September 2024 – Page 4

Dean of the University Libraries at University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland Libraries comprise eight distinct libraries holding more than 3.5 million volumes and representing a diverse array of special collections, digital collections, and electronic resources: McKeldin Library (general collections), and separate branch libraries for architecture, performing arts, arts, special collections and archives, library media services, chemistry, engineering/physical sciences, and the Shady Grove branch. The Dean occupies a critical place in the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) consortium of libraries, which shares services among sixteen institutions. The Libraries is an active member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the HathiTrust, OCLC, and the Northeast Research Libraries Consortium, as well as state, regional and national consortia and organizations.

https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/122588

Paywall: "Ephemeral Geodata: An Impending Digital Dark Age"

Despite the unprecedented rate of geospatial data (“geodata”) generation, we are paradoxically creating a potential “dark age” in geospatial knowledge due to a failure to archive it. In the twentieth century, map libraries systematically collected and preserved government-issued maps. However, many have not expanded to include digital formats, which have replaced paper maps in most domains. Compounding this issue is the prevailing practice among government data providers to continuously update public data without adequately preserving previous iterations, thus overwriting the historical record.

https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2024.2398542

Senior Applications Developer at The Ohio State University

The Senior Applications Developer serves on the cross-functional Application Development & Operations team in the University Libraries IT Division. The Senior Applications Developer is responsible for the end-to-end development and delivery of specialized library and administrative systems that enable the libraries to share knowledge and culture with the people of Ohio, the nation, and the world. The Senior Applications Developer collaborates with product owners, project managers, and team members on the specification of business and technical requirements and proposes and implements solutions that adhere to standards for data security, code quality, test coverage, digital accessibility, and architecture. Duties also include providing technical support; maintaining existing open-source and custom applications; collaborating in the investigation of problems, conducting root-cause analyses, and recommending fixes; and participating in weekly maintenance windows.

https://tinyurl.com/ym22uacy

"Creating a Fully Open Environment for Research Code and Data"

Quantitative research in the social and natural sciences is increasingly dependent on new datasets and forms of code. Making these resources open and accessible is a key aspect of open research and underpins efforts to maintain research integrity. Erika Pastrana explains how Springer Nature developed Nature Computational Science to be fully compliant with open research and data principles.

https://tinyurl.com/7uwdxrrz

Digital Program Manager at Rockefeller Archive Center

The Rockefeller Archive Center seeks a highly organized and detail-oriented individual to join its Access team as a Digitization Program Manager. In this newly created position, you will guide the RAC’s efforts to make its collections more broadly accessible to its user communities by building and sustaining the organization’s capacity for digitizing archival records.

https://tinyurl.com/3h9ac2w4

Paywall: "The FAIRification Process for Data Stewardship: A Comprehensive Discourse on the Implementation of the Fair Principles for Data Visibility, Interoperability and Management"

Using a systematic literature review, the study focuses on the implementation of these [FAIR] principles in research data management and their applicability in data repositories and data centres. It highlights the importance of implementing these principles systematically, allowing stakeholders to choose the minimum requirements and provide a vision for implementing them in data repositories and data centres. The article also highlights the steps in the FAIRification process, which can enhance data interoperability, discovery and reusability.

https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352241270692

Director of Copyright & Scholarly Communication Services at University of Virginia

The University of Virginia Library is seeking a dynamic leader in copyright and scholarly communication services to shape future outreach efforts. This new position will transform the Library’s copyright and scholarly communication services to faculty and students in support of innovation in scholarly production, open access initiatives, and rights and risk assessment of digital content. The Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communication Services will build crucial partnerships both within the library and across grounds with faculty and students. Strengthening these relationships will enhance services, engage with the UVA scholarly community, and encourage compliance with federal open policies.

https://tinyurl.com/6yd69ck9

Internet Archive: "New Feature Alert: Access Archived Webpages Directly through Google Search"

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. . . .

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time.

https://tinyurl.com/ms749s28

Digital Repository Coordinator at The New York Public Library

The Library seeks a system-minded, collaborative person to serve as a Digital Repository Coordinator. As part of the library’s Digital Preservation program, the Digital Repository Coordinator leads the technical effort to migrate digital collections from all of the Library’s born-digital acquisition and digitization programs into its digital repository. They also administer the digital repository software and manage the long-term preservation of files within.

https://tinyurl.com/4bn3yuvt

Paywall: "Reshaping Academic Library Information Literacy Programs in the Advent of ChatGPT and Other Generative AI Technologies"

This article reports on three digital information literacy initiatives created by instruction librarians to support students’ use of generative AI technologies, namely ChatGPT, in academic library research. The cumulative and formative data gathered from the initiatives reveals a continuing need for academic libraries to provide information literacy instruction that guides students toward the ethical use of information and awareness of using generative AI tools in library research.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2024.2400132

Operations Manager (Digital Archiving) at The National Archives (UK)

The National Archives is the archive of UK Government and the courts and one of the world’s leading digital archives. We preserve and provide access to the UK’s public records. Our strategy sets out our ambition to be an inclusive, entrepreneurial and disruptive archive.

We have operated as a digital archive for over 20 years. Our technical platform includes innovative new services running alongside systems that are approaching retirement. We are seeking a talented individual to strengthen our team as our next generation of digital archiving services become operational.

https://tinyurl.com/v2xbpe3r

"3D Data Long-Term Preservation in Cultural Heritage"

The report explores the challenges and strategies for preserving 3D digital data in cultural heritage. It discusses the issue of technological obsolescence, emphasising the need for ustainable storage solutions and ongoing data management strategies. Key topics include understanding technological obsolescence, the lifecycle of digital content, digital continuity, data management plans (DMP), FAIR principles, and the use of public repositories. The report also covers the importance of metadata in long-term digital preservation, including types of metadata and strategies for building valuable metadata. It examines the evolving standards and interoperability in 3D format preservation and the importance of managing metadata and paradata. The document provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and solutions for preserving 3D cultural heritage data in the long term.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04507

Software Quality Assurance Specialist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As a member of a highly collaborative team within the University Libraries’ Software Development department, the Software Quality Assurance Specialist designs and implements automated and manual software quality assurance processes to support technology and infrastructure for University Libraries services and collections. The core goal for this position is to improve software quality across our portfolio by implementing consistent processes aimed at proactively identifying functional, interface, security, and other issues during development and maintenance. This person also learns and applies robust software development and diagnostic practices, including automated testing, software documentation, peer review, and the creation and maintenance of software testing environments and dashboards.

https://tinyurl.com/yan8m6wp

| Digital Library Jobs |
| Electronic Resources Jobs |
| Library IT Jobs |
| Digital Scholarship |

"The AI-Copyright Trap"

As AI tools proliferate, policy makers are increasingly being called upon to protect creators and the cultural industries from the extractive, exploitative, and even existential threats posed by generative AI. In their haste to act, however, they risk running headlong into the Copyright Trap: the mistaken conviction that copyright law is the best tool to support human creators and culture in our new technological reality (when in fact it is likely to do more harm than good). It is a trap in the sense that it may satisfy the wants of a small group of powerful stakeholders, but it will harm the interests of the more vulnerable actors who are, perhaps, most drawn to it. Once entered, it will also prove practically impossible to escape. I identify three routes in to the copyright trap in current AI debates: first is the “if value, then (property) right” fallacy; second is the idea that unauthorized copying is inherently wrongful; and third is the resurrection of the starving artist trope to justify copyright’s expansion.

https://tinyurl.com/bdett6ue

"Datacenters to Emit 3X More Carbon Dioxide Because of Generative AI"

The datacenter industry is set to emit 2.5 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide between now and the end of the decade, three times more than if generative AI had not been developed.

https://tinyurl.com/4vatmm8a

DevOps Engineer at University of Maryland, College Park

The DevOps Engineer is responsible for building and maintaining the University of Maryland Libraries’ application deployment environments. The DevOps Engineer utilizes software development techniques to automate application deployments and to automate system monitoring and notifications. . . . The incumbent maintains applications and systems through monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning resources such as cpu, memory, disk, and network, and will ensure systems are properly redundant, backed up and prepared for disaster recovery.

https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/122213

"eBooks, Interlibrary Loan and an Uncertain Future"

Important advancements are underway, but ILL for ebooks is hampered by restrictive licensing models, resource sharing systems, and current practices. This study provides an environmental scan of the current acquisitions and ILL practices of academic libraries. This paper guides academic libraries through these conversations so that they can support the borrowing and lending of ebooks into the future.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2024.2391735

Digital Archivist at Carnegie Mellon University

In this role, you will be responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining the Carnegie Mellon University Archives’ born-digital program. This includes developing policies and procedures for accessioning, ingesting, preserving, managing, and providing access to electronic records; developing procedures and workflows for describing born-digital records within hybrid collections; and managing web-archiving activities. You will also work closely with colleagues focused on digitization, and digital strategies and infrastructure to develop policies and procedures for managing digital records and integrate them into existing projects and programs.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2jwzn9

"‘It Is Obscenely Fast’ — Biggest Rival to Nvidia Demos Million-Core Super AI Inference Chip That Obliterates the DGX100 with 44GB of Super Fast Memory and You Can Even Try It for Free"

Patrick Kennedy from ServeTheHome saw the product in action at the recent Hot Chips 2024 symposium, noting, “I had the opportunity to sit with Andrew Feldman (CEO of Cerebras) before the talk and he showed me the demos live. It is obscenely fast. The reason this matters is not just for human to prompt interaction. Instead, in a world of agents where computer AI agents talk to several other computer AI agents. Imagine if it takes seconds for each agent to come out with output, and there are multiple steps in that pipeline. If you think about automated AI agent pipelines, then you need fast inferencing to reduce the time for the entire chain.”

https://tinyurl.com/5bdv4rxj

Senior Developer at Northwestern University Libraries [AI]

The Digital Products and Data Curation team at Northwestern University Libraries is looking for a term Senior Developer to help us build best-in-class AI driven, opensource discovery and metadata description applications for use by Northwestern and the wider library community. A member of the Digital Products team, the successful candidate will take part in a variety of public-facing, open-source projects that challenge assumptions about discovery of library collections and metadata generation. Prioritizing working code and pragmatic solutions, Northwestern Libraries is looking for a candidate that thrives in a fast-paced environment solving complex problems with bleeding-edge tools and who strives to improve access to a rich collection of cultural heritage artifacts including the 1968 Bursar’s Office Takeover, Berkeley Folk Music, and photos from the WPA https://dc.library.northwestern.edu/collections/ . In addition, the incumbent will focus on developing practices and standards that help the wider community implement similar systems.

https://tinyurl.com/4trnsd9x

"Clarivate Report Unveils the Transformative Role of Artificial Intelligence on Shaping the Future of the Library"

The report combines feedback from a survey of more than 1,500 librarians from across the world with qualitative interviews, covering academic, national and public libraries. In addition to the downloadable report, the accompanying microsite’s dynamic and interactive data visualizations enable rapid comparative analyses according to regions and library types. . . .

Key findings of the report include:

Most libraries have an AI plan in place, or one in progress: Over 60% of respondents are evaluating or planning for AI integration.

AI adoption is the top tech priority: AI-powered tools for library users and patrons top the list of technology priorities for the next 12 months, according to 43% of respondents.

AI is advancing library missions: Key goals for those evaluating or implementing AI include supporting student learning (52%), research excellence (47%) and content discoverability (45%), aligning closely with the mission of libraries.

Librarians see promise and pitfalls in AI adoption: 42% believe AI can automate routine tasks, freeing librarians for strategic and creative activities. Levels of optimism vary regionally.

AI skills gaps and shrinking budgets are top concerns. Lack of expertise and budget constraints are seen as greater challenges than privacy and security issues: — Shrinking budgets: Almost half (47%) cite shrinking budgets as their greatest challenge. — Skills gap: 52% of respondents see upskilling as AI’s biggest impact on employment, yet nearly a third (32%) state that no training is available.

AI advancement will be led by IT: By combining the expertise of heads of IT with strategic investment and direction from senior leadership, libraries can move from consideration to implementation of AI in the coming years.

Regional priorities differ: Librarians’ views on other key topics such as sustainability, diversity, open access and open science show notable regional diversity.

https://tinyurl.com/9azeessa

Pulse of the Library report

Discovery Librarian at University of California Berkeley

In partnership with and under the guidance of the Head of Systems and Discovery Services, the Discovery Librarian will collaborate with stakeholders across the Library to ensure seamless access to the Library’s collections for all users to support research and teaching and to advance the University Libraries’ commitment to equity and inclusion. This might include identifying pain points and contributing to the development of user-centered access and discovery practices, strategies, and services. The Discovery Librarian will oversee configurations related to Discovery in Alma, troubleshoot issues reported by users and staff and identify solutions and/or communication opportunities, review ongoing monthly release notes, quarterly feature releases, and annual product roadmaps for Primo VE.

https://tinyurl.com/48fu5sxz

"The AI Copyright Hype: Legal Claims That Didn’t Hold Up"

Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks, we are suddenly flooded by news reports with titles such as “US Artists Score Victory in Landmark AI Copyright Case,” “Artists Land a Win in Class Action Lawsuit Against A.I. Companies,” “Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators”—and the list goes on. The exuberant mood in these headlines mirror the enthusiasm of people actually involved in this particular case (Andersen v. Stability AI). The plaintiffs’ lawyer calls the court’s decision “a significant step forward for the case.” “We won BIG,” writes the plaintiff on X.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the reality behind these headlines and statements. The “BIG” win in fact describes a portion of the plaintiffs’ claims surviving a pretrial motion to dismiss. If you are already familiar with the motion to dismiss per Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 12(b)(6), please refer to Part II to find out what types of claims have been dismissed early on in the AI lawsuits.

https://tinyurl.com/rhmzkr8y

Digital Archivist at Old Dominion University

The Digital Archivist is responsible for creating and implementing digital preservation plans, engaging in digital curation and collection development, supporting the Libraries’ digital collections platform(s), creating and providing guidance on metadata for digital materials, and providing access to Old Dominion University’s digital collections. The Digital Archivist administers and prioritizes multiple projects and tasks to meet the goals of the Digital Collections Program, including training, and supervising student employees and interns to assist with program activities.

https://jobs.odu.edu/postings/21423

"Impact Factor Does Not Predict Long-Term Article Impact across 15 Journals"

Authors who publish in journals with higher impact factors are deemed to contribute more to their discipline. However, the impact factor of a journal does not indicate how long a specific article stays in the scientific discourse, and metrics that measure the length of time articles within a journal continue to be cited are not typically used. We examined citations of 443,732 research articles [786,064 total] between 1980 and 2020 across 15 journals. We explored the range of longevity values found across different journals as well as the relationship between impact factor and longevity. We found no relationship between impact factor and longevity, indicating that immediate attention to an article is not correlated with longer-term impact. . . .

For early-career scholars, the implications of citation longevity can be meaningful. Our data suggest that a new faculty member publishing primarily in strong society journals has yet to reach their full impact by mid-career milestones such as applying for tenure and promotion. The total contribution of the work to the field will likely not be seen until after their career is finished. . . .

The results presented here have important implications for journal selection and evaluation of science academics. For example, early career researchers may benefit from publishing in lower-impact, higher-longevity journals because their work may become classic within their field when they reach full promotion. Additionally, hiring and promotion committees should consider giving journals with higher longevity scores more weight among early career researchers, as these works can potentially impact departmental rankings over the long run. Furthermore, funding agencies and university review committees could benefit from a holistic analysis of academic productivity by examining article and journal performance metrics over time along with traditional indicators, such as altmetrics (Fortin et al., 2021), impact factor, and total citations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dim.2024.100079