DigitalKoans – Page 50 – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

"CORE: A Global Aggregation Service for Open Access Papers"

This paper introduces CORE, a widely used scholarly service, which provides access to the world’s largest collection of open access research publications, acquired from a global network of repositories and journals. CORE was created with the goal of enabling text and data mining of scientific literature and thus supporting scientific discovery, but it is now used in a wide range of use cases within higher education, industry, not-for-profit organisations, as well as by the general public. Through the provided services, CORE powers innovative use cases, such as plagiarism detection, in market-leading third-party organisations. CORE has played a pivotal role in the global move towards universal open access by making scientific knowledge more easily and freely discoverable. In this paper, we describe CORE’s continuously growing dataset and the motivation behind its creation, present the challenges associated with systematically gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at scale, and introduce the novel solutions that were developed to overcome these challenges. The paper then provides an in-depth discussion of the services and tools built on top of the aggregated data and finally examines several use cases that have leveraged the CORE dataset and services.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02208-w

Digital Humanities Research Programmer at Carnegie Mellon University

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carnegie Mellon University’s Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press project is seeking a highly motivated Digital Humanities Research Programmer to join an interdisciplinary team. The successful candidate will work collaboratively to streamline bash code, develop front-end interfaces, and build and maintain data pipelines. The DH Research Programmer will implement warehousing solutions for extremely large collections of images of individual character imprints from historical books, large collections of images of whole pages, and complex metadata from libraries and other institutions.

https://tinyurl.com/acxk6cy6

"New UVM Press Breaks Down Barriers to Scholarly Publishing"

The University of Vermont has launched an open-access academic press aimed at removing the financial barrier between peer-reviewed research and audiences worldwide. Fully funded by the university and overseen by UVM Libraries, the UVM Press operates under a "diamond open access model"— meaning that authors pay no fees to publish with the press, and readers pay no fees to access the press’s published materials. . . .

Bryn Geffert, UVM’s dean of libraries, has experience with open-access publishing having launched the Amherst College Press in 2013. Geffert also led a consortium of libraries in establishing the open-access Lever Press in 2016. Geffert believes that the role of a library is to connect patrons to information, making UVM Libraries a logical partner for managing the UVM Press.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfa8msf

Library Specialist – Digital Scholarship Center at University of Wyoming

Facilitate the day-to-day operations of the Digital Scholarship Center. Under the direction of the Digital Scholarship Librarian, assist in planning and delivery of workshops and other educational programming in the center. Develop educational materials and provide direct assistance to patrons. Train and supervise hourly staff to provide assistance to patrons.

https://tinyurl.com/2vc6bhwb

Shifting Tides: The Open Movement at a Turning Point

At the turn of 2022 and 2023, we conducted a series of interviews with leading voices in the open movement. We spoke with professional activists who address openness from varied perspectives and work in different fields of open. Some have been engaged in activism for decades, while others are looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. Many of our interviewees lead organizations advancing openness, and we were particularly interested in talking with those who have been exploring new approaches and strategies.

Our research aims to understand the current state of the open movement, as seen through the eyes of people actively involved in its endeavors and leading organizations within the movement. We want to make sense of shared positions and understand whether there are any clear division lines. We are particularly interested in identifying trends that transform the movement and understanding the challenges and needs of activists and organizations as these changes occur. The report signals a shift to what can be best described as a post-copyright approach to openness. However, while our focus is on how the movement is changing, this does not mean that the whole movement is subject to that shift. There still exists a need for copyright advocacy work in the movement, and many organizations maintain the course developed at the outset. Nonetheless, we hope that they, too, will find this report’s insights worth examining.

https://openfuture.eu/publication/shifting-tides/

Digital Resources Co-Creator at University of Sheffield

We have an exciting opportunity within the Library Learning & Teaching Services Team for a collaborative and digitally agile individual. We are looking for someone with experience of screen-casting, online learning tutorial software and video production software, to contribute to the work of the University Library. . . . We welcome applications from those with a flair for design and experience in creating learning objects, video and audio production, photo editing and web page creation.

https://tinyurl.com/3tbjthk2

"Transformative Agreements and Their Practical Impact: A Librarian Perspective"

This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.612

Head of Digital Scholarship Services at University of Missouri – Kansas City

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries are seeking a collaborative individual to fill a new role, Head of Digital Scholarship Services (DSS), serving as the Libraries’ co-director for the Center for Digital and Public Humanities and supervising staff in the Digital Scholarship Services department within the Special Collections & Archives Division of UMKC Libraries. The Head of DSS position is responsible for operational management of the Digital Collaboration Studio, a technology-rich space designed to support research and teaching across all disciplines with an emphasis on Digital and Public Humanities; creating programming, resource guides, and consulting services that support digital research and pedagogy; and administrative management and direction for the Libraries’ participation in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities, a partnership between the Libraries and the School for Humanities and Social Sciences.

https://tinyurl.com/3wwmc45f

Digital Scholarship Has Released the Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography

The Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography includes over 345 selected English-language articles and books that are useful in understanding how academic libraries plan for, implement, provide, evaluate, and conduct studies about research data management (RDM) services. Most sources have been published from 2012 through 2023. It includes full abstracts for works under certain Creative Commons Licenses. It is available as a website and a website PDF with live links.

Digital Scholarship’s other bibliographies about research data curation include the Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography (over 800 works), the Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography (over 225 works), and the Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography (over 200 works).

Digital Preservation Manager at Tate

Reporting to the Head of Business Solutions you will make certain that Tate’s digital resources are well-managed and accessible. As well as developing action plans and reviewing policies and strategies, you will also be creating staff training programmes to ensure Tate systems accommodate all defined digital preservation metadata. To succeed you’ll need an impressive track record of managing digital rich media resources, developing metadata schemes to support preservation, and of training users. This includes good knowledge of preservation systems such as Archivematica or Preservica and knowledge of preservation metadata standards.

https://tinyurl.com/4r8pwdvb

End-User Online Searching in 1970 at Syracuse University: "Ingenious Librarians"

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. . . . The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line. . . in order to search for papers that included both terms. After running the query, the terminal produced a printout indicating how many documents matched each search; users could then narrow down or expand that search before generating a list of article citations. Many users burst into laughter upon seeing the response from a computer so far away.

https://tinyurl.com/mr4578b6

Senior Software Engineer – Frontend at Harvard University

The Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is looking for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in frontend development to help us imagine and build innovative software that charts the future of libraries. . . .Located at the Harvard Law Library, LIL is a fun and collaborative lab with a broad mission focused on re-envisioning how libraries can contribute to society. We are a small but active group working at the intersection of libraries, technology, and law, and we are looking for someone with new skills and perspectives to add to our team.

https://tinyurl.com/yc2j8tb7

"New ChatGPT Course at ASU Gives Students a Competitive Edge"

A new Arizona State University course will provide students with those skills, providing expertise that is becoming increasingly sought after.

Basic Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT: An Introduction is open this summer to students in any major, and despite the name, is not really about engineering.

https://tinyurl.com/rcfnt39d

DigitalKoans Tops 15,000 Posts

DigitalKoans was launched on April 20, 2005 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. It has now published over 15,000 posts. The top ten topics it has published about are:

1. Digital Library Jobs

2. Publishing

3. Open Access

4. Library IT Jobs

5. Copyright

6. Scholarly Journals

7. Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

8. Data Curation, Open Data, and Research Data Management

9. Research Libraries

10. Scholarly Communication

Job ads were added to the weblog in 2009. Over 4,900 job ads have been posted.

DigitalKoans was preceded by Bailey’s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW), which was established on June 7, 2001 as part of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. SEPW ceased publication at the end of 2013.

Vice Provost for University Libraries, University Librarian at University of Wisconsin – Madison

The General Library System (GLS) currently administers twelve libraries: Memorial Library is the flagship library and caters to the humanities and social sciences, along with the Business Library and Social Work Library. College Library serves as the undergraduate library, and is a hub for programs focusing on student support services and partnerships. The Science and Engineering Libraries (SEL) consist of Steenbock, Chemistry, Geology, and Astronomy, Math, and Physics (AMP). The Special Collections and Archives unit features one of the nation’s leading special collections for the history of science and medicine, including significant holdings for chemistry, science and religion, and optics and ophthalmology. Other special collections include the Mills Music Library, the Kohler Art Library, and the Gender and Women’s Studies Library. The University Archives serves as the official repository for all UW-Madison, UW-System Administration, UW-Extension, and Wisconsin Public Media records appraised to have permanent or archival value. The health sciences library, law library, and education library each report to their respective deans, while several other special purpose libraries report through various schools, colleges, or departments.

https://tinyurl.com/rb66rjat

"FAIR in Action — A Flexible Framework to Guide FAIRification"

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data more than any other scientific challenge to date. We developed a flexible, multi-level, domain-agnostic FAIRification framework, providing practical guidance to improve the FAIRness for both existing and future clinical and molecular datasets. We validated the framework in collaboration with several major public-private partnership projects, demonstrating and delivering improvements across all aspects of FAIR and across a variety of datasets and their contexts. We therefore managed to establish the reproducibility and far-reaching applicability of our approach to FAIRification tasks.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02167-2

Open Education Resources Librarian at University of Houston-Downtown

The Open Education Resources (OER) Librarian facilitates the evaluation and implementation of open and affordable learning materials, and collaborates with faculty, library staff, and other campus partners to promote the adoption of these resources.

https://tinyurl.com/muhf5pb8

"Guest Post — Accessibility Powered by AI: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Universalize Access to Digital Content"

More than 1 billion people around the world have some type of disability (including visual, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility, and other disabilities) that affects how they access digital content. No wonder we spend so much time talking about accessibility tools!

Digital transformation can revolutionize the world, turning it into an inclusive place for people with and without disabilities, with accessibility powered by artificial intelligence. This post provides an overview of how AI can improve accessibility in different ways, illustrated with real-world applications and examples.

https://tinyurl.com/3s64tvm7

Senior Software Engineer – Backend at Harvard University

The Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) is looking for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and backend development to help us imagine and build innovative software that charts the future of libraries. Our ideal candidate would be excited to build data pipelines and tools that help the world create, preserve, and access knowledge. . . .Our work is open-source and openly available, with an eye to broad public interest impact.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2krpnw

Replayed: Essential Writings on Software Preservation and Game Histories

Since the early 2000s, Henry Lowood has led or had a key role in numerous initiatives devoted to the preservation and documentation of virtual worlds, digital games, and interactive simulations, establishing himself as a major scholar in the field of game studies. . . . Replayed consolidates Lowood’s far-flung and significant publications on these subjects into a single volume.

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12805/replayed

Geographic Information Systems Specialist at Ball State University

You will have a major impact on students and faculty, leading support for complex GIS solutions used by over 100 students daily and over 2,200 students and faculty annually, from over 23 academic departments and programs. This position manages Ball State’s ESRI ArcGIS and Hexagon ERDAS solution licenses and software, and significant GIS datasets. The Libraries’ GIS support is very robust and includes StoryMaps and datasets.

https://bsu.peopleadmin.com/postings/37431

"Global Trends in Digital Preservation: Outsourcing versus In-House Practices"

This study aimed at investigating the trends toward digital preservation in terms of in-house activities versus outsourcing by systematically reviewing the extant literature. . . . . The meta-analysis of the final studies affirms a strong global preference of libraries, archives, and other cultural and memory organizations toward in-house activities for the preservation of their digital objects and collections compared to outsourcing digital preservation activities by third parties.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231173461

Systems and Discovery Librarian at Texas A&M University – Commerce

Reporting to the Associate Dean of Collections and Discovery, the Systems and Discovery Librarian is responsible for the oversight of library systems including Alma/Primo, Tipasa, OCLC, EZproxy, and Springshare products. The Systems and Discovery Librarian will contribute to larger projects within the Resource Acquisition and Discovery department aimed at enhancing a variety of essential library services.

https://tinyurl.com/mrybdp5u

"Can Open Access Increase LIS Research’s Policy Impact? Using Regression Analysis and Causal Inference"

The relationship between open access and academic impact (usually measured as citations received from academic publications) has been extensively studied but remains a very controversial topic. However, the effect of open access on policy impact (measured as citations received from policy documents) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of open access on the policy impact, which might initiate a new controversial topic. . . . Linear regression models, logit regression models, four other matching methods, open access status provided by different databases, and different sizes of data samples were used to check the robustness of the main results. This study revealed that open access had significant and positive effects on the policy impact.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04750-1

Digital Publishing Specialist at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries are seeking a visionary and technically skilled Digital Publishing Specialist to help shape the future of scholarly communication and build a vibrant publishing program at the heart of our library. . . . You will contribute to the department by providing vital support by crafting and launching a diverse publishing portfolio, including online journals, blogs, galleries, websites, podcasts, project portfolios, and other interactive media.

https://tinyurl.com/3twjaukv