DigitalKoans – Page 29 – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

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

Paywall: "For the People: How We Make Online LAM [Library, Archive, and Museum] Collections More Democratized"

The article critiques the misconception that online collections democratize artifact information for public consumption and explores the ways in which LAM institutions fall short of living up to their democratic ideals when it comes to digital collections projects. Inspired by others with similar critiques, the authors discuss how LAM institutions can better fulfill the ideal of accessible and equitable access to their collections. The article emphasizes the importance of five areas of digital collections projects: system design, metadata practices, digitization selection and prioritization, labor, and user participation and engagement.

https://doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2024.2306042

Repository and Scholarly Services Librarian at University of Chicago

The Repository and Scholarly Services Librarian has primary responsibility for D’Angelo’s administration of the Law School’s institutional repository, Chicago Unbound. In that role, the Repository and Scholarly Services Librarian monitors the scholarship produced by the Law School’s faculty, convenes, and leads D’Angelo’s Chicago Unbound Working Group, and coordinates with Library and Law School colleagues to develop and maintain the repository. The Repository and Scholarly Services Librarian also oversees the Library’s discovery and curation of scholarship in the faculty citation database and uses content from the repository and the citations database to generate reports for Law School stakeholders and to maintain faculty publication lists on the Law School website.

https://apply.interfolio.com/143371

"How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I."

The volume of data is crucial [to train AIs]. Leading chatbot systems have learned from pools of digital text spanning as many as three trillion words, or roughly twice the number of words stored in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which has collected manuscripts since 1602. The most prized data, A.I. researchers said, is high-quality information, such as published books and articles, which have been carefully written and edited by professionals. . . .

Tech companies are so hungry for new data that some are developing "synthetic" information. This is not organic data created by humans, but text, images and code that A.I. models produce — in other words, the systems learn from what they themselves generate.

https://tinyurl.com/3uxuwekh

Programmer Analyst I – Digital Resources at Texas Tech University

The Programmer Analyst I’s role is to develop, test, and maintain software applications in support of business requirements. This includes writing, coding, testing, and analyzing software programs and applications.

https://tinyurl.com/2nkxm4ns

"Transitional Agreements Aren’t Working: What Comes Next?"

Most important is the question of whether TAs deliver on their promise of their name to be transitional and transformative. Overall, the rate of journal "flipping" is low (with the exception of some smaller publishers). Most shocking, if not entirely unsurprising, to me was the following finding: based on the journal flipping rates observed between 2018 -2022 it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA.

https://tinyurl.com/n2ukvxr6

Digital Scholarship Developer at Providence College

Develop and maintain applications, platforms, and tools that support digital scholarship projects and initiatives through the use of extensive technical skills and knowledge of digital scholarship best practices. . . .

In collaboration with the Head of Digital Projects and Metadata and library administration, provide strategic guidance and critical support for the College’s Digital Scholarship program. Develop and maintain policies, procedures, and technical infrastructure for sustainable digital humanities and digital scholarship initiatives and projects. . . .

Maintain and support ongoing digital scholarship projects with scalability and long-term viability in mind. Develop and maintain internal project documentation for continuous support of projects in all phases of their lifecycles.

https://tinyurl.com/2m425y92

"VeriXiv Supports Gates-Funded Researchers to Comply with New Open Access Policy"

F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to launch a new verified preprint platform that will enable the rapid availability of new findings and promote research integrity. VeriXiv [pronounced very-kive] will support researchers in complying with the Gates Foundation’s refreshed open access policy that requires all their funded research to be made available as a preprint from January 2025. . . .

Twenty different ethics and integrity checks will assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification and competing interests. In addition, open research transparency checks will check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and that methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labelling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article, and which levels have been passed.

https://www.f1000.com/verixiv/

Data Services Librarian at University of Massachusetts – Amherst

Works in collaboration with the Data Services unit to develop and deliver forward-thinking, measurable, campus-aligned programming, resources, and services to support researchers throughout the data lifecycle; develop educational and outreach programming and support for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty; and coordinate project support for data-intensive research. Assists University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers and scholars in meeting the data management and sharing requirements of funding agencies and publishers. Assists in developing strong, collaborative relationships with library subject specialists in data-intensive disciplines and with relevant offices, departments, and centers across campus.

https://tinyurl.com/3xea758j

"The Future of Data in Research Publishing: From Nice to Have to Need to Have?"

Science policy promotes open access to research data for purposes of transparency and reuse of data in the public interest. We expect demands for open data in scholarly publishing to accelerate, at least partly in response to the opacity of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Open data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and also trustworthy and verifiable. The current state of open data in scholarly publishing is in transition from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have.’ Research data are valuable, interpretable, and verifiable only in context of their origin, and with sufficient infrastructure to facilitate reuse. Making research data useful is expensive; benefits and costs are distributed unevenly. Open data also poses risks for provenance, intellectual property, misuse, and misappropriation in an era of trolls and hallucinating AI algorithms. Scholars and scholarly publishers must make evidentiary data more widely available to promote public trust in research. To make research processes more trustworthy, transparent, and verifiable, stakeholders need to make greater investments in data stewardship and knowledge infrastructures.

https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.b73aae77

NDNP (National Digital Newspaper Program) Project Manager at University of Alabama (Term)

This is a grant-funded clinical faculty position with an initial one-year contract, and the opportunity for additional annual appointments. The Digitizing Alabama Newspapers Project will digitize Alabama newspapers between the years 1909-1928 in accordance with National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) standards during the grant period.

https://tinyurl.com/ymk7yfbz

"New Report on the Sustainability of Diamond OA in Europe"

A new report from the DIAMAS work package that SPARC Europe looks at understanding how institutional publishing is sustained today. Institutional publishers and service providers are diverse due to their missions, size and service provision. In addition, there is no definitive set of tasks that all institutional publishers share. These characteristics influence the sustainability options available to them and the choices they make. . . .

Diamond OA publishing needs more stable and long-term funding. IPSPs utilise diverse funding models, and 40% depend on time-limited grants to support their operations and many are burdened by the administration that these grants demand. They rely primarily on parent organisations for basic support, especially in-kind support, such as personnel, and services. Personnel are more central to IPSPs’ financial sustainability than revenue streams, but they are often employed outside the boundary of the IPSP itself, which means that IPSPs have to negotiate for resources.

https://tinyurl.com/yw9ythtx

Report

UT Libraries Residency Program (Two Positions; 3 Year)

The UT Libraries is pleased to offer two positions in our three-year residency program for early career librarians and archivists. We seek prospective applicants looking to deepen their experience in the field of academic libraries and/or archives. The residency program will provide specialized training, continuing education, and mentorship based on the resident’s professional interests and goals.

https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/residency-program

Paywall: "Managing Scholarly Outputs in a Proprietary Platform: Exploring the Implications of Esri Story Maps for Spatial Digital Humanities Preservation"

For the past decade, Esri’s Story Maps platform has offered a way to combine maps, text, images, and other multimedia with relatively little technical overhead for the end user. This has had substantial influence on spatial digital humanities. . . The challenge of preserving this work looms large, however, as the retirement date for the "classic" version of the platform approaches. . . [T]his paper reflects on the difficulty of managing scholarly outputs in a system not primarily designed for that purpose and of representing web-based work within the library record. More broadly it asks, what does it mean for spatial digital humanities that so much scholarship is hosted and organized within one proprietary platform?

ArcGIS StoryMaps

https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2024.2335381

Digital Collections Librarian at UCLA

UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library seeks an energetic, creative, culturally competent, and service-oriented professional to develop and administer an inaugural digital archives and asset management program. They will build systems and workflows for digital assets and manage the stewardship of digital assets produced through digital reformatting of analog collections of the Clark Library, and lead and implement the Clark’s strategies for the acquisition and long-term stewardship of born-digital archival collections.

https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF09322