Charles W. Bailey, Jr. – Page 2

Metadata Technologies Librarian at NCSU

The Metadata Technologies Librarian participates in describing and providing access to electronic, print, and manuscript resources, with focus on user discovery systems. They are significantly involved in database maintenance operations in the Libraries’ integrated library system/library services platform (ILS/LSP) and discovery layers. They also contribute to data control activities, including data quality, standardization, batch loading, and data transfer. The position provides metadata consulting and project analysis services for patrons and colleagues. . . . The position will contribute to the planning and implementation of future ILS/LSP, discovery, and retrieval services, including the department’s and Libraries’ anticipated 2026-2027 ILS migration.

https://tinyurl.com/mrynzu7k

Paywall: "Changes in Digital Collections and Their Metadata: A Longitudinal Study of UIUC Digital Library"

This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future.

https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2024.2338015

Head of Digital Scholarship at University of Pennsylvania

Reporting to the Director of Research Data and Digital Scholarship (RDDS), the Head of Digital Scholarship is responsible for the administrative management of libraries’ digital scholarship initiatives including those related to digital projects, digital humanities, public digital scholarship, and affiliated areas.

https://tinyurl.com/mvj35wuh

"Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s New OA Policy the Start of a Shift towards Preprints?"

Whether a more decoupled ecosystem emerges will depend on other funders. Will key funders like Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Wellcome Trust follow Gates? Up until now they have made supportive noises about preprints but stopped short of mandates. Both are supporters of Plan S though, and frankly Plan S 2.0 looks a lot like Plan U. And what of the elephant in the room, National Institutes of Health (NIH)? The recent OSTP memo requires US-government-funded articles to be made free, but does not provide additional funds. If government agencies like NIH were to decide preprints qualify, as bioRxiv and arXiv have suggested, authors would have an easy path to making articles free that doesn’t require them to find an extra $5-10K behind the couch to cover APCs.

https://tinyurl.com/2t7z39vf

Electronic & Continuing Resources Librarian at Wesleyan University

Reporting to the Associate University Librarian for Discovery & Access, the Electronic & Continuing Resources Librarian is responsible for providing leadership and coordination of the overall lifecycle of electronic and continuing resources, including both the day-to-day work surrounding these resources and the conceptualization of how this work is done.

https://tinyurl.com/yecza86x

"Generative AI Can Turn Your Most Precious Memories into Photos That Never Existed"

Dozens of people have now had their memories turned into images in this way via Synthetic Memories, a project run by Domestic Data Streamers. The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, to bring people’s memories to life. Since 2022, the studio, which has received funding from the UN and Google, has been working with immigrant and refugee communities around the world to create images of scenes that have never been photographed, or to re-create photos that were lost when families left their previous homes.

https://tinyurl.com/yekzh6sy

Electronic Resources Librarian at Texas A&M University

The Electronic Resources Librarian (Assistant Librarian) will manage, maintain, and evaluate the Libraries’ electronic resources access and management systems. The selected candidate will set up and maintain access records for existing, new, and trial electronic resources, including updates to the systems’ knowledge bases. This position will be responsible for resolving electronic resources access issues and communicating with patrons, vendors, publishers, and library staff regarding such issues. The Electronic Resources Librarian will also collaborate with staff members responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the Libraries’ link resolver and will review, negotiate and process contracts and licenses for electronic resources.

https://tinyurl.com/3ca3venp

"Is ChatGPT Corrupting Peer Review? Telltale Words Hint at AI Use"

A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers are turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to evaluate others’ work. . . .

Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01051-2

Systems Librarian for Technical Services & Associate Director at University of California, Santa Barbara Library

Reporting to the Director of ReADS [Department of Resource Acquisition and Discovery Service], the successful candidate will provide leadership in planning and implementing the library’s collection-related technology needs and will be responsible for the integrated use of library technical services tools and cloud-based applications, acquisition platforms, and related systems and resources. . . . .Reporting to the Director of ReADS, the successful candidate will provide leadership in planning and implementing the library’s collection-related technology needs and will be responsible for the integrated use of library technical services tools and cloud-based applications, acquisition platforms, and related systems and resources.

https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02640

"AI Race Heats Up as OpenAI, Google and Mistral Release New Models"

OpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer.

The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI’s hit chatbot Chat-GPT.

https://tinyurl.com/36zmymwp

Senior Applications Developer at The Ohio State University

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/mvuzt8tx

"Guest Post — Speak Finance: Gain University Support for Open Scholarship "

Over the past ten years, Carnegie Doctoral Institutions with Very High Research Activity (R1) have received a significant portion of federal grant dollars. Although the unusual infusion of COVID research dollars will skew trends for years, on average, university revenues from all funding sources, have increased over the past ten years.. . .

During the same period of growth in university revenues, much attributed to R&D dollars, university investments in their libraries has remained around 1% of revenue. In good news, through unpredictable fluctuations in university revenues, an ARL library budget remains consistent. Unfortunately, with continuing cost increases, a flat library budget is an erosion in purchasing power. Without new investments, or substantial resource redistribution, we cannot make progress on new mandates for open data and scholarship.

https://tinyurl.com/25y6xh4d

Systems and Digital Services Librarian at University of Wisconsin – Superior

Chiefly, the position administers and maintains the library’s website and databases via EZproxy, the integrated library system (Ex Libris, Alma/Primo), Lib-Guides, SharePoint, and other services. The position includes close collaboration with other UW System libraries, campus Technology Services unit, with library colleagues to integrate and monitor library systems to improve the user experience.

https://tinyurl.com/z4avahat

"Towards a Books Data Commons for AI Training"

This white paper describes ways of building a books data commons: a responsibly designed, broadly accessible data set of digitized books to be used in training AI models. This report, written in partnership with Creative Commons and Proteus Strategies, is based on a series of workshops that brought together practitioners building AI models, legal and policy scholars, and experts working with collections of digitized books.

In the paper, we first explain why books matter for AI training and how broader access could be beneficial. We then summarize two tracks that might be considered for developing such a resource, highlighting existing projects that help foreground the potential challenges. One track relies on public domain and permissively licensed books, while the other depends on exceptions to copyright to enable training on in-copyright books. The report also presents several key design choices and next steps that could advance further development of this approach.

https://tinyurl.com/2fu47552

Senior Web Developer at The Ohio State University

The Senior Web Developer designs creative and usable solutions that have a significant impact on how users experience University Libraries’ discover and access interfaces for the digital library, content management systems, library catalogs, digital exhibits, learning resources and other systems. Duties also include providing technical support; maintaining existing applications; and participating in weekly maintenance windows.

https://tinyurl.com/2bkcpacs

"Impact and Development of an Open Web Index for Open Web Search"

Web search is a crucial technology for the digital economy. Dominated by a few gatekeepers focused on commercial success, however, web publishers have to optimize their content for these gatekeepers, resulting in a closed ecosystem of search engines as well as the risk of publishers sacrificing quality. To encourage an open search ecosystem and offer users genuine choice among alternative search engines, we propose the development of an Open Web Index (OWI). We outline six core principles for developing and maintaining an open index, based on open data principles, legal compliance, and collaborative technology development. The combination of an open index with what we call declarative search engines will facilitate the development of vertical search engines and innovative web data products (including, e.g., large language models), enabling a fair and open information space. This framework underpins the EU-funded project OpenWebSearch.EU, marking the first step towards realizing an Open Web Index.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24818

Metadata Specialist for Electronic and Visual Resources at Stanford University

The Metadata Specialist for Electronic and Visual Resources will be responsible for complex copy, derived original, and abbreviated original cataloging for online electronic monographs, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and physical video formats (e.g., DVD and Blu-ray) in a variety of Latin script (chiefly Western European) languages and original cataloging of non-documentary videos.

https://tinyurl.com/bddrvttb

"Life Scientists’ Experience with Posting Preprints during the COVID-19 Pandemic"

In the COVID-19 pandemic, it was much more critical for many life science researchers to rapidly disseminate research results—so they used preprints as upstream publication opportunities. This was rather new to the life sciences where preprint servers had only appeared as early as 2013. With a mixed-methods-study we examined this development and investigated whether preprint posting is a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of a cultural shift in publishing behavior in the life sciences. First, we conducted a survey of researchers who have posted COVID-19 related preprints. We investigated experiences with posting preprints during the COVID-19 pandemic, motivations for and concerns about posting preprints, the role of research institutions or funders, and the future of preprint publishing. Answers were grouped to compare differences between respondents’ gender, career stage, region of origin (global south or global north) and experience with posting preprints before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We further analyzed eight popular preprint repositories regarding the number of posted preprints and preprint characteristics, such as the number of authors and citations. Interestingly, survey and preprint server analysis have presented different, if not contradicting results: While the majority of surveyed researchers was willing to continue posting preprints, the numbers of preprints published, especially on servers for the life sciences, have stagnated or declined. Also, while certain preprints garnered substantial citations during the COVID-19 pandemic, this has not resulted in a significant shift in researchers’ publishing behavior, and the posting of preprints has not become a routine. We concluded that the sustainability of preprint publishing practices is more strongly influenced by disciplinary norms and practices than by external shocks as the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04982-9

Data Curator for Interdisciplinary Sustainability at Stanford University

We conceive of the area of Interdisciplinary Sustainability broadly and in alignment with the newly-inaugurated Doerr School of Sustainability’s mission to draw upon "a deep understanding of Earth, climate, and society to create solutions at a global scale." As a member of Stanford Libraries’ Research Data Services (RDS) department, the Data Curator for Interdisciplinary Sustainability will play a key role in advancing the Libraries’ data curation program. Alongside a growing team of data curation professionals within RDS, this Data Curator will primarily assist Stanford researchers from the Doerr School of Sustainability in finding, processing, managing, analyzing and preserving data.

https://tinyurl.com/5ybpx54w

Paywall: "Global Status of Dataset Repositories at a Glance: Study Based on OpenDOAR"

Developed countries like the United Kingdom and the USA are primarily involved in the development of institutional open-access repositories comprising significant components of OpenDOAR. The most extensively used software is DSpace. Most data set archives are OAI-PMH compliant but do not follow open-access rules. . . . Furthermore, the study concludes that the number of data sets kept in repositories is insufficient, although the expansion of such repositories has been consistent over the years.

https://doi.org/10.1108/DLP-11-2023-0094

Data Curator for Programmatic Access at Stanford University

Stanford Libraries seeks a Data Curator for Programmatic Access to join a team of existing and new data curation professionals at Stanford Libraries. Based in Stanford’s historic Green Library, this cross—disciplinary position will be located in a space associated with both Social Science data and Data Science software and services. Addressing all disciplines and departments at Stanford, this role builds on these traditions of service to build best practices in API usage for all researchers on campus. As a member of Research Data Services, this person plays a key part in advancing researchers’ abilities to discover, obtain, transform, compute and communicate research data.

https://tinyurl.com/ybyzneep

"PubTator 3.0: An AI-Powered Literature Resource for Unlocking Biomedical Knowledge"

PubTator 3.0 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator3/) is a biomedical literature resource using state-of-the-art AI techniques to offer semantic and relation searches for key concepts like proteins, genetic variants, diseases and chemicals. It currently provides over one billion entity and relation annotations across approximately 36 million PubMed abstracts and 6 million full-text articles from the PMC open access subset, updated weekly. PubTator 3.0’s online interface and API utilize these precomputed entity relations and synonyms to provide advanced search capabilities and enable large-scale analyses, streamlining many complex information needs. We showcase the retrieval quality of PubTator 3.0 using a series of entity pair queries, demonstrating that PubTator 3.0 retrieves a greater number of articles than either PubMed or Google Scholar, with higher precision in the top 20 results. We further show that integrating ChatGPT (GPT-4) with PubTator APIs dramatically improves the factuality and verifiability of its responses. In summary, PubTator 3.0 offers a comprehensive set of features and tools that allow researchers to navigate the ever-expanding wealth of biomedical literature, expediting research and unlocking valuable insights for scientific discovery.

https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae235

Digital Library Administrator at Mount Sinai Health System

Reporting to the Associate Dean of Libraries & Information Sciences, this position collaborates across all Scholarly & Research Technologies units to ensure continuous access to library resources that meet the education, research and clinical care needs of the Mount Sinai community. The Digital Library Administrator is primarily responsible for administering, enabling access to, and evaluating resources through our library discovery and reporting systems including Ex Libris, Alma/Primo and LibApps.

https://tinyurl.com/ppkthb5n

"Advancing the Search Frontier with AI Agents"

As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people struggle with tasks on search engines every day. Often, their struggles relate to the intrinsic complexity of their task and the failure of search systems to fully understand the task and serve relevant results. The task motivates the search, creating the gap/problematic situation that searchers attempt to bridge/resolve and drives search behavior as they work through different task facets. Complex search tasks require more than support for rudimentary fact finding or re-finding. Research on methods to support complex tasks includes work on generating query and website suggestions, personalizing and contextualizing search, and developing new search experiences, including those that span time and space. The recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the arrival of assistive agents, based on this technology, has the potential to offer further assistance to searchers, especially those engaged in complex tasks. There are profound implications from these advances for the design of intelligent systems and for the future of search itself. This article, based on a keynote by the author at the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference, explores these issues and how AI agents are advancing the frontier of search system capabilities, with a special focus on information interaction and complex task completion.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01235

Library Digital Literacy & Technology Coordinator at Texas Library and Archives Commission

Performs advanced (senior-level) consultative services and training in digital literacy and library technologies, including broadband and broadband enabled technologies. This position takes a leadership role in ensuring Texas libraries are knowledgeable about and have resources to implement digital literacy programs and technologies that meet the needs of their communities. As a member of the Library Digital Opportunity (LDO) team, also serves as the project lead for major internal, statewide, and national initiatives and projects relating to digital literacy programs and technology in libraries that support library capacity.

https://tinyurl.com/mr236p39