DigitalKoans – Page 48 – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

Supervisory Information Technology Specialist at Library of Congress

This position will assist in the development and implementation of technical strategy to develop and sustain a reliable set of production systems supporting critical functions of the Digital Library Services (DLS) platform. DLS is a suite of tools used by a variety of users both internal and external to the Library to ingest, manage, store, and provide access to the Library’s digital collections. This position will lead a team of technicians developing new system features supporting content management, reporting, workflow, metadata, and web/API access to the Library’s collections. They will lead their team in maintaining and supporting existing applications implemented in both on-premises and cloud platforms with integrations across multiple systems.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/731246500

Head of Systems & Service Development at King’s College London

You will lead the Systems & Service Development team to develop and manage various systems and digital services (e.g. access to digital collections) and to facilitate continuous improvement and service development. With the Associate Director for Service Design & Delivery, you will collaborate with IT colleagues to drive forward our plans to enable strategy through technology.

https://tinyurl.com/54pwh7ky

Scholarly Podcasting Why, What, How?

Featuring interviews with 101 podcasting academics, including scholars and teachers of podcasting, this book explores the motivations of scholarly podcasters, interrogates what podcasting does to academic knowledge, and leads potential podcasters through the creation process from beginning to end. With scholarship often trapped inside expensive journals, wrapped in opaque language, and laced with a standoffish tone, this book analyses the implications of moving towards a more open and accessible form.

https://tinyurl.com/mr3b9bew

"European Lawmakers Vote to Adopt EU AI Act"

European Union lawmakers have passed the EU AI Act that will govern use and deployment of artificial intelligence technology within the EU. . . . Changes introduced by MEPs to the original commission draft act include some top-level regulation of general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT. These foundation models will require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content and the forced disclosure of training data covered by copyright. . . . . Other changes include a fine-tuned list of prohibited practices, extended to include subliminal techniques, biometric categorisation, predictive policing, and internet-scraped facial recognition databases.

https://tinyurl.com/nhet5ckd

Digital Imaging Manager at Stanford University

This position will lead, develop, and execute digital media production assignments requiring advanced level skills from original concept through final implementation with limited oversight. Partner with internal and external clients including senior leaders and faculty regarding digital media projects and services. Serve as an in-house digital media expert for a school/unit with time contribution split between project leadership and as a technical contributor.

https://tinyurl.com/yn5nuzmj

ACRL: "2022 Academic Library Trends and Statistics Data Now Available"

Key findings include:

Of the libraries that have sought to hire new employees in the past year, 56% report that the candidate pool is smaller than pre-Covid levels, while only 30% say it is the same size or larger.

60.7% of library employees have the option to work remotely in some capacity, whether it be full-time, hybrid, a compressed work week or flexible hours and locations.

Since 2017, the average number of digital/electronic book titles in library collections has changed from 315,213 to 619,805, an increase of 96.6%.

The average number of FTE libraries has remained steady in the last three years. In both 2020 and 2021 the average was 11, while the 2022 average is 12.

https://tinyurl.com/53a6pw6v

Digital Imaging Specialist at The Library of Congress

Manages projects, designs and executes plans and methodologies; leads other staff assigned to projects; documents results and makes resulting recommendations. Suggests improvements to workflows for a wide variety of content streams and identifies risks and challenges to implementation. Establishes priorities and time-frames in coordination with management and stakeholders. Independently implements approved plans by scheduling and coordinating work, including determining division of work amongst specialists and technicians assigned to a project.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/730002000

Japanese Preprint Server: "Guest Post — A Year of Jxiv — Warming the Preprints Stone"

However, this anomaly was corrected with the launch in March 2022 of Jxiv — the first fully-fledged Japanese-born preprint server — by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), one of the largest public funders of research in the country that sits under the administrative and policy behemoth, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). . . . JST also manages J-STAGE, the national online platform for Japanese journals launched in 1999, which hosts more than 3,500 journals containing almost 5.38 million articles, as well as J-STAGE Data launched in 2020.

https://tinyurl.com/388vd3y3

Associate Head, Data & Visualization Services at NC State University

The Associate Head, Data & Visualization Services shares management responsibility for the department, helping to set departmental goals and objectives and to foster a collaborative, motivating, and creative work environment. They oversee, promote, and directly participate in the department’s instruction program and workshop series, including teaching sessions in collaboration with course faculty and Libraries colleagues. In addition, the Associate Head supervises at least one staff member, while also offering training and guidance to all members of the DVS team on relevant areas of expertise.

https://jobs.ncsu.edu/postings/185272

University of Hawaii at Manoa: Needs Assessment for Data Management and Sharing Training Courses

Data management is an increasingly fundamental skill for graduate students and researchers in the biomedical sciences, especially as National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funding agencies are now beginning to require data management and sharing plans as part of research. Since the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) Library provided little support for this area and existing data management and sharing instructional content are either out of date or fail to address the unique needs of the UHM research community, the UHM Library took steps to establish data management and sharing instruction services to meet the specific needs of the UHM research community.

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/104944

Director, Digital Libraries and Preservation at Virginia Tech

Under the general direction of the Assistant Dean & Director of IT, the Director of Digital Libraries and Preservation is responsible for the strategic management and development of Virginia Tech’s comprehensive digital libraries and preservation program. They work collaboratively with stakeholders to plan and design the future of digital libraries and preservation services. The Director ensures efficient execution of technology-based projects, considering emerging trends and advancements, including the impact of AI, to advance cutting-edge digital libraries and preservation services.

https://tinyurl.com/bdf85d6m

"Should Academic Libraries Worry about Futureproofing?"

The what and how are at the heart of a new question we introduced in the latest cycle of the 2022 Ithaka S+R Library Survey. Nestled among questions about value proposition and strategic prioritization, we asked library deans and directors to indicate their level of agreement with the statement that their "library has a clear vision for futureproofing that takes into account technological and socio-political trends."

Sixteen percent of respondents indicated a high level of agreement with this statement (ratings 8-10). Sixty-four percent neither strongly agreed or disagreed (ratings of 4-7), and 20 percent strongly disagreed (ratings of 1-3). Figures 1 and 2 below show that there aren’t any particularly stark differences across Carnegie class, or sector.

https://tinyurl.com/229wsnvs

"The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It"

The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy. In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation, characterized by datafication and commodification similar to practices on social media platforms. Scholarly publications are treated as user-generated contents for data tracking and surveillance, resulting in profitable data products and services for research assessment, benchmarking and reporting. Meanwhile, the bibliodiversity and equal open access are denied by the dominant gold open access model and the privacy of researchers is being compromised by spyware embedded in research infrastructure. This article proposes four actions to fight the platformisation of scholarly information after a brief overview of the market of academic journals and research assessments and their implications for bibliodiversity, information access, and privacy: (1) Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs; (2) Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing; (3) Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform; and (4) Advocate for research assessment reforms.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13561

Systems Administrator at Michigan State University

Reporting to the Library Systems Manager III, the Systems Administrator will be responsible for Linux server administration, which includes the provision, configuring and deployment of Linux server environments; application administration, which includes configuring, deployment, and maintaining of server-based applications, as well as providing support for and troubleshooting system hardware and software issues; and customer support.

https://tinyurl.com/3nftfs3k

"DataChat: Prototyping a Conversational Agent for Dataset Search and Visualization"

Data users need relevant context and research expertise to effectively search for and identify relevant datasets. Leading data providers, such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), offer standardized metadata and search tools to support data search. Metadata standards emphasize the machine-readability of data and its documentation. There are opportunities to enhance dataset search by improving users’ ability to learn about, and make sense of, information about data. Prior research has shown that context and expertise are two main barriers users face in effectively searching for, evaluating, and deciding whether to reuse data. In this paper, we propose a novel chatbot-based search system, DataChat, that leverages a graph database and a large language model to provide novel ways for users to interact with and search for research data. DataChat complements data archives’ and institutional repositories’ ongoing efforts to curate, preserve, and share research data for reuse by making it easier for users to explore and learn about available research data.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18358

Digital Preservation Archivist at Southern Methodist University

Reporting to the Digital Preservation Librarian/Institutional Repository Manager, the Digital Preservation Archivist will be responsible for processing and cataloging born-digital material that has been donated and/or acquired by SMU Libraries and its special collection subunits, as well as digital assets created by SMU Libraries’ Norwick Center for Digital Solutions and housed in SMU Scholar, SMU’s institutional repository and ContentDM, SMU’s digital collections repository. They will support the development and adoption of digital preservation workflows and technology.

https://tinyurl.com/25athxt3

"Is Googling Risky? A Study on Risk Perception and Experiences of Adverse Consequences in Web Search"

Search engines, such as Google, have a considerable impact on society. Therefore, undesirable consequences, such as retrieving incorrect search results, pose a risk to users. Although previous research has reported the adverse outcomes of web search, little is known about how search engine users evaluate those outcomes. In this study, we show which aspects of web search are perceived as risky using a sample (N = 3884) representative of the German Internet population. We found that many participants are often concerned with adverse consequences immediately appearing on the search engine result page. For example, 45.2% of respondents are concerned about retrieving incorrect information. In contrast, consequences with a delayed impact are rarely perceived as a risk. Moreover, participants’ experiences with adverse consequences are directly related to their risk perception. Our results demonstrate that people perceive risks related to web search. In addition to our study, there is a need for more independent research on the possible detrimental outcomes of web search to monitor and mitigate risks. Apart from risks for individuals, search engines with a massive number of users have an extraordinary impact on society; therefore, the acceptable risks of web search should be discussed.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24802

Head of Technology Services, University Libraries at University at Buffalo

The Head of Technology Services will serve in a strategic planning and leadership capacity in directing the planning and development of the University at Buffalo Libraries’ digital collection and repository infrastructure. This includes supporting and overseeing information technology operations related to end user services, network operations, information security, library network monitoring, and library systems. The Head of Technology Services will also be responsible for the oversight of the core library operations such as the integrated library Alma-Primo system, the interlibrary loan application OCLC ILLiad, and customized applications for Discovery, Delivery and E-Resources.

https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/postings/43204

"Open Access Books through Open Data Sources: Assessing Prevalence, Providers, and Preservation"

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2023-0016

Libraries Electronic Resources Access Coordinator at University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Libraries Electronic Resources Access Coordinator focuses on establishing and maintaining access to electronic resources licensed by the University of Tennessee Libraries, including online journals, databases, streaming video, ebooks, and datasets. This position requires a thorough understanding of and experience in all aspects of activating, managing, problem reporting & resolving, and supporting ongoing access to electronic resources with current authentication and library system technologies, especially the library service platform, knowledge base, link resolver, proxy server, and article discovery service.

https://tinyurl.com/46ppu4r4

Paywall: "Toward a Potential Solution of the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: An Academic Research Community Alliance Model"

The academic research community alliance model suggested is based on the scholarly community taking on the responsibilities of peer review, article production, and knowledge dissemination while acting in an altruistic way of doing so. The proposed approach is described in detail, and both challenges and potential solutions to the impediments to implementing this model are explored. Finally, the authors report on initial efforts to build support for the proposed model, which suggests that meaningful progress on this difficult problem is possible.

https://tinyurl.com/4dznxau6

GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator at University of Texas at Austin

Within that context, this strategic position is intended to develop, promote, and provide leadership for GIS and geospatial data services for faculty, staff, and students by providing tools and resources to facilitate the discovery, access, management, and analysis of geospatial data across all disciplines at UT.

https://tinyurl.com/4jew8v5f

Congressional Research Service: Generative Artificial Intelligence: Overview, Issues, and Questions for Congress

The recent public release of many GenAI tools, and the race by companies to develop ever-more powerful models, have generated widespread discussion of their capabilities, potential concerns with their use, and debates about their governance and regulation. This CRS InFocus describes the development and uses of GenAI, concerns raised by the use of GenAI tools, and considerations for Congress. For additional considerations related to data privacy, see CRS Report R47569, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Data Privacy: A Primer, by Kristen E. Busch.

https://tinyurl.com/bdrpkzcj

Data and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Reed College

In this position, you will work closely with students, faculty, and library staff to provide in-depth data support, from introductory courses to the required senior thesis. This is a dynamic and established research data role at Reed with the additional opportunity to identify strategic digital initiatives development in areas such as scholarly communication, institutional repositories, and open educational resources. This position is one of 5 liaison librarians in the Research Services department, a team of highly collaborative colleagues focused on outreach and instruction.

https://apply.interfolio.com/126666

Videos from the Library Publishing Coalition’s 2023 Library Publishing Forum

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars.

https://tinyurl.com/mresrts7