July 2023 – DigitalKoans

Open Repositories Team Lead at Science and Technology Facilities Council, UKRI

We are looking for a repository manager to join the team to implement and lead a programme of work to review, update, host and maintain the current institutional repositories ePubs and eData. In addition to developing the current research outputs repositories, you will build a team of data stewards who will curate the content of the repositories and any new repositories that are in development. . . .

You will lead a review to identify a new repository platform for our existing repositories ePubs and eData and for several new repositories that are under development. Following the review, you will implement a change programme to install, configure and migrate data from our current repositories to a new platform(s).

https://tinyurl.com/3kamcrfe

"Data Sharing Implementation in Top 10 Ophthalmology Journals in 2021"

Background/Aims: Deidentified individual participant data (IPD) sharing has been implemented in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors journals since 2017. However, there were some published clinical trials that did not follow the new implemented policy. This study examines the number of clinical trials that endorsed IPD sharing policy among top ophthalmology journals.

Method: All published original articles in 2021 in 10 highest-ranking ophthalmology journals according to the 2020 journal impact factor were included. Clinical trials were determined by the WHO definition of clinical trials. Each article was then thoroughly searched for the IPD sharing statement either in the manuscript or in the clinical trial registry. We collected the number of published clinical trials that implemented IPD sharing policy as our primary outcome.

Results: 1852 published articles in top 10 ophthalmology journals were identified, and 9.45% were clinical trials. Of these clinical trials, 44% had clinical trial registrations and 49.14% declared IPD sharing statements. Only 42 (48.83%) clinical trials were willing to share IPD, and 5 (10.21%) of these share IPD via an online repository platform. In terms of sharing period, 37 clinical trials were willing to share right after the publication and only 2 showed the ending of sharing period.

Conclusion: This report shows that the number of clinical trials in top ophthalmology journals that endorsed the IPD sharing policy and the number of registrations is lower than half even though the policy has been implemented for several years. Future updates are necessary as policy evolves.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjophth-2023-001276

Library Digital Transformation Lead at University of Leeds

As Library Digital Transformation Lead, you will be responsible for day-to-day leadership and oversight of digital transformation projects and initiatives within the service. Your initial focus will be on the leadership and delivery of the ‘Digital Library Infrastructure Project’ a cornerstone project to support the University in meeting the objectives set out in the Digital Transformation component of the Universal Values, Global Changes, University of Leeds Strategy 2020 to 2030. You will help implement the Digital Futures strand of the Libraries vision ‘Knowledge for All’, delivering a sustainable digital libraries research and education infrastructure, responds to the rapidly changing expectations our students, staff, and partners, and support the aims of University’s strategy.

https://tinyurl.com/2c4rn52c

"The Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium: A Blueprint Designed in Response to a Community of Practice Need"

Background: Health sciences libraries in medical schools, academic health centers, health care networks, and hospitals have established institutional repositories (IRs) to showcase their research achievements, increase visibility, expand the reach of institutional scholarship, and disseminate unique content. Newer roles for IRs include publishing open access journals, tracking researcher productivity, and serving as repositories for data sharing. Many repository managers oversee their IR with limited assistance from others at their institution. Therefore, IR practitioners find it valuable to network and learn from colleagues at other institutions.

Case Presentation: This case report describes the genesis and implementation of a new initiative specifically designed for a health sciences audience: the Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium. Six medical librarians from hospitals and academic institutions in the U.S. organized the inaugural symposium held virtually in November 2021. The goal was to fill a perceived gap in conference programming for IR practitioners in health settings. Themes of the 2021 and subsequent 2022 symposium included IR management, increasing readership and engagement, and platform migration. Post-symposium surveys were completed by 73/238 attendees (31%) in 2021 and by 62/180 (34%) in 2022. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Discussion: Participant responses in post-symposium surveys rated MIRL highly. The MIRL planning group intends to continue the symposium and hopes MIRL will steadily evolve, build community among IR practitioners in the health sciences, and expand the conversation around best practices for digital archiving of institutional content. The implementation design of MIRL serves as a blueprint for collaboratively bringing together a professional community of practice.

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2023.1503

Digital Publishing Coordinator at University of Michigan

The library seeks a talented and service-oriented individual to serve as a Digital Publishing Coordinator in the Publishing Services unit within Michigan Publishing. The Digital Publishing Coordinator is primarily responsible for the project management, performance, and completion of digital publishing projects, including overseeing the publication of journal issues, books, and digital projects. They will be responsible for preparing and producing scholarly content for publication online and in print.

https://tinyurl.com/45ra5sh5

An Index, a Publisher and an Unequal Global Research Economy

This is the story of how a publisher and a citation index turned the science communication system into a highly profitable global industry. Over the course of seventy years, academic journal articles have become commodities, and their meta-data a further source of revenue. . . . During the 1950s, two men — Robert Maxwell and Eugene Garfield — begin to experiment with their blueprint for the research economy. Maxwell created an ‘international’ publisher — Pergamon Press — charming the editors of elite, not-for-profit society journals into signing commercial contracts. Garfield invented the science citation index to help librarians manage this growing flow of knowledge. . . . Sixty years later, the global science system has become a citation economy, with academic credibility mediated by the currency produced by the two dominant commercial citation indexes: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivates Web of Science. The reach of these citation indexes and their data analytics is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. . . . Non-Anglophone journals are disproportionately excluded from these indexes, reinforcing the stratification of academic credibility geographies and endangering long established knowledge ecosystems.

https://tinyurl.com/3x7try9p

Electronic Resources Librarian at Illinois State University

This position provides expertise and leadership in procuring and making accessible electronic information resources, including licensing, management, and support of ongoing access to electronic resources and discovery systems purchased by Milner Library, as well as shared institutional and shared consortia resources. Responsibilities include oversight of ordering resources in all formats, licensing of electronic resources in all formats, system administration for electronic resource platforms (including link resolvers, electronic resource management systems and databases), discovery and federated search services, and management of authentication systems.

https://tinyurl.com/kba9u7rv

Paywall: "Human-AI Interaction for Exploratory Search & Recommender Systems with Application to Cultural Heritage "

This dissertation introduces three primary contributions through publicly deployed sys- tems and datasets. First, we demonstrate how the construction of large-scale cultural heritage datasets using machine learning can answer interdisciplinary questions in library & information science and the humanities (Chapter 2). Second, based on the feedback of users of these cultural heritage datasets, we introduce open faceted search, an extension of faceted search that leverages human-AI interaction affordances to empower users to define their own facets in an open domain fashion (Chapter 3). Third, encountering similar challenges with the deluge of scientific papers, we explore the question of how to improve recommender systems through human-AI interaction and tackle the broad challenge of advice taking for opaque machine learners (Chapter 4).

https://tinyurl.com/yc59txc5

Electronic Resources Acquisitions and Licensing Librarian at University of Notre Dame

The Electronic Resources Librarian serves as the Hesburgh Libraries primary contact with the University’s General Counsel, regarding resource licensing and interpretation; advising the program leadership and other colleagues by reviewing and recommending approval or changes in terms that align with evolving service needs and campus requirements. The Electronic Resources Acquisitions and Licensing Librarian supports the procurement, licensing, renewal, and maintenance of electronic resources and print serials for the Hesburgh Libraries in a multi-faceted environment.

https://apply.interfolio.com/128644

"Sustainability of Open-Access Author Fund: A Case Study of Faculty Usage Patterns and APC Cost"

The California State University, Los Angeles Library established a pilot program on Open-Access (OA) Author Fund in 2018. This article presents information about the management of the University Library’s Open-Access Author Fund. Particularly, this article focuses on faculty usage of the OA Author Fund by colleges, disciplines, and publishers. Additionally, the authors examined the article processing charges (APCs) and self-archiving policies of the top open-access journals where Cal State LA faculty publish. This analysis will assist the University Library’s Open-Access Group to understand if the University Library needs to provide additional funding and explore new ways to sustain the funding. Our research also revealed that librarians in specific academic areas can be more proactive in educating, explaining, and initiating conversations with disciplinary faculty about the benefits of open-access publications.

https://tinyurl.com/35kprj6a

Research Support Librarian/Officer at The Open University

A specialist role to support the growing area of scholarly communication including open access publishing, research data management and research metrics.

As part of the Research Support team develop and implement a research support strategy ensuring that the requirements of the University, researchers and external funders are met.

Provide advice and guidance on funder requirements for research data management, open access publications and research metrics.

https://tinyurl.com/2r7bh8ca

Generative AI and the Future of Work in America

By 2030, activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI. However, we see generative AI enhancing the way STEM, creative, and business and legal professionals work rather than eliminating a significant number of jobs outright. Automation’s biggest effects are likely to hit other job categories. Office support, customer service, and food service employment could continue to decline. . . .

An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.

https://tinyurl.com/yn2xdt7p

Digital Collections Metadata Librarian at University of Oregon

The University of Oregon Libraries is seeking a Digital Collections Metadata Librarian to provide strategic leadership and management of digital collections metadata, including consultation, design, training, and development of services and initiatives to facilitate the use of digital assets in research and education. This position provides expertise in information architecture and data modeling, data interoperability, metadata best practices, and evolving trends and technologies related to metadata in digital collections and digital projects. It coordinates the selection and implementation of relevant metadata standards, linked open data sources, ontologies, and taxonomies, and develops and documents local policies, critical cataloging methods, and workflows. The Digital Collections Metadata Librarian creates original descriptive metadata and enhances local and external authorities and controlled vocabularies to support metadata interoperability between Aviary and ArchivesSpace, DSpace, Alma/Primo, and Oregon Digital, a joint Samvera-based digital asset management system with the Oregon State University Library, which contributes assets to the Digital Public Library of America, the Mountain West Digital Library, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, Northwest Digital Heritage, JSOTR Community Collections, and Wikimedia.

https://tinyurl.com/47zt7x4f

"eLife and PREreview to Enhance the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ Ecosystem Through Adoption of COAR Notify"

The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research.

https://tinyurl.com/36emyk9b

Head Librarian, Systems & Applications at Boston College

The Head of Library Systems & Applications provides overall direction and management of the Boston College Libraries’ technical infrastructure, enterprise systems and applications, website development, library systems’ usage analytics, and software development lifecycle utilities and platforms. Reporting to the AUL for Technology, Metadata, and Archival Services, this position works closely with library administration and other library and campus stakeholders to set the direction for innovative services and technologies that will support and enhance research, learning, scholarship and teaching. This position manages a department of 5 FTE and works with both library staff and university ITS to ensure the smooth, reliable operation of the libraries’ key systems and the development and implementation of new applications and services.

https://tinyurl.com/5878e3j4

"Springer Nature Continues Open Research Drive with Acquisition of protocols.io"

Scientific advancement depends on data credibility and work that can be verified, built upon and reproduced. Sharing all elements of research, including data, methods and materials, and even negative results, makes research more efficient, enables reproducibility and therefore builds trust in science. Studies show that lack of awareness of existing work or negative results leads to unnecessary duplication and could waste up to €26 billion in Europe alone.

By laying out detailed step-by-step instructions for research methods, aiming to standardise the process, ensure accuracy of results and enabling research to be reproduced, protocols have a vital role to play in addressing this. With protocols.io joining Springer Nature’s leading protocol offering, researchers will now have the option to make their protocols openly available on the protocols.io platform (fully OA) as well as publishing them in peer-reviewed publications (searchable via the Springer Nature Experiments).

https://tinyurl.com/3j4kn49w

Curator of Born Digital Special Collections at Vanderbilt University

We are seeking a Curator of Born Digital Special Collections to play a pivotal role building and sustaining this transformation to meet the emerging needs of 21st century researchers while expanding collections of born digital and digitized material. Reporting to the Director of Special Collections and University Archives, the Curator of Born Digital Special Collections will lead the University libraries’ curation, management, and preservation of born-digital materials in its Special Collections. The Curator will work with other subject matter curators in SCUA, library staff, faculty, and external donors to accession, curate, describe, and preserve unique collections of born-digital materials in multiple formats. The Curator will lead the implementation and use of digital forensic and preservation tools in SCUA as well as a new Vanderbilt University Web-Archiving program with extensive collaboration with colleagues in the Digital Imaging and Preservation, Library Technology and Digital Services, and Library teams.

https://tinyurl.com/mv2czw52

Paywall: "An Initial Interpretation of the U.S. Department of Education’s AI Report: Implications and Recommendations for Academic Libraries"

This article provides an analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s report on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its implications for academic libraries. It delves into the report’s key points, including the importance of AI literacy, the need for educator involvement in AI design and implementation, and the necessity of preparing for AI related issues. The author discusses how these points impact academic libraries and offers actionable recommendations for library leaders. It emphasizes the need for libraries to promote AI literacy, involve librarians in AI implementation, develop guidelines for AI use, prepare for AI issues, and collaborate with other stakeholders.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102761

Integrated Library Systems Specialist at University of Northern Iowa

Manages the Integrated Library System (ILS) and serves as library’s Ex Libris specialist; works with others to recommend and implement procedures, configurations, and workflows for effective and efficient use of and interoperability between the ILS’ Alma repository and the PrimoVE discovery layer to provide a positive user experience; communicates options, new developments, and updates of Ex Libris products to the library on a regular basis; manages and oversees the Alma repository; serving as ex-officio member and chair of the Alma Primo Advisory Committee (APAC); and provides leadership in the use of Ex Libris Analytics to improve workflows, quality, and efficiency of work and to inform the management of enhancements.

https://jobs.uni.edu/pands/view/52990

"Reproducibility in Machine Learning-Driven Research"

Research is facing a reproducibility crisis, in which the results and findings of many studies are difficult or even impossible to reproduce. This is also the case in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Often, this is the case due to unpublished data and/or source-code, and due to sensitivity to ML training conditions. Although different solutions to address this issue are discussed in the research community such as using ML platforms, the level of reproducibility in ML-driven research is not increasing substantially. Therefore, in this mini survey, we review the literature on reproducibility in ML-driven research with three main aims: (i) reflect on the current situation of ML reproducibility in various research fields, (ii) identify reproducibility issues and barriers that exist in these research fields applying ML, and (iii) identify potential drivers such as tools, practices, and interventions that support ML reproducibility. With this, we hope to contribute to decisions on the viability of different solutions for supporting ML reproducibility.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10320

Digital Preservation Analyst at University of Cambridge

Reporting to the Head of Digital Preservation, the Digital Preservation Analyst will focus on the following activities:

Digital Collection Analysis (e.g., lead a review of the digitisation workflow to inform its future state, focusing on day-to-day data management, preservation, and storage).

Business change (e.g., determine and plan new processes and procedures for digital preservation, metadata improvement, and quality management and dataflow processes, and embed them into the work of staff).

Stakeholder engagement and learning delivery (e.g., lead on training for new services delivered by the Programme, creating a training programme that addresses the needs of library staff who will use these services).

Community, collaboration, advocacy (e.g., work with the Head of Digital Preservation to build and manage mutually beneficial partnerships and networks within CUL, the University, and wider digital preservation and GLAM communities).

https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/42041/

"Analyzing and Navigating Electronic Theses and Dissertations"

This research is aimed at building tools and techniques for discovering and accessing the knowledge buried in ETDs, as well as to support end-user services for digital libraries, such as document browsing and long document navigation. First, we review several machine learning models that can be used to support such services. Next, to support a comprehensive evaluation of different models, as well as to train models that are tailored to the ETD data, we introduce several new datasets from the ETD domain. To minimize the resources required to develop high quality training datasets required for supervised training, a novel AI-aided annotation method is also discussed. Finally, we propose techniques and frameworks to support the various digital library services such as search, browsing, and recommendation.

https://tinyurl.com/33ay562h

Scholarly Publishing Librarian at Dartmouth College

The Scholarly Publishing Librarian supports new models and services for the creation, dissemination, and management of research and scholarship at Dartmouth College. This position helps to realize the strategic goals and initiatives of Dartmouth Library’s Scholarly Communication Program that engages diverse voices, supports the publication and sharing of a range of research outputs, and empowers the Dartmouth community to contribute to a more equitable and sustainable research ecosystem. The Scholarly Publishing Librarian participates in the implementation, development, and planning of publishing initiatives including the institutional repository of Dartmouth research, and coordinates and execute those aspects of the program that provide researchers, instructors, students, and staff with tools, information, education, and resources for publishing the results of their scholarly activities.

https://searchjobs.dartmouth.edu/postings/69861

"Mellon Foundation Funds Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices"

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has been granted a $5,000,000 award from the Mellon Foundation to bolster the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices regranting program and related operations. . . .

The forthcoming call, Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices, is set to create a groundbreaking opportunity for eligible nonprofit organizations in the US and Canada to digitize materials in any format. By providing essential funding to a diverse cohort of academic, independent, and community-based organizations, CLIR seeks to unlock access to previously unavailable or underutilized collections. This move is expected to foster broader recognition of the immense value in preserving resources that document the history of marginalized people to the advancement of social justice.

https://tinyurl.com/22nkn5at

Digital Collection Specialist at Library of Congress

Are you interested in joining a highly collaborative team-based environment working to acquire, preserve, and provide access to digital collections at the Library of Congress? Do you enjoy creative problem solving that will contribute to automating processes, developing workflows, working with large amounts of digital content, and making digital collections accessible? The Digital Content Management Section (DCM) is seeking a Digital Collections Specialist to join its dedicated, engaged, and innovative staff. DCM manages a variety of digital general collections content including content collected through the Library’s web archiving program, eBooks, e-Journals, digitized general collections materials, bulk datasets, and more! DCM maintains custodial responsibility for general digital collections materials, facilitating born digital acquisitions, conducting research and testing on digital content management methods and practices, and developing policy and procedures for the management of digital content.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/733116500