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Month: September 2017

A Little Précis of Librarianship, 9-24-2017

It’s been a while, so let’s get right into it.

Jump to:
Politics (the one that there’s nothing funny about)
Scholarly (Mis)Communication
Copyright Corner
Emerging Technobabble
Research Reports
Get your professional development on!
”Why do we even have libraries?”
New Sources
Ending on a Good Note

 

Politics (the one that there’s nothing funny about)

ALA responds to DACA end.

Changes to Section 108 may be in the works, but don’t get worked up yet.

Scholarly (Mis)Communication

Article: Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency for librarians

Copyright Corner

Could Sci-Hub, LibGen, et al. be our new partners? Probably not but it’s a nice thought.

EFF roundup: Copyright Office needs to let us tinker; and the fight against DRM standard in the W3C continues.  

“We Shall Overcome” copyright. “This Land” might actually be “Your Land”.

Let’s Plays in danger due to stringent copyright enforcement via DACA.

“Open” Access in terms of negative and positive liberty. I don’t agree with the conceptualization of positive liberty exactly, I think it’s a little weakly defined, but still a neat way to think about something we deal with every day.

Article: Using Fair Use to preserve government data.

Emerging Technobabble

How is education actually transforming education? (If you need access, just let me know).

With my upcoming chapter on web archiving in the works, I’m doing a lot of reading on link rot.

Also just as a warning: turn your bluetooth off when not using it (unless you have an iPhone, which never fully turns bluetooth off as of iOS 11).

Research Reports

Article: “Should Institutions License their Data about Scholarship?” If you’re familair with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, I think this applies to subtitles of journal issue briefs. Even the author doesn’t seem convinced one way or the other.

Get your professional development on!

This week is Banned Book Week! Here’s a webinar for some programming ideas.

”Why do we even have libraries?”

Preserving protests and their digital records.

English Language Learners and the contextualization provided by graphic novels.

New Sources

Alexander Hamilton papers online, thanks to the LoC.

Also the LoC has launched labs.loc.gov as a data source.

Ending on a Good Note

Little Free Libraries are in the news. Doing the good work.

Jer Thorpe at the LoC wins “coolest job title ever” in librarianship.

The William Davidson Talmud

Just added to the Humanities Open Access Resources page:

The William Davidson Talmud is a free digital edition of the Babylonian Talmud with parallel translations, interlinked to major commentaries, biblical citations, Midrash, Halakhah, and an ever-growing library of Jewish texts. As with all of Sefaria, The William Davidson Talmud will continually evolve as we add additional translations, commentaries, and connections.

You can submit your own favorite OA Humanities resources here.

A Little Précis of Librarianship, 9-3-2017

Again, I have to thank Audrey Watters of Hack Education for the inspiration of this blogging format, with her weekly wrap up of education technology news.

Jump to:

Politics (the one that there’s nothing funny about)
Scholarly (Mis)Communication
Copyright Corner
Emerging Technobabble
Research Reports
Get your professional development on!
”Why do we even have libraries?”
Ending on a Good Note

Politics (the one that there’s nothing funny about)

With the Net Neutrality debate in full swing, librarians should be well aware that access to high-speed internet is a basic utility required for their users to be integrated into the modern social, political, and economic systems we’ve built upon that utility. Yet Title II remains contentious, mainly due to monopolistic or duopolistic laws across the country that protect cable companies from competition.

Alaska adds its name to the list of fights for high-speed access, along with another fight against discrimination (protected by Title II) in Cleveland, Ohio, leading to a formal complaint against AT&T for slowed speeds in poorer neighborhoods. Comcast has also sued Vermont to prevent the construction of new high-speed Internet lines.

Meanwhile, AT&T has claimed that most of the comments the FTC has received that are “legitimate” are in favor of a repeal of net neutrality. This despite the fact that there are significantly more unique comments against the repeal of Title II.

As much as I dislike the FDLP, it does provide an important service in creating open government (kinda). Here’s a petition to protect title 44: https://freegovinfo.info/node/12325

There’s also a piece from the Washington Monthly that worries about the decline of the public research institution. The majority of research still happens in publicly funded universities… I just wonder how long that will remain the case. Maybe we’ll all be corporate librarians soon.

Also: stop locking laws away behind paywalls!

Scholarly (Mis)Communication

Article: “Academic stratospheres-cum-underworlds: when highs and lows of publication cultures meet”. A critique of predatory publishing mixed with the geopolitics and economics of globalizing knowledge production.

Where we’re going, we won’t need (pay)walls. The importance of self-archiving when dealing with a long publishing process.

Copyright Corner

We’ve had one recurring theme during the short time I’ve been writing these précis: schools, universities, libraries, etc. should be focusing on protecting copyright. Here’s an argument as to why universities cannot perform that role. Lots of spying concerns there.

Techdirt uses the success of the revived NES and other classic Nintendo games as proof that when markets provide something people want, piracy goes down. It can’t just be about wanting “free stuff” (by the way, I would add that a VPN is not cheap…).

In my most recent webinar on copyright, I mentioned there’s something akin to a “10 second rule” for ContentID (a Google anti-piracy product that runs automated takedowns on YouTube). Apparently, there’s also a “seven second rule” that journalism students are taught. The thing is though, neither actually exist in law.

Grim copyright news out of Europe.

Emerging Technobabble

Google is in the news, as usual. This time for apparently putting pressure on think tank The New America Foundation to fire one of its members of their Open Markets group for pointing out Google’s growing monopoly. More on why that’s worrying. Here’s a quote from an email in the Times’ piece:

“We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”

Google should be a major concern for librarians, since its growing influence will shape information technology and information science for a long time. Plus, as a provider, it has the power to shape services in ways that create systems that favor its vision of the future. What do we do when caught between Big Content’s copyright wars and Big Tech? Of course, it isn’t that simple.

Cathy O’Neil shows who (finally) is taking notice of our algorithmic overlords, and doing something about it.

The library as an education system.

Research Reports

Podcast: Learn a little more about the threats institutions face from hackers.

Paper: Notes on Operations Diminishing Short Term Loans. Looks more maturely at what Demand/Patron Driven Acquisitions has been doing (or not doing) for librarie).

Poster: Reference rot, a digital preservation issue beyond file formats.

Get your professional development on!

In addition to the podcast above, this presentation was a nice discussion on privacy online and the concerns your users may face, with lots of questions submitted by yours truly.

Some fun professional development in coding with students.

I’m not sure if this might instead fit into “Emerging Technobabble of Lore”, but it’s a very nice reflective on 10 years in librarianship.

Call for Papers: Educator Activism in Politically Polarized Times (The Educational Forum)

”Why do we even have libraries?”

Library privatization in California continues, despite public outcry.

Ending on a Good Note

Students are spending less on textbooks/course materials.
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