June 2023 – Page 5 – DigitalKoans

Head of Digital Scholarship Services at University of Missouri – Kansas City

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries are seeking a collaborative individual to fill a new role, Head of Digital Scholarship Services (DSS), serving as the Libraries’ co-director for the Center for Digital and Public Humanities and supervising staff in the Digital Scholarship Services department within the Special Collections & Archives Division of UMKC Libraries. The Head of DSS position is responsible for operational management of the Digital Collaboration Studio, a technology-rich space designed to support research and teaching across all disciplines with an emphasis on Digital and Public Humanities; creating programming, resource guides, and consulting services that support digital research and pedagogy; and administrative management and direction for the Libraries’ participation in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities, a partnership between the Libraries and the School for Humanities and Social Sciences.

https://tinyurl.com/3wwmc45f

Digital Scholarship Has Released the Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography

The Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography includes over 345 selected English-language articles and books that are useful in understanding how academic libraries plan for, implement, provide, evaluate, and conduct studies about research data management (RDM) services. Most sources have been published from 2012 through 2023. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a website PDF with live links.

Digital Scholarship’s other bibliographies about research data curation include the Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography (over 800 works), the Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography (over 225 works), and the Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography (over 200 works).

Digital Preservation Manager at Tate

Reporting to the Head of Business Solutions you will make certain that Tate’s digital resources are well-managed and accessible. As well as developing action plans and reviewing policies and strategies, you will also be creating staff training programmes to ensure Tate systems accommodate all defined digital preservation metadata. To succeed you’ll need an impressive track record of managing digital rich media resources, developing metadata schemes to support preservation, and of training users. This includes good knowledge of preservation systems such as Archivematica or Preservica and knowledge of preservation metadata standards.

https://tinyurl.com/4r8pwdvb

End-User Online Searching in 1970 at Syracuse University: "Ingenious Librarians"

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. . . . The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line. . . in order to search for papers that included both terms. After running the query, the terminal produced a printout indicating how many documents matched each search; users could then narrow down or expand that search before generating a list of article citations. Many users burst into laughter upon seeing the response from a computer so far away.

https://tinyurl.com/mr4578b6

Senior Software Engineer – Frontend at Harvard University

The Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is looking for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in frontend development to help us imagine and build innovative software that charts the future of libraries. . . .Located at the Harvard Law Library, LIL is a fun and collaborative lab with a broad mission focused on re-envisioning how libraries can contribute to society. We are a small but active group working at the intersection of libraries, technology, and law, and we are looking for someone with new skills and perspectives to add to our team.

https://tinyurl.com/yc2j8tb7

"New ChatGPT Course at ASU Gives Students a Competitive Edge"

A new Arizona State University course will provide students with those skills, providing expertise that is becoming increasingly sought after.

Basic Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT: An Introduction is open this summer to students in any major, and despite the name, is not really about engineering.

https://tinyurl.com/rcfnt39d

DigitalKoans Tops 15,000 Posts

DigitalKoans was launched on April 20, 2005 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. It has now published over 15,000 posts. The top ten topics it has published about are:

1. Digital Library Jobs

2. Publishing

3. Open Access

4. Library IT Jobs

5. Copyright

6. Scholarly Journals

7. Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

8. Data Curation, Open Data, and Research Data Management

9. Research Libraries

10. Scholarly Communication

Job ads were added to the weblog in 2009. Over 4,900 job ads have been posted.

DigitalKoans was preceded by Bailey’s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW), which was established on June 7, 2001 as part of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. SEPW ceased publication at the end of 2013.

Vice Provost for University Libraries, University Librarian at University of Wisconsin – Madison

The General Library System (GLS) currently administers twelve libraries: Memorial Library is the flagship library and caters to the humanities and social sciences, along with the Business Library and Social Work Library. College Library serves as the undergraduate library, and is a hub for programs focusing on student support services and partnerships. The Science and Engineering Libraries (SEL) consist of Steenbock, Chemistry, Geology, and Astronomy, Math, and Physics (AMP). The Special Collections and Archives unit features one of the nation’s leading special collections for the history of science and medicine, including significant holdings for chemistry, science and religion, and optics and ophthalmology. Other special collections include the Mills Music Library, the Kohler Art Library, and the Gender and Women’s Studies Library. The University Archives serves as the official repository for all UW-Madison, UW-System Administration, UW-Extension, and Wisconsin Public Media records appraised to have permanent or archival value. The health sciences library, law library, and education library each report to their respective deans, while several other special purpose libraries report through various schools, colleges, or departments.

https://tinyurl.com/rb66rjat

"FAIR in Action — A Flexible Framework to Guide FAIRification"

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data more than any other scientific challenge to date. We developed a flexible, multi-level, domain-agnostic FAIRification framework, providing practical guidance to improve the FAIRness for both existing and future clinical and molecular datasets. We validated the framework in collaboration with several major public-private partnership projects, demonstrating and delivering improvements across all aspects of FAIR and across a variety of datasets and their contexts. We therefore managed to establish the reproducibility and far-reaching applicability of our approach to FAIRification tasks.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02167-2

Open Education Resources Librarian at University of Houston-Downtown

The Open Education Resources (OER) Librarian facilitates the evaluation and implementation of open and affordable learning materials, and collaborates with faculty, library staff, and other campus partners to promote the adoption of these resources.

https://tinyurl.com/muhf5pb8

"Guest Post — Accessibility Powered by AI: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Universalize Access to Digital Content"

More than 1 billion people around the world have some type of disability (including visual, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility, and other disabilities) that affects how they access digital content. No wonder we spend so much time talking about accessibility tools!

Digital transformation can revolutionize the world, turning it into an inclusive place for people with and without disabilities, with accessibility powered by artificial intelligence. This post provides an overview of how AI can improve accessibility in different ways, illustrated with real-world applications and examples.

https://tinyurl.com/3s64tvm7

Senior Software Engineer – Backend at Harvard University

The Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is looking for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and backend development to help us imagine and build innovative software that charts the future of libraries. Our ideal candidate would be excited to build data pipelines and tools that help the world create, preserve, and access knowledge. . . .Our work is open-source and openly available, with an eye to broad public interest impact.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2krpnw

Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories

Since the early 2000s, Henry Lowood has led or had a key role in numerous initiatives devoted to the preservation and documentation of virtual worlds, digital games, and interactive simulations, establishing himself as a major scholar in the field of game studies. . . . Replayed consolidates Lowood’s far-flung and significant publications on these subjects into a single volume.

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12805/replayed

Geographic Information Systems Specialist at Ball State University

You will have a major impact on students and faculty, leading support for complex GIS solutions used by over 100 students daily and over 2,200 students and faculty annually, from over 23 academic departments and programs. This position manages Ball State’s ESRI ArcGIS and Hexagon ERDAS solution licenses and software, and significant GIS datasets. The Libraries’ GIS support is very robust and includes StoryMaps and datasets.

https://bsu.peopleadmin.com/postings/37431

"Global Trends in Digital Preservation: Outsourcing versus In-House Practices"

This study aimed at investigating the trends toward digital preservation in terms of in-house activities versus outsourcing by systematically reviewing the extant literature. . . . . The meta-analysis of the final studies affirms a strong global preference of libraries, archives, and other cultural and memory organizations toward in-house activities for the preservation of their digital objects and collections compared to outsourcing digital preservation activities by third parties.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231173461

Systems and Discovery Librarian at Texas A&M University – Commerce

Reporting to the Associate Dean of Collections and Discovery, the Systems and Discovery Librarian is responsible for the oversight of library systems including Alma/Primo, Tipasa, OCLC, EZproxy, and Springshare products. The Systems and Discovery Librarian will contribute to larger projects within the Resource Acquisition and Discovery department aimed at enhancing a variety of essential library services.

https://tinyurl.com/mrybdp5u

"Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference"

The relationship between open access and academic impact (usually measured as citations received from academic publications) has been extensively studied but remains a very controversial topic. However, the effect of open access on policy impact (measured as citations received from policy documents) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of open access on the policy impact, which might initiate a new controversial topic. . . . Linear regression models, logit regression models, four other matching methods, open access status provided by different databases, and different sizes of data samples were used to check the robustness of the main results. This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1

Digital Publishing Specialist at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries are seeking a visionary and technically skilled Digital Publishing Specialist to help shape the future of scholarly communication and build a vibrant publishing program at the heart of our library. . . . You will contribute to the department by providing vital support by crafting and launching a diverse publishing portfolio, including online journals, blogs, galleries, websites, podcasts, project portfolios, and other interactive media.

https://tinyurl.com/3twjaukv

"Mastodon over Mammon — Towards Publicly Owned Scholarly Knowledge"

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

Data Engineer at Northeastern University

The Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) in the Northeastern University Library is excited to open a search for a Data Engineer. Working within a warm and collaborative environment dedicated to social justice, the Data Engineer gathers, organizes, manipulates, transforms, and documents a variety of humanities research data.

https://tinyurl.com/5n8up24a

"AI Is about to Turn Book Publishing Upside-down"

The latest generation of AI is a game changer. Not incremental change—something gentle, something gradual: this AI changes everything, fast. Scary fast.

I believe that every function in trade book publishing today can be automated with the help of generative AI. And, if this is true, then the trade book publishing industry as we know it will soon be obsolete. We will need to move on.

https://tinyurl.com/2p9z6pr6

Digital Archivist and Librarian at St. Olaf College

Design and manage digital collections by establishing the metadata schema and controlled vocabularies, and by exercising quality control of the software, equipment and metadata records.

Create policies and procedures for managing born-digital materials for ingest, storage, preservation, organization, description, and access in accordance with accepted standards and practices to ensure the long-term preservation of collections. . .

Lead the efforts in computer expertise in digitization, including hardware/software for digital preservation, web archiving, cataloging, public delivery, and preservation.

https://bit.ly/3MKo1IS

"Reference Rot in the Digital Humanities Literature: An Analysis of Citations Containing Website Links in DHQ"

Link rot is likely most familiar in the form of "404 Not Found" error messages, but there are other less prominent obstacles to accessing web content. Our study examines instances of link rot in Digital Humanities Quarterly articles and its impact on the ability to access the online content referenced in these articles after their publication. . . .

Our data shows that a significant number of works cited no longer exist, are inaccessible, or have additional barriers to access. Instances of link rot increase with time. Additionally, there is a higher frequency and higher proportion of links contained in DHQ articles, showing that internet resources are a critical part of the DH literature. Taken together, the combined result is a persistent and cumulative threat to the integrity and stability of the DH literature, and one that is even more alarming when compared to other disciplines.

https://bit.ly/42iZq3t

Research Data Manager at Edge Hill University

In this post you will lead on advising researchers on the most appropriate ways to manage and disseminate their datasets. . . .You will also establish, develop, and maintain a research data service, providing leadership which will inform university policies and determine internal workflows. This will involve imparting current knowledge and leading the University research community as we commit to open research.

https://bit.ly/42hCDoO

"Integrating Preservation into Librarian Workflows"

The core mission of libraries is to ensure perpetual access to the record of knowledge. As a review of the NASIG webinar (formerly North American Serials Interest Group), "Integrating Preservation into Librarian Workflows," by Jill Emery and Sunshine Carter, this article examines working models constructed to sustain perpetual access for their institutional communities. In reflecting on these data-intensive practices, both presenters now recognize that previously impactful collection development business decisions were being made in the dark. Reviewing the webinar also reveals that this issue of preservation access has two critically distinct aspects, which should not be conflated as interchangeable. One is concerned with long-term preservation and the other addresses a library’s ability to provide post-cancellation access to its user community, given budgetary or physical space constraints. The following is an analysis of how effective the processes explored in the webinar are in addressing both post-cancellation access and long-term perpetual access goals. Based on a 2018 NASIG survey, results indicated that many organizations in scholarly communications lacked preservation policies. In June 2022, as a result of the survey, NASIG released the model digital preservation policy as a template to guide consequential and explicit decision-making by addressing issues including scope, roles, responsibilities, tools and techniques. These policy issues are important for librarians to understand before negotiating content licenses, in sustaining long-term discovery and access, and when developing collaborative access frameworks to address collection development and maintenance challenges.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.614