Libraries – DigitalKoans

Paywall: “Mind the Gap!: How Do We Ethically Bridge the Divide Between the Cataloging/Metadata Community and the World of AI?”

How can cataloging/metadata professionals at academic institutions incorporate general frameworks and standards about ethical AI implementation into policies for AI use. . . . How can technical services/cataloging departments. . . provide accurate and culturally sensitive metadata? More importantly, how do cataloging/metadata professionals ethically fill the gap. . . without sacrificing job security?

https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2025.2525720

“The Current State of Female Representation in Library Leadership: A Comprehensive Analysis of Over 13,000 Open U.S. Libraries by Library Type, Collection Size, and State”

Women are underrepresented in leadership by 8.2 percentage points (pp) at academic libraries, 5.5 pp at special libraries, 10.7 pp at school libraries, and 14.7 pp at government libraries. This corresponds to a male being 28.6%–185.5% more likely to be director.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2025.2518008

“Generative AI and Open Access Publishing: A New Economic Paradigm”

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in scholarly publishing presents both opportunities and challenges for open access. AI can streamline workflows, reduce costs, and enhance the discoverability of research, potentially making open access more financially sustainable. However, the same AI capabilities also raise concerns about exclusivity and the creation of a tiered system that limits access to knowledge. Publishers face a strategic decision between embracing open access and leveraging AI for proprietary content and services. Libraries play a crucial role in advocating for open access and ethical AI use, building expertise, and influencing policy development. Balancing the benefits of AI with the principles of equity and inclusivity requires collaboration among stakeholders. By working together, publishers, librarians, and policymakers can harness the power of AI to democratize access to knowledge while upholding ethical standards, fostering a more inclusive and equitable academic community.

https://tinyurl.com/2d52e37d

Paywall: “AI and Systematic Reviews: Can AI Tools Replace Librarians in the Systematic Search Process?”

Focusing on the search stage of the systematic review process, the author examines the features and viability of select AI-based tools, evaluates their integration into existing systematic review workflows, and addresses issues related to transparency, reproducibility, and trustworthiness. The study also assesses whether these AI tools can be effectively and reliably incorporated into systematic review processes and discusses the evolving roles and responsibilities of librarians in using these technologies.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2025.2521519

“Why Engage with Transformative Agreements in Scholarly Publishing? Analysis of Customer and Publisher Press Release Statements”

How open access (OA) should be supported has been a frequent point of debate during the last three decades as different pathways have been created and evolved. One particular point of contention has been the use of institutional contracts between customer institutions and academic journal publishers, so-called transformative agreements (TAs), where subscription-based reading access is bundled with OA publishing rights. This study explores the motivational reasonings given by customers and publishers engaging with TAs. This study provides a thematic content analysis of customer and publisher statements from 95 press releases announcing new TAs involving five large scholarly journal publishers. Existing literature on motivational reasoning for open science, OA, and TAs was reviewed in order to create an initial set of codes to be used, which was complemented with an inductive process producing additional codes based on categorisation of reasonings that did not fit within the initial codes.The study found that TAs were supported for a variety of reasons, where both customers and publishers stressed better research dissemination, facilitating a transition towards OA publishing, and improved workflow management for publishing and invoicing. Customers emphasized economic and equality aspects while publishers did so to a notably lesser degree. This study complements the active area of bibliometric studies on TAs with a rich qualitative study based on a set of press releases that have not been used for this type of research, establishing a solid foundation for future studies to build upon.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/crxn3_v1

“Reeling Them In: Using TikTok and Video Content to Leverage Engagement Between Academic Librarians, Libraries and Students”

TikTok is the video-sharing social media platform of the moment. Young people, most often of the age of undergraduate students, are its primary users. Creating a library TikTok profile and sharing video content on the platform is consequently an excellent way for academic librarians and their libraries to engage with their student users. This case study explores the strategy employed at the Ferriss Hodgett Library at the Grenfell Campus of Memorial University for creating and sharing engaging videos on our library’s TikTok and other social media channels. Providing a critical evaluation of TikTok use and discussing themes and ideas for video content alongside best practices, this article outlines how short-form videos can be leveraged via TikTok and other video-based platforms to make the academic library and its staff more relevant and approachable, and lay the foundation for building stronger and more meaningful relationships with students.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.693

“Prospects of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Academic Library Search and Retrieval”

This paper examines the integration of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems within academic library environments, focusing on their potential to transform traditional search and retrieval mechanisms. RAG combines the natural language understanding capabilities of large language models with structured retrieval from verified knowledge bases, offering a novel approach to academic information discovery. The study analyzes the technical requirements for implementing RAG in library systems, including embedding pipelines, vector databases, and middleware architecture for integration with existing library infrastructure. We explore how RAG systems can enhance search precision through semantic indexing, real-time query processing, and contextual understanding while maintaining compliance with data privacy and copyright regulations. The research highlights RAG’s ability to improve user experience through personalized research assistance, conversational interfaces, and multimodal content integration. Critical considerations including ethical implications, copyright compliance, and system transparency are addressed. Our findings indicate that while RAG presents significant opportunities for advancing academic library services, successful implementation requires careful attention to technical architecture, data protection, and user trust. The study concludes that RAG integration holds promise for revolutionizing academic library services while emphasizing the need for continued research in areas of scalability, ethical compliance, and cost-effective implementation.

https://tinyurl.com/43d97fe5

“A Survey of AI Tools in Library Tech: Accelerating Into and Unlocking Streamlined Enhanced Convenient Empowering Game-Changers”

This article presents the current status of AI tools in library resources and systems, such as those licensed by Clarivate, Elsevier, and EBSCO. It also offers thoughts on the utility of the tools, how they work, their problems, and their context within the offerings of the companies that own them. With this information, library workers will be able to make better informed decisions about which, if any, AI tools to subscribe to, activate, or opt out of in their library resources and systems.

https://tinyurl.com/5xzc9d5d

“Use of Generative AI in Aiding Daily Professional Tasks: A Survey of Librarians’ Experiences”

This study examines how librarians are using third-party generative AI (GAI) tools such as ChatGPT to aid their daily professional tasks. An online survey of 272 librarians found that text-generating AI tools were the most popular. The majority of respondents felt that GAI tools were effective in improving productivity. Key challenges included ensuring content accuracy and designing effective prompts. Top suggestions for better preparing librarians to use GAI include practical training on using GAI, establishing AI policies and guidelines, fostering collaboration and communities of practice, and providing access to useful GAI resources. The study highlights popular use cases that can inform professional development, while underscoring the need for hands-on training, institutional policies, opportunities to experiment with GAI, and access to enhanced tools. As GAI evolves, supporting librarians’ adoption will be crucial for harnessing its potential benefits.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lib.2025.a961200

“Identifying Open Access Practices in Librarianship Journals”

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Policies around open access (OA) models, open peer review, and open data are often not transparent or consistent, leading to barriers in understanding for scholars, particularly those new to publishing; therefore, librarians and editors should take care to learn about OA models ahead of the publishing stage of their writing process.

Diamond OA is the most common method of publication in librarianship journals, and librarianship journals are most commonly published by association or society publishers. Librarians can highlight how this positively impacts authors and readers while being conscious of the workload and power imbalances possible in editorial environments where labor is not directly remunerated.

Following diamond, hybrid (green) OA is the most commonly offered publication option by all types of publishers in librarianship journals. Librarians can advocate for deposit in institutional repositories and support researchers in doing so.

A very low number of the analyzed librarianship journals (14 of 133) were either closed or required an APC for OA publication; therefore, librarians and editors can note that the field has strong adoption of no-fee publication and readership models.

To inform their own publication choices and to better engage with and guide other researchers at their institutions, librarians should develop competencies in OA literacy by following industry trends and changes and considering critically the structure of academic publishing.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17778

Paywall: “Technical Standards Within Socio-Technical Systems: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) Paper”

The paper presents interdisciplinary viewpoints to discuss key aspects of the literature, including how standards reflect political, financial, and cultural motivations, how standards are often implemented in different ways, challenging their effectiveness, and how standards structure work as much as they structure information. These various disciplinary perspectives are also used to highlight standardization issues related to emerging technologies, such as social media and generative artificial intelligence.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.25017

“Estimating Transformative Agreement Impact on Hybrid Open Access: A Comparative Large-Scale Study Using Scopus, Web of Science and Open Metadata”

This study of over 13,000 hybrid journals shows a substantial rise in open access due to transformative agreements between 2019 and 2023, although most articles remained paywalled. While transformative agreements accounted for the majority of open access, many articles continue to become open through the payment of individual publication fees. Hybrid open access and transformative agreements remain concentrated among a small group of large commercial publishers, with European countries—alongside South Africa—showing high adoption rates. In contrast, the three most productive countries, China, the United States, and India, show a substantially lower adoption in transformative agreements. Open questions remain as to whether this uneven distribution reflects temporary implementation gaps, inherent inequities in the transformative agreement model, or deliberate avoidance of such agreements.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15038

“Guest Post: Eight Hypotheses Why Librarians Don’t Like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)”

Content providers are starting to silo their collections in order to restrict other RAG-based tools from accessing their content.

An example: in the case of Primo Research Assistant, collections from APA (and others such as Elsevier and JSTOR) are excluded from result generation. This would need to be explained to students and faculty using the tool, which adds considerably to the time and energy put into the communication needed to make these tools worth their licensing cost. It can reasonably be assumed that almost all content providers are going to invest in their own AI assistants or make licensing deals with existing ones. How many of these can and should we license and maintain? Librarians working on discovery layers should start making plans now for identifying the tools that best serve their community and how their workflows need to change.

https://tinyurl.com/2fe6hdnw

“Exploring Emerging Technologies in Archiving and Preservation: Leveraging 3D Models, Interactive Environments, and AI Tools”

This article. . . explores how cultural heritage practitioners can leverage emerging technologies to enhance their work. . . . This article highlights AI applications and emerging technologies that can generate scripts without needing coding experience, create 3D models that increase accessibility and engagement, and develop virtual exhibits that extend the lifespan and reach of physical exhibits while providing additional interactive elements.

https://doi.org/10.1177/18758789251336085

“Learning from the Past | Periodicals Price Survey 2025 ”

Since 1960, Library Journal has published an annual article covering the ups and downs of periodicals pricing. . . . The article, however, is not just about numbers. It also touches on new and emerging pricing and sales models, discusses trends in the serials marketplace, and considers the issues collections librarians deal with when working with a finite budget. This year, we cast both a look back to see what can be learned from the past, and a look forward to consider what might be heading our way in the coming years.

https://tinyurl.com/bpkpf27a

“Evaluating AI Language Models for Reference Services: A Comparative Study of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot”

The descriptive statistics indicate that Google Gemini outperformed the other GenAI chatbots, by scoring high on “accuracy,” relevancy,” “friendliness” and “instruction” resulting in a higher mean score followed by public ChatGPT, commercial ChatGPT-4.0, and Microsoft Copilot.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2025.2478861

“AI Literacy: A Guide For Academic Libraries”

By embracing AI literacy, libraries can lead efforts to demystify AI, offer targeted programs, and foster interdisciplinary collaborations to explore AI’s influence on research and learning. Through partnerships with faculty and campus technology units, librarians can integrate AI literacy into courses, create learning communities, and provide practical training on AI-driven tools. In doing so, academic libraries position ourselves as key players in shaping critical conversations about AI and guiding the next generation of scholars to engage thoughtfully and ethically with these technologies.

https://tinyurl.com/5hap9t7v

“Developing Practices for FAIR and Linked Data in Heritage Science”

Heritage Science has a lot to gain from the Open Science movement but faces major challenges due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field, as a vast array of technological and scientific methods can be applied to any imaginable material. Historical and cultural contexts are as significant as the methods and material properties, which is something the scientific templates for research data management rarely take into account. While the FAIR data principles are a good foundation, they do not offer enough practical help to researchers facing increasing demands from funders and collaborators. In order to identify the issues and needs that arise “on the ground floor”, the staff at the Heritage Laboratory at the Swedish National Heritage Board took part in a series of workshops with case studies. The results were used to develop guides for good data practices and a list of recommended online vocabularies for standardised descriptions, necessary for findable and interoperable data. However, the project also identified areas where there is a lack of useful vocabularies and the consequences this could have for discoverability of heritage studies on materials from areas of the world that have historically been marginalised by Western culture. If Heritage Science as a global field of study is to reach its full potential this must be addressed.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-025-01598-x

“Datafication and Cultural Heritage Collections Data Infrastructures: Critical Perspectives on Documentation, Cataloguing and Data-sharing in Cultural Heritage Institutions”

The role of cultural heritage collections within the research ecosystem is rapidly changing. From often-passive primary source or reference point for humanities research, cultural heritage collections are now becoming integral part of large-scale interdisciplinary inquiries using computational-driven methods and tools. This new status for cultural heritage collections, in the ‘collections-as-data’ era, would not be possible without foundational work that was and is still going on ‘behind the scenes’ in cultural heritage institutions through cataloguing, documentation and curation of cultural heritage records. This article assesses the landscape for cultural heritage collections data infrastructure in the UK through an empirical and critical perspective, presenting insights on the infrastructure that cultural heritage organisations use to record and manage their collections, exploring the range of systems being used, the levels of complexity or ease at which collections data can be accessed, and the shape of interactions between software suppliers, cultural heritage organisations, and third-party partners. The paper goes on to include a critical analysis of the findings based on the sector’s approach to ‘3s’, that is standards, skill sets and scale, and how that applies to different cultural heritage organisations throughout the data lifecycle, from data creation, stewardship to sharing and re-using.

https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.277

Clarivate Change Reactions: “Library Database Providers Clash Over Subscription Models”

Lo [Leo Lo, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries] predicted that “as libraries adjust to leasing-only arrangements, they are likely to become more selective, prioritizing high-demand or core resources while potentially overlooking materials in emerging fields, niche subject areas, or interdisciplinary research.” He also thought the change could strain the relationship between librarians and publishers, hasten a shift to open-access initiatives, or “drive libraries to negotiate more aggressively” for favorable licensing terms.

https://tinyurl.com/yahhr9kd

Generative AI: “Do We Trust Ourselves? Is the Human the Weak Link?”

Generative artificial intelligence tools are becoming ubiquitous in applications across personal, professional and educational contexts. Similar to the rise of social media technologies, this means they are becoming an embedded part of people’s lives, and individuals are using these tools for a variety of benign purposes. This article examines how existing information literacy understandings will not work for artificial intelligence literacy, and provides an example of artificial intelligence searching, demonstrating its shortcomings. Present approaches may fall short of the answer required to navigate these new information tools, and this begs the question of what comes next. The current scope of information literacy and technology necessitates a multidisciplinary approach to solving the question of ‘what to do with artificial intelligence’ and arguably most impactfully requires one to acknowledge that what has worked may no longer suffice.

https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352251315845

“Copyright and Licencing for Cultural Heritage Collections as Data”

Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions have been exploring innovative ways to publish digital collections to facilitate reuse, through initiatives like Collections as data and the International GLAM Labs Community. When making a digital collection available for computational use, it is crucial to have reusable and machine-readable open licences and copyright terms. While existing studies address copyright for digital collections, this study focuses specifically on the unique requirements of collections as data. This research highlights both the legal and technical aspects of copyright concerning collections as data. It discusses permissible uses of copyrighted collections, emphasising the need for interoperable, machine-readable licences and open licences. By reviewing current literature and examples, this study presents best practices and examples to help CH institutions better navigate copyright and licencing issues, ultimately enhancing their ability to convert their content into collections as data for computational research.

https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.263

“Staffing of Library Publishing Programs in the United States and Canada: A Data-Driven Analysis”

Introduction: Using the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Research Dataset, this paper focuses on the staffing of library publishing programs at colleges, universities, and consortia in the United States and Canada from 2014 to 2022.

Methods: In order to transform the data into a consistent format and write it into a single table as a commaseparated values (CSV) file, we created a program written in C# and executed on Windows 10. We narrowed the data set to focus on just library publishing programs from the United States and Canada, as well as to those that responded to the survey in early and later years. We also analyzed the data by enrollment and compared the staffing of library publishing programs to the staffing of academic libraries in general using the annual Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Library Trends and Statistics Annual Survey data.

Results: The average library publishing program relies largely on professional staff, has shown the most growth in paraprofessional staff, and has lost staff overall since 2019 while still showing growth overall since data collection began. Discussion: Compared with staffing of ACRL libraries in general, library publishing programs lost staff members at about a four-times higher rate from 2014 to 2021.

Conclusion: From 2014 to 2022, the number of library publishing staff did not grow at the same rate as the number of staff in libraries did as a whole. Also, although there are certainly general conclusions or trends, there are also opportunities for additional quantitative and qualitative research to be done in this area.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.17755

"Beyond the Minimum: New Rule Requires Web Content (I’m Looking at You, LibGuides) to Meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA Standards "

In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalized a rule updating regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires that all state and local governments make their services, programs, and activities accessible, including those that are offered online and in mobile apps. The final rule dictates that public entities’ web content meet the technical standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1, level AA, an industry standard since its creation in 2018.

Libraries that receive federal funding will be required to follow this rule for any web content they create, including LibGuides. Springshare’s LibGuide platform is one of the most widely used among libraries for web content creation, from complete websites to pedagogical and research guides. While Springshare may develop plans to make sure its clients are in compliance with this new rule, there are more important questions that LibGuide creators need to consider to move beyond the bare minimum of following the rule. The authors explain what WCAG 2.1 AA compliance requires, how LibGuide authors can use accessibility principles to ensure compliance, and offer available tools to check existing guides, as well as discuss alternatives to LibGuides.

https://tinyurl.com/yc64vrjm

New Horizons in Artificial Intelligence in Libraries

This publication provides an opportunity to explore developing new library AI paradigms, including present use case practical implementation and opportunities on the horizon as well as current large ethics questions and needs for transparency, scenario planning, considerations and implications of bias as library AI systems are developed and implemented presently and for our collective future.

https://tinyurl.com/4b5juutm