Many, if not most, ebook platforms are adversarial to the health of libraries and intellectual freedom. One of the larger ebook platform companies is Clarivate so I want to use it for an example of how its business practices increasingly harm libraries.
Continue reading “The Harm of E-book Platform Vendors like Clarivate/ProQuest”Getting Certainty on Human Versus Synthetic Media
The Authors Guild (USA) launched its Human Authored Certification program (29 January 2025). This certification permits its members to register their written works with the Guild as having been created by a human rather than something produced by artificial intelligence (AI). These are some first thoughts I had when reading about the program and reflecting on initiatives with similar goals.
Continue reading “Getting Certainty on Human Versus Synthetic Media”Institutional Change toward Open Scholarship and Open Science
The processes and supports within an institution can, I’ve noticed, demand a bit of effort to change. When we speak of open scholarship or open science, many aspects tie-in or lead out from those concepts, which makes the whole prospect of institutional change quite complex. I’m very excited about the efforts so far that the Open Science Working Group (of which I’m a participant) at Concordia University has undertaken and accomplished. These include an initial report on “Recommendations for Fostering Open Science at Concordia University” (DOI: 10.11573/spectrum.library.concordia.ca.00992647)
Continue reading “Institutional Change toward Open Scholarship and Open Science”Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us
The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc. as tools to be used for examining human cultures, behaviours, and society.
Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us”Tracking the Challenges Made to Canadian Library Books
Sometimes we see headlines in the news about a book being challenged at a library. People from different perspectives might see the content of the book or other aspects of it as threatening or inappropriate. Understanding these challenges and forming responses is essential to our work as librarians in advocating and supporting intellectual freedom. Now, the work to track this information will receive more coordinated support. Both the Canadian Federation of Library Associations and the Centre for Free Expression announced that they would work together to maintain a joint library challenges database.
Continue reading “Tracking the Challenges Made to Canadian Library Books”Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?
I’ve been thinking about something like an instance Community Pledge becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are. Perhaps because until recently things have been on a smaller scale & practices are maturing.
Here is what I’ve been considering. It’s a thought process but not at all, thought-out. There are problems but I’d like to put the idea out there in case others have worried about this and perhaps, something can come of it. This is written in 500 character paragraphs because I was originally going to thread it in Mastodon but it got too long.
Continue reading “Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?”Talk about the Broad Value of Open Access
As a librarian, I talk with other faculty and students about their academic work and the life-cycle of the research process. I’ve always stressed that open access is important for many reasons, including toward making research outputs available to people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to get them. This post provides some background about the Concordia Library’s new interactive open access display, Seer. You can also learn about it in this video recorded for the Open for Climate Justice: An Across-Disciplines Fair at 4TH SPACE.
Continue reading “Talk about the Broad Value of Open Access”Publishers Proposing Surveillance Tech on Libraries
Gautama Mehta’s recent article “Proposal to install spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights shocks academics” is an important read. I appreciate the many issues it raises and the great links to additional commentary about Elsevier’s and Springer’s problematic Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI).
Although the article mentions digital rights advocates and scientists, I did not see much written about the fact that librarians are not passive recipients of technology in their libraries.
Continue reading “Publishers Proposing Surveillance Tech on Libraries”Letter to Ministers Regarding the New NAFTA / USMCA & “Intellectual Property”
This morning, upon learning of the newly negotiated NAFTA or as it seems to be called now USMCA, I sent the following letter to ministers of the current Canadian government. Continue reading “Letter to Ministers Regarding the New NAFTA / USMCA & “Intellectual Property””
Digital Curation Issues Involving Open Government Data
Open data is a well-defined concept but in the public sector, there is some difficult work ahead for its digital curation.
Although the support and production of open data from governments around the world varies (with many not yet supporting it at all) there are clear movements to encourage and grow open government data initiatives. Within the realm of governments that do support and produce datasets open to the public, benefits that would otherwise accompany the availability of this open data are sometimes hampered due to incomplete adoption of best practices.
I’d like review some of the tenets of open government data, then I’ll discuss some of the digital curation issues that are important to deal with for the success of open government data initiatives. Continue reading “Digital Curation Issues Involving Open Government Data”
E-books: New Experiences and Problems with Access
I first read an e-book a few years ago when I decided to see how War and Peace felt on my phone. Engrossing. And probably no less so than it is on paper. Now I like both paper books and e-books but the spread of e-books is about more than just enjoying them or not. The introduction of e-books (among other digital content) changed the interactions and responsibilities of publishers, authors, academics, librarians, government policy-makers, and of course readers (or users). These changes come with both social and technical issues and challenges, particularly in the vein of access. Continue reading “E-books: New Experiences and Problems with Access”
Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Our Pragmatic Ignorance
A common way to model the relationships of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is the DIKW pyramid. Starting with its base, each concept builds on top of the former. The gist is that we require data to form information † we use information to gain knowledge † and we use knowledge toward developing wisdom. This model is one doorway to understanding the relationship between these concepts.
For workaday pragmatic purposes, common understandings of those terms and their relationships may be worthwhile. But for our acceptance of a pragmatic ignorance, this model will break down when we examine the meaning of any of those terms in depth. Continue reading “Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Our Pragmatic Ignorance”