open scholarship, and transforms the scholarly publishing landscape to make Penn State research more accessible.

bit.ly/3Sjx9Xa