August 2024 – DigitalKoans

DigitalKoans Posts Resume on 9/10/2024

DigitalKoans Posts will resume on 9/10/2024.

Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities, 2000-2024: Marketing and Communications Challenges and Opportunities

This book explores the recent history and future directions of scholarly publishing in the humanities in the United States from a marketing and communications perspective. The study draws on statistical surveys and data from a multidude of sources in order to analyze the major challenges confronting the humanities in higher education as well as the opportunities for print and digital publication since 2000. Chapters cover all types of publishing from university to trade presses, libraries, national programs, and self publishing, and focuses on changes in higher education funding, the impact of disruptive technologies such as AI, and the importance of global markets in disseminating new research in the humanities.

https://tinyurl.com/25m3abwu

"Tweeting and Retweeting Scientific Articles: Implications for Altmetrics"

Despite differences in extent of engagement of users, original tweets and retweets to scientific publications are considered as equal events. Current research investigates quantifiable differences between tweets and retweets from an altmetric point of view. Twitter users, text, and media content of two datasets, one containing 742 randomly selected tweets and retweets (371 each) and another with 5898 tweets and retweets (about 3000 each), all linking to scientific articles published on PLoS ONE, were manually categorized. Results from analyzing the proportions of tweets and retweets indicated that academic and individual accounts produce majority of original tweets (34% and 55%, respectively) and posted significantly larger proportion of retweets (41.5 and 81%). Bot accounts, on the other hand, had posted significantly more original tweets (20%) than retweets (2%). Natural communication sentences prevailed in retweets and tweets (63% vs. 45%) as well as images (41.5% vs. 23%), both showing a significant rise in usage overtime. Overall, the findings suggest that the attention scientific articles receive on Twitter may have more to do with human interaction and inclusion of visual content in the tweets, than the significance of or genuine interest towards the research results.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05127-8

"What Needs to be Learned by U.S. Cultural Heritage Professionals? Results from the Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network"

With the current proliferation of training opportunities available in digital preservation, this study asks: what are the most in demand digital preservation instruction topics? To answer this question, we did a qualitative content analysis of 168 Professional Development Support applications received by the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N) between September 2020 and December 2023. The study finds that the management of digital records and metadata/cataloging standards were the most requested training topics, and that general and broadly applicable skills tend to be the most sought after. This indicates that there is a continuing need to provide education focusing on the core elements of digital preservation and knowledge, and that we have not moved on yet to a place where cultural heritage professionals are solely seeking skills in more advanced or specialized digital preservation topics.

https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2024-0024

"AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data"

Yet, although current LLMs. . ., including GPT-3, were trained on predominantly human-generated text, this may change. If the training data of most future models are also scraped from the web, then they will inevitably train on data produced by their predecessors. In this paper, we investigate what happens when text produced by, for example, a version of GPT forms most of the training dataset of following models. . . .

Model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality. . . .

In our work, we demonstrate that training on samples from another generative model can induce a distribution shift, which—over time—causes model collapse. This in turn causes the model to mis-perceive the underlying learning task. To sustain learning over a long period of time, we need to make sure that access to the original data source is preserved and that further data not generated by LLMs remain available over time. The need to distinguish data generated by LLMs from other data raises questions about the provenance of content that is crawled from the Internet: it is unclear how content generated by LLMs can be tracked at scale. One option is community-wide coordination to ensure that different parties involved in LLM creation and deployment share the information needed to resolve questions of provenance. Otherwise, it may become increasingly difficult to train newer versions of LLMs without access to data that were crawled from the Internet before the mass adoption of the technology or direct access to data generated by humans at scale.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Access & Systems Librarian at Roseman University of Health Sciences

Serve as system administrator for the library’s integrated library system (ILS); including troubleshooting issues, overseeing updates, maintaining vendor relations, patron account management, resolving data discrepancies, providing reports, and overseeing library staff training

Oversee the maintenance, configuration, and troubleshooting of other library systems including the institutional repository, interlibrary loan software, library guides, and the library website

Promote Roseman University research through management and growth of the institutional repository system

https://tinyurl.com/2wbt33z3

"Interview: Deciphering the Law: Hachette v. Internet Archive Pt. 1 (2023) with Dave Hansen"

This is the first in a series of interviews with those closely tied to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit. In March 2023, the court ruled against the Internet Archive and its use of the Emergency Lending Library causing a ripple throughout the library and education fields. Below, find the answers to some of the questions that the case elicited by JCEL contributors and copyright scholars Dave Hansen, Michelle Wu, and Kyle Courtney.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v7i2.21337

Library DevOps Engineer II at Princeton University

In this role, you will leverage your knowledge of servers, storage, virtualization, application administration, security frameworks, and the academic Library domain to verify that Princeton maintains its reputation as a national and international leader in the development of digital repositories and access systems which are integral to preserving and making available the scholarly record at a complex institution such as Princeton. You will collaborate with DevOps and Library Software Engineer team members to determine technical requirements and automation strategies for our on premise infrastructure containing virtual hosts running over three hundred (300) virtual machines in our test, staging, and production environments.

https://tinyurl.com/ywpbprfp

"Director of University of Texas Libraries and Open Access Champion Lorraine Haricombe Announces Retirement"

Lorraine J. Haricombe, an innovating leader in academic libraries, has announced her retirement as Director and Vice Provost of the University of Texas Libraries, marking the conclusion of a distinguished career spanning decades. . . .

Among her many achievements, she expanded the development of Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository, which has significantly enhanced the accessibility and impact of the university’s scholarly output. Haricombe also championed the implementation of advanced data management services, providing critical support for the university’s research community in managing, preserving, and sharing their data. . . . .

One of Haricombe’s most notable accomplishments as a library leader was her advocacy in advancing open access initiatives. She played a key role in the establishment of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Working Group, which has been instrumental in reducing the cost of educational materials for students and promoting the adoption of OER across the campus. . . .

Before her tenure at The University of Texas at Austin, Haricombe served as the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas from 2006 to 2015. At Kansas, she was a driving force behind the implementation of the university’s open access policy, making it one of the first public universities in the United States to adopt such a policy.

https://tinyurl.com/2296efah

Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries

As a member of a team of professionals in the Digital Scholarship Lab, the Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian will be a key contributor to the MSU Libraries’ services and programs for data visualization, immersive technologies, and digital scholarship. Collaborating with colleagues across the Libraries, this position provides consultation services and designs programming that orient patrons to the transformative capabilities of data visualization tools and immersive technologies for teaching, learning, and research. The Data and Immersive Visualization Librarian will contribute to rich, well-developed communities at MSU that are experimenting with data visualization tools, XR/AR/MR/VR, gaming, and other immersive technologies.

https://tinyurl.com/ncdr3jvz

"Summary of User Rights Network Symposium: Protecting Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override "

In this paper, Benson, Blumenthal, and Klosek summarize the proceedings of the public symposium on the “Protection of Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override.” The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)—together, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA)—sponsored the symposium in partnership with the American University Washington College of Law Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The paper includes summaries of each panel, questions that were discussed, and takeaways for the library community to consider.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v7i2.20856

Technology Development Librarian at Emory University

Reporting to the Director of the Library, the Technology Development Librarian (TDL) is responsible for supporting, updating, and developing software used in the ongoing research and access agenda of Pitts Theology Library, a unit of Candler School of Theology. . . . The current portfolio of library technologies includes WordPress, OmekaS, Opensolr, Quire, and Reclaim Hosting. . . . The TDL will also play a key role in project teams that leverage digital technology to provide access for library patrons, enhance research on library collections, and allow collaboration between the library and its various constituencies.

https://tinyurl.com/4n72bxff

Paywall: British Library: "User-Centred Collecting for Emerging Formats"

This paper provides an overview of the work conducted at legal deposit libraries to better understand access requirements for emerging formats, from a user’s perspective and with a focus on web-based interactive narratives. . . . It also considers how existing tools and methodologies, such as web archiving, can be adapted and built to support the collection of emerging formats. Finally, it delves into different research projects conducted at the British Library around archiving and performing quality assurance for interactive narratives, collecting contextual information, and lessons learnt from exhibiting born-digital content in a physical space.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2389101

Associate College Librarian & Coordinator for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications at Haverford College

The ACL serves as a member of the Libraries’ leadership team and participates in strategic planning. The ACL leads the overall collections program, discipline-specific responsibility for which is distributed among subject librarians. The ACL manages the collections budget, generates reports and forecasts, and negotiates licenses for e-resources. The ACL provides vision and leadership for the Libraries’ open access strategies and supports open publishing among Haverford scholars. The ACL administers Haverford’s repository of faculty publications and develops best practices for showcasing faculty scholarship.

https://tinyurl.com/yc5c5s2c

"An Analysis of the Impact of Gold Open Access Publications in Computer Science"

There has been some concern about the impact of predatory publishers on scientific research for some time. Recently, publishers that might previously have been considered `predatory’ have established their bona fides, at least to the extent that they are included in citation impact scores such as the field-weighted citation impact (FWCI). These are sometimes called ‘grey’ publishers (MDPI, Frontiers, Hindawi). In this paper, we show that the citation landscape for these grey publications is significantly different from the mainstream landscape and that affording publications in these venues the same status as publications in mainstream journals may significantly distort metrics such as the FWCI.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10262

Geospatial Specialist / Librarian at University of Arizona

The Geospatial Specialist / Librarian will develop an interdisciplinary service program supporting the geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data needs of the UA research and instruction communities. . . . The Geospatial Specialist / Librarian will: stay abreast of trends and tools available in the evolving geospatial data ecosystem; provide technical support and training in the use of tools and workflows to support GIS applications; develop skill in and apply pedagogical best practices in data and computational instruction; work with library colleagues and researchers to identify appropriate tools, platforms, and resources for geospatial projects; collaborate with other members of the Data Cooperative and Research Engagement to develop outreach strategies and partnerships; work with members of the Libraries’ Technical Services and Support (TeSS) department in support of infrastructure for discovery and access of the Libraries’ geospatial digital assets; collaborate with Research Engagement and TeSS departments on curation and metadata management for geospatial digital assets.

https://tinyurl.com/47vc2tyk

Paywall: "Application-Based Big Data Development Framework for Health Sciences Libraries"

It presents a theoretical framework of the performance-based evaluation system for health institutes’ libraries in the digital environment. The health sciences libraries’ systematic approach was judged based on the five main components (data culture, organisational infrastructure, responsibilities, skills and technology competence) of big data analytics (BDA). . . . The study proposed a need for skilled professionals with the knowledge and experience both professionally and technically. Finally, the study proposed a model that will help to measure the organisation’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data to empirically validate the association concerning big data analysis and analytical practices in health libraries.

https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12545

Librarian for Electronic Resources at Pepperdine University

The Librarian for Electronic Resources manages the acquisition, access, and renewal of electronic resources, ensuring seamless and reliable access for all users. This role involves analyzing usage data to inform collection development, negotiating license agreements, and maintaining accurate metadata to ensure that Pepperdine Libraries’ resources meet the ever-changing needs of the university’s academic community.

https://tinyurl.com/jd4mucub

Paywall: "Research on the Generation Mechanism and Action Mechanism of Scientific Data Reuse Behavior"

Specifically, this study takes scientific data reuse attitudes as a breakthrough to discuss the factors that influence researchers’ scientific data reuse attitudes and the extent to which these factors influence scientific data reuse behaviors. It also further explores the impact of scientific data reuse behavior on research and innovation performance and the moderating effect of scientific data services on scientific data reuse behavior.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102921

Electronic Resources and Discovery Librarian at Seattle University

Seattle University’s Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons seeks a creative and collaborative Electronic Resources and Discovery Librarian to manage and support the entire lifecycle of electronic resources (databases, ejournals, ebooks, streaming media) including acquisition, licensing review, troubleshooting and assessment.

https://tinyurl.com/246kf384

"Determinants of Downloads as Demand for Hybrid Journals "

Although Big Deal contracts that provide access rights to all electronic journals published by the publisher initially gained favor with university libraries, some libraries have terminated these contracts owing to increased charges since the 2010s. Consequently, they are faced with the problem of selecting journals for purchase within their limited budgets. This study investigates the factors affecting the number of downloads, representing journal demand, to provide libraries with guidance on journal selection. The download equation for 1485 hybrid journals published by Springer Nature is formulated using ordinary least squares. The results found that 5% and 50% of the 1485 journals generated approximately 30% and 85% of the downloads in 2022, respectively. Downloads are concentrated in fewer journals, although the Pareto principle does not apply to hybrid journals. Demand concentration implies that libraries do not need to maintain access rights to all journals. Recently, a few leading publishers have provided access rights to almost all electronic journals based on transformative agreements aiming to promote open access. Therefore, this study’s findings raise the issue of the rationale for bundling electronic journals in transformative agreements, which is similar to Big Deal. Moreover, the results of the download estimation reveal that hybrid journals with more open access articles, larger citation scores, and longer histories acquire more downloads. These findings indicate that open access accelerates the dissemination of research.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.18689

Discovery & Systems Librarian at Mount Holyoke College

Reporting to the Head of Discovery Services, the Discovery and Systems Librarian will join a collaborative team that connects the Mount Holyoke Community to the many information resources available to them virtually and in person. As a member of the Discovery Services department within Discovery & Access (DnA), this person works to maximize best possible cross-system functionality, partnering with colleagues to optimize all aspects regarding the discovery of and access to electronic and physical resources. In close collaboration with others in LITS and across the Five Colleges, the Discovery and Systems Librarian guides and directs the management and integration of the Library’s suite of discovery and digital access platforms with remote access & authentication systems.

https://tinyurl.com/yc3bd3ex

"Women and Men in Library and Information Science Scholarship: Authorship Trends from 2003 to 2021"

Library and information science (LIS) has long consisted of more women than men, at least in sheer numbers of library employees, but men are the primary authors of library literature. This study explores LIS literature published between 2003 and 2021 to identify if there are differences in the publishing patterns of women and men. The authors used content analysis to code the entire sample to identify overall subject trends after authors were categorized as women or men by mainly automated methods, using two R packages, genderize and ssa. The results show that there are overall inequities when compared to the profession as whole between the publishing rates of women and men in LIS, as well as differences in publication patterns by subjects and within specific journals. Shifts in subjects over the period under investigation did not increase the percentage of women publishing in the selected LIS journals. The authors conclude more research needs to be conducted to determine the cause of inequities in publishing not just among women and men, but all underrepresented voices in LIS.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102939

E-resources Librarian at Abertay University

In this role, you will manage and optimize library systems such as Alma, Primo, Leganto, and Rialto, overseeing the resource lifecycle of subscription and one-time resources. You’ll implement and maintain secure authentication methods for electronic resources, ensuring seamless access for our users. A significant part of your work will involve conducting data analysis and reporting to inform collection development and demonstrate the value of our resources to stakeholders.

https://tinyurl.com/7psb3jd9

"The PubPeer Conundrum: Administrative Challenges in Research Misconduct Proceedings"

The founders of PubPeer envisioned their website as an online form of a “journal club” that would facilitate post-publication peer review. Recently, PubPeer comments have led to a significant number of research misconduct proceedings – a development that could not have been anticipated when the current federal research misconduct regulations were developed two decades ago. Yet the number, frequency, and velocity of PubPeer comments identifying data integrity concerns, and institutional and government practices that treat all such comments as potential research misconduct allegations, have overwhelmed institutions and threaten to divert attention and resources away from other research integrity initiatives. Recent, high profile research misconduct cases accentuate the increasing public interest in research integrity and make it inevitable that the use of platforms such as PubPeer to challenge research findings will intensify. This article examines the origins of PubPeer and its central role in the modern era of online-based scouring of scientific publications for potential problems and outlines the challenges that institutions must manage in addressing issues identified on PubPeer. In conclusion, we discuss some potential enhancements to the investigatory process specified under federal regulations that could, if implemented, allow institutions to manage some of these challenges more efficiently.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2390007