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	Digital Library Federation: Calls for Volunteers for 2021 Digital Preservation Conference
The NDSA calls for volunteers to join our Planning Committee for the 2021 Digital Preservation conference.
Digital Preservation (DigiPres) is the NDSA’s annual conference – open to members and non-members alike – focused on stewardship, curation, and preservation of digital information and cultural heritage. The 2021 meeting will take place on November 10-11th 2021 in St. Louis, Missouri, just after the DLF Forum. 
NDSA is an affiliate of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the DigiPres conference is held in concert with the annual DLF Forum. CLIR continues to monitor the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and after successfully pivoting to a virtual format for 2020, will be making a call on this for 2021 by early spring 2021. 
Planning Committee responsibilities include:

Defining a vision for the conference
Crafting and distributing a Call for Proposals
Reviewing and selecting proposals
Identifying a keynote speaker
Determining the conference schedule
Moderating sessions
Supporting membership through recruitment and mentorship efforts
Collaborating with the DLF Forum planning committee on community events, equity and inclusion, and sponsorship opportunities

We expect to have monthly group calls from January-November, and this year’s committee will have an exciting opportunity to creatively sustain some of the conveniences and benefits of our virtual platform as we negotiate meeting in person again. 
Join us by completing this form by Friday, January 15th, and please share widely.
We look forward to working with you!
Tricia Patterson, 2021 Chair
Jes Neal, 2021 Vice Chair/2022 Chair
The post Calls for Volunteers for 2021 Digital Preservation Conference appeared first on DLF.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Betsy Yoon
This post was written by Betsy Yoon (@betsyoon), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Betsy Yoon (she/they) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and OER/Reference Librarian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and earned her MLIS in 2019. She also has a Master of International Affairs. She lives in occupied Lenapehoking and is a longtime member of Nodutdol, a grassroots organization of diasporic Koreans and comrades working to advance peace, decolonization, and self-determination on the Korean Peninsula and Turtle Island (North America). Interests include critical approaches to OER and openness, the free/libre software movement, understanding and addressing root causes over symptom management, and the role that libraries and archives can play in our collective liberation.

One advantage of attending a virtual Forum is the fact that you no longer have to decide between two interesting panels that are happening at the same time. Before I realized that the sessions would be pre-recorded and available for viewing any time, I pored over the schedule trying to decide which of the two sessions to participate in per time block. What complicated my decision-making process was the fact that I was attending with two different angles. As a librarian, I do reference and work related to Open Educational Resources on my campus. But I am also part of Nodutdol(1), a community organization with a 20-year history in need of archiving and preservation. While not totally distinct (outreach is relevant for both roles, for instance), my two roles occasionally had divergent needs. For example, the Monday 5:00 pm session had both “Where It’s At: Using GIS Tools for Engagement and Outreach at an HBCU Library,” which seemed a good fit for my position in the academic library, and “Linked While Apart: Overcoming Division with Linked Data,” which seemed more applicable to my work with Nodutdol. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that not only would the sessions be available for asynchronous viewing, but that it would also be possible to engage in discussions about the panel on Slack.
The panel that ended up being the most informative for my specific needs was “Finding a Good Fit: Scaling Best Practices for Born-Digital Material to Fit the Needs of Diverse Communities.” The presenters walked us through the process of setting up a small-scale digitization project and emphasized the iterative nature of the process. As a grassroots organization, we do not have the luxury of hiring digitization experts to guide us through the process, and it has been difficult to know how and where to get started. Margo Padilla’s saying that “good enough” digital preservation practices (as opposed to best practices) stood out to me as particularly relevant to my organization’s needs. The description of their organization’s custom modular setup and the numerous resources that the slides linked out to were also very helpful in offering some solid starting points to embark on a “good enough” digital preservation process.
[image: Cover of Nodutdol’s October 2020 born-digital zine, 제국의 제재, or Sanctions of Empire]I also found the Learn@DLF sessions to be valuable in their specificity–in particular, I found the tools introduced in “Wax and Jekyll to build minimal digital projects” and “Oral History as data: Lightweight, static tool for publishing and analyzing transcripts” to be accessible in that they did not necessarily require investing time in a comprehensive platform or software and instead had relatively low barriers to entry. Wax, for example, describes itself as a “minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions focused on longevity, low costs, and flexibility.” While not exactly the same, the spirit behind minimal computing reminded me of SPLOTs (what the acronym stands for is not yet fixed — one interpretation is Smallest Portable Open Learning Technology), which are intended to have low barriers to entry and “support more accessible, sustainable, and user-friendly ways to get publicly-engaged learning happening on the open web.” The question of platforms and sustainability is a topic that is directly relevant to my work in Open Educational Resources and with Nodutdol, and I always love to learn about technologies that provide access to knowledge creation mechanisms without locking you in to a specific system.
Though the fact that this year’s DLF Forum was digital was due to the constraints of the pandemic, the thoughtful way in which the experience was designed was due to the efforts of the organizers. The asynchronous viewing options, the Slack interface, the provision of presentation slides and transcripts all made it possible for organizations such as mine to benefit from the expertise of the DLF community. While an in-person DLF Forum will no doubt have different considerations, I hope that some of the innovations of this year will be retained for future forums to ensure wide accessibility and participation from a wide variety of organizations and individuals. As a first-time DLF Forum participant, I am grateful to have been able to participate in this year’s virtual forum and look forward to continuing to learn from the DLF community!

(1) Nodutdol is a grassroots organization of diasporic Koreans and comrades based in Lenapehoking/New York City seeking to advance peace, decolonization, and self-determination on the Korean Peninsula and on Turtle Island/North America. We advance our mission through political education, collective action, and principled solidarity.
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Betsy Yoon appeared first on DLF.
	Hugh Rundle: For what we will
A couple of months ago there was a ridiculous article on the ABC ostensibly about a four-day working week. It turns out that by "four day week" they mean "four ten hour days a week as long as the boss gets to decide what you're allowed to do on the other day". I work a real four-day week and it's certainly not that.
"The last time we actually made a serious change to the working week was done by Henry Ford" claims the boss. Um no. He didn't even do that for Americans. Ford's offer in 1914 of an eight hour day only stood for "worthy" workers of the Ford Motor Company. This was a full fifty eight years after Melbourne's stonemasons had already successfully won an eight hour day for the same wages as the former ten hour working day. They did it by going on strike until their demands were met. In 1903 (eleven years before "Henry Ford gave us the eight hour day") Socialist Tom Mann unveiled the Eight Hours Monument near Victoria's Parliament House, celebrating the events of 1856 and the status quo fact of an eight hour working day for most workers in Victoria.
Liam Hogan has already succinctly noted the core problem of "romance day", but it bears repeating. Bosses aren't doing you a favour when they "give" you some "time off". A job is labour time in exchange for money. Never mistake it for something else. There are certainly ways of organising human societies where you do have obligations to others when you're not working for them. Serfdom. Feudalism. Gift economies. Communalism. Mutual Aid. But we live under Capitalism. You don't owe your boss anything when you're not on the clock.
Essential work
Even with the "second wave" in Melbourne, Australia has been quite lucky with COVID-19 and avoided the sort of overwhelming chaos we see in Europe and the Americas. We're able to talk about "COVID recovery" already, and what it might look like. So far, it appears — perhaps unsurprisingly — our elites in politics and the media have learned nothing at all from the experience here or elsewhere. All talk is of "job creation" and that political staple, the "shovel ready project". Even Adam Bandt has gotten into the action, parroting the latest trends from the United States left and calling for a "Green New Deal" and "green jobs".
Earlier this year there was some speculation about genetic factors being behind the much higher COVID-19 death rate for Black and South Asian Britons. But more recently it's become apparent that Africa — which Western health experts expected to be decimated by COVID — has on the contrary largely contained the virus much more effectively than other continents. So clearly African genes are playing a marginal role here, if any. The more recent evidence from Britain suggest that, unsurprisingly, the problem is simply that those from minority ethnicities are more likely to live in crappy houses with bad air quality, or work in the most dangerous, often low paid jobs. The UK government's own report notes:

Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19 - released  June, updated August


People who live in deprived areas have higher diagnosis rates and death rates than those living in less deprived areas. The mortality rates from COVID-19 in the most deprived areas were more than double the least deprived areas, for both males and females.
...High diagnosis rates may be due to geographic proximity to infections or a high proportion of workers in occupations that are more likely to be exposed.

The pattern of second-wave infections in Melbourne was likewise all too obvious: the suburbs with the most frequent and large case clusters were those housing the most tenuously employed in the lowest paid jobs. It's marginalisation, not genes, that makes people more likely to get COVID.
Staying at home and avoiding contact with potential infections is much easier when everyone is guaranteed to have a home, and doesn't have to worry about paying rent or a mortgage. Staying away from a crowded or dangerous workplace is easy for someone like me, in an office-based professional job. It's impossible for someone staring at eviction and hunger if they don't turn up, as is the case for abattoir and warehouse workers, or those without the right government paperwork.
Work sucks
And that's a problem, according to Martin Betts. The fact that I have some kind of job security, I mean. He thinks it would be much more "exciting" for us if all university staff were Uberised short-contract or sham contract workers, instead of the only 68% of us who already are. You will be shocked to learn Martin describes himself as a "strategic consultant" and "thought leader".
It's the reliance on cash income and a market economy for every facet of life that has caused so much trouble in this pandemic and of course well before it. What, exactly, is so great about a "job"? Work sucks. Capitalists only ever got people to work for wages by violently cutting off access to systems of community sustenance, whether in the British Isles, North America, El Salvador, Australia or elsewhere. It's not "jobs" or "work" that people need. It's sustenance, meaning, and connection. Or as authors in Uneven Earth noted:

The Coronavirus pandemic has clearly revealed the rather limited list of jobs and sectors that are essential for meeting society’s basic needs.

A "sector" that has recently gained a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons is what is euphemistically called the "Care industry". When "economic growth" is prized above all other things due to a fantasy that it "improves living standards", we should expect to see something exactly like this. Socialised to follow individual lives in a system structured to make the alternative difficult, saddled with huge debts or outrageous rents in order to live in poorly constructed housing, and working unpredictable or inflexible schedules, we warehouse the old, the unwell, and disabled. In exchange for the work of providing for their needs on our behalf, other desperate workers are paid ever so slightly above minimum wage, with no prospect of promotion or progression. David Speers recently proposed that the solution to this depressing state of affairs is to double down. Steering unemployed young people into caring careers might just pay off he suggests. The only people who have "careers" that "pay off" in the "Care sector" are the executives in Head Office and the corporate Board members. Everybody else just has a shit job — often literally.
A truly civilised society would see that care is essential, and Care is an abomination. That providing good housing for all is an obligation, and Real Estate is violence. That the health of the populace is largely determined by the health of the society they live in. It would work together rather than having jobs alone. It sure as hell wouldn't make you work ten hour days making shitty ads and call it romance.
	Open Library: Importing your Goodreads & Accessing them with Open Library’s APIs
by Mek



Today Joe Alcorn, founder of readng, published an article (https://joealcorn.co.uk/blog/2020/goodreads-retiring-API) sharing news with readers that Amazon’s Goodreads service is in the process of retiring their developer APIs, with an effective start date of last Tuesday, December 8th, 2020. 



A screenshot taken from Joe Alcorn’s post 



The topic stirred discussion among developers and book lovers alike, making the front-page of the popular Hacker News website. 



Hacker News at 2020-12-13 1:30pm Pacific.



The Importance of APIs



For those who are new to the term, an API is a method of accessing data in a way which is designed for computers to consume rather than people. APIs often allow computers to subscribe to (i.e. listen for) events and then take actions. For example, let’s say you wanted to tweet every time your favorite author published a new book. One could sit on Goodreads and refresh the website every fifteen minutes. Or, one might write a twitter bot which automatically connects to Goodreads and checks real-time data using its API. In fact, the reason why Twitter bots work, is that they use Twitter’s API, a mechanism which lets specially designed computer programs submit tweets to the platform.As one of the more popular book services online today, tens of thousands of readers and organizations rely on Amazon’s Goodreads APIs to lookup information about books and to power their book-related applications across the web. Some authors rely on the data to showcase their works on their personal homepages, online book stores to promote their inventory, innovative new services like thestorygraph are using this data to help readers discover new insights, and even librarians and scholastic websites rely on book data APIs to make sure their catalog information is as up to date and accurate as possible for their patrons.



For years, the Open Library team has been enthusiastic to share the book space with friends like Goodreads who have historically shown great commitment by enabling patrons to control (download and export) their own data and enabling developers to create flourishing ecosystems which promote books and readership through their APIs. When it comes to serving an audience of book lovers, there is no “one size fits all” and we’re glad so many different platforms and APIs exist to provide experiences which meet the needs of different communities. And we’d like to do our part to keep the landscape flourishing.  



“The sad thing is it [retiring their APIs] really only hurts the hobbyist projects and Goodreads users themselves.” — Joe Alcorn



Picture of Aaron Swartz by Noah Berger/Landov from thedailybeast



At Open Library, our top priority is pursuing Aaron Swartz‘s original mission: to serve as an open book catalog for the public (one page for every book ever published) and ensure our community always has free, open data to unlock a world of possibilities. A world which believes in the power of reading to preserve our cultural heritage and empower education and understanding. We sincerely hope that Amazon will decide it’s in Goodreads’ best interests to re-instate their APIs. But either way, Open Library is committed to helping readers, developers, and all book lovers have autonomy over their data and direct access to the data they rely on.



One reason patrons appreciate Open Library is that it aligns with their values



Imports & Exports



In August 2020, one of our Google Summer of Code contributors Tabish Shaikh helped us implement an export option for Open Library Reading Logs to help everyone retain full control of their book data. We also created a Goodreads import feature to help patrons who may want an easy way to check which Goodreads titles may be available to borrow from the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending program via openlibrary.org and to help patrons organize all their books in one place. We didn’t make a fuss about this feature at the time, because we knew patrons have a lot of options. But things can change quickly and we want patrons to be able to make that decision for themselves.



For those who may not have known, Amazon’s Goodreads website provides an option for downloading/exporting a list of books from one’s bookshelves. You may find instructions on this Goodreads export process here. Open Library’s Goodreads importer enables patrons to take this exported dump of their Goodreads bookshelves and automatically add matching titles to their Open Library Reading Logs.



The Goodreads import feature from https://openlibrary.org/account/import



Known issues. Currently, Open Library’s Goodreads Importer only works for (a) titles that are in the Open Library catalog and (b) which are new enough to have ISBNs. Our staff and community are committed to continuing to improve our catalog to include more titles (we added more than 1M titles this year) and we plan to improve our importer to support other ID types like OCLC and LOC.



APIs & Data



Developers and book overs who have been relying on Amazon’s Goodreads APIs are not out of luck. There are several wonderful services, many of them open-source, including Open Library, which offer free APIs:



Wikidata.org (by the same group who brought us Wikipedia) is a treasure trove of metadata on Authors and Books. Open Library gratefully leverages this powerful resource to enrich our pages.Inventaire.io is a wonderful service which uses Wikidata and Openlibrary data (API: api.inventaire.io)Bookbrainz.org (by the group who runs Musicbrainz) is a up-and-coming catalog of booksWorldCat by OCLC offers various metadata APIs



Did we miss any? Please let us know! We’d love to work together, build stronger integrations with, and support other book-loving services.



Open Library’s APIs. And of course, Open Library has a free, open, Book API which spans nearly 30 million books.



Bulk Data. If you need access to all our data, Open Library releases a free monthly bulk data dump of Authors, Books, and more.



Spoiler: Everything on Open Library is an API!







One of my favorite parts of Open Library is that practically every page is an API. All that is required is adding “.json” to the end. Here are some examples:



Searchhttps://openlibrary.org/search?q=lord+of+the+rings is our search page for humans…https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=lord+of+the+rings is our Search API!Bookshttps://openlibrary.org/books/OL25929351M/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality is the human page for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality…https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25929351M.json is its API!Authorshttps://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2965893A/Rik_Roots is a human readable author page…https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2965893A.json and here is the API!



Did We Mention: Full-text Search over 4M Books?



Major hat tip to the Internet Archive’s Giovanni Damiola for this one: Folks may also appreciate the ability to full-text search across 4M of the Internet Archive’s books (https://blog.openlibrary.org/2018/07/14/search-full-text-within-4m-books) on Open Library: 



You can try it directly here:http://openlibrary.org/search/inside?q=thanks%20for%20all%20the%20fish



As per usual, nearly all Open Library urls are themselves APIs, e.g.:http://openlibrary.org/search/inside.json?q=thanks%20for%20all%20the%20fish



Get Involved



Questions? Open Library is an free, open-source, nonprofit project run by the Internet Archive. We do our development transparently in public (here’s our code) and our community spanning more than 40 volunteers meets every week, Tuesday @ 11:30am Pacific. Please contact us to join our call and participate in the process.



Bugs? If something isn’t working as expected, please let us know by opening an issue or joining our weekly community calls.



Want to share thanks? Please follow up on twitter: https://twitter.com/openlibrary and let us know how you’re using our APIs!



Thank you



A special thank you to our lead developers Drini Cami, Chris Clauss, and one of our lead volunteer engineers, Aaron, for spending their weekend helping fix a Python 3 bug which was temporarily preventing Goodreads imports from succeeding.



A Decentralized Future



The Internet Archive has a history cultivating and supporting the decentralized web. We operate a decentralized version of archive.org and host regular meetups and summits to galvanize the distributed web community.



In the future, we can imagine a world where no single website controls all of your data, but rather patrons can participate in a decentralized, distributed network. You may be interested to try Bookwyrm, an open-source decentralized project by Mouse, former engineer on the Internet Archive’s Archive-It team.
	Andromeda Yelton: Though these be matrices, yet there is method in them.
When I first trained a neural net on 43,331 theses to make HAMLET, one of the things I most wanted to do is be able to visualize them. If word2vec places documents ‘near’ each other in some kind of inferred conceptual space, we should be able to see some kind of map of them, yes? Even if I don’t actually know what I’m doing?



Turns out: yes. And it’s even better than I’d imagined.



43,331 graduate theses, arranged by their conceptual similarity.



Let me take you on a tour!



Region 1 is biochemistry. The red dots are biology; the orange ones, chemistry. Theses here include Positional cloning and characterization of the mouse pudgy locus and Biosynthetic engineering for the assembly of better drugs. If you look closely, you will see a handful of dots in different colors, like a buttery yellow. This color is electrical engineering & computer science, and its dots in this region include Computational regulatory genomics : motifs, networks, and dynamics — that is to say, a computational biology thesis that happens to have been housed in computation rather than biology.



The green south of Region 2 is physics. But you will note a bit of orange here. Yes, that’s chemistry again; for example, Dynamic nuclear polarization of amorphous and crystalline small molecules. If (like me), you almost majored in chemistry and realized only your senior year that the only chemistry classes that interested you were the ones that were secretly physics…this is your happy place. In fact, most of the theses here concern nuclear magnetic resonance applications.



Region 3 has a striking vertical green stripe which turns out to be the nuclear engineering department. But you’ll see some orange streaks curling around it like fingers, almost suggesting three-dimensional depth. I point this out as a reminder that the original neural net embeds these 43,331 documents in a 52-dimensional space; I have projected that down to 2 dimensions because I don’t know about you but I find 52 dimensions somewhat challenging to visualize. However — just as objects may overlap in a 2-dimensional photo even when they are quite distant in 3-dimensional space — dots that are close together in this projection may be quite far apart in reality. Trust the overall structure more than each individual element. The map is not the territory.



That little yellow thumb by Region 4 is mathematics, now a tiny appendage off of the giant discipline it spawned — our old friend buttery yellow, aka electrical engineering & computer science. If you zoom in enough you find EECS absolutely everywhere, applied to all manner of disciplines (as above with biology), but the bulk of it — including the quintessential parts, like compilers — is right here.



Dramatically red Region 5, clustered together tightly and at the far end, is architecture. This is a renowned department (it graduated I.M. Pei!), but definitely a different sort of creature than most of MIT, so it makes sense that it’s at one extreme of the map. That said, the other two programs in its school — Urban Studies & Planning and Media Arts & Sciences — are just to its north.



Region 6 — tiny, yellow, and pale; you may have missed it at first glance — is linguistics island, housing theses such as Topics in the stress and syntax of words. You see how there are also a handful of red dots on this island? They are Brain & Cognitive Science theses — and in particular, ones that are secretly linguistics, like Intonational phrasing in language production and comprehension. Similarly — although at MIT it is not the department of linguistics, but the department of linguistics & philosophy — the philosophy papers are elsewhere. (A few of the very most abstract ones are hanging out near math.)



And what about Region 7, the stingray swimming vigorously away from everything else? I spent a long time looking at this and not seeing a pattern. You can tell there’s a lot of colors (departments) there, randomly assorted; even looking at individual titles I couldn’t see anything. Only when I looked at the original documents did I realize that this is the island of terrible OCR. Almost everything here is an older thesis, with low-quality printing or even typewriting, often in a regrettable font, maybe with the reverse side of the page showing through. (A randomly chosen example; pdf download.)



A good reminder of the importance of high-quality digitization labor. A heartbreaking example of the things we throw away when we make paper the archival format for born-digital items. And also a technical inspiration — look how much vector space we’ve had to carve out to make room for these! the poor neural net, trying desperately to find signal in the noise, needing all this space to do it. I’m tempted to throw out the entire leftmost quarter of this graph, rerun the 2d projection, and see what I get — would we be better able to see the structures in the high-quality data if they had room to breathe? And were I to rerun the entire neural net training process again, I’d want to include some sort of threshhold score for OCR quality. It would be a shame to throw things away — especially since they will be a nonrandom sample, mostly older theses — but I have already had to throw away things I could not OCR at all in an earlier pass, and, again, I suspect the neural net would do a better job organizing the high-quality documents if it could use the whole vector space to spread them out, rather than needing some of it to encode the information “this is terrible OCR and must be kept away from its fellows”.







Clearly I need to share the technical details of how I did this, but this post is already too long, so maybe next week. tl;dr I reached out to Matt Miller after reading his cool post on vectorizing the DPLA and he tipped me off to UMAP and here we are — thanks, Matt!



And just as clearly you want to play with this too, right? Well, it’s super not ready to be integrated into HAMLET due to any number of usability issues but if you promise to forgive me those — have fun. You see how when you hover over a dot you get a label with the format 1721.1-X.txt? It corresponds to a URL of the format https://hamlet.andromedayelton.com/similar_to/X. Go play :).
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Carolina Hernandez
This post was written by Carolina Hernandez (@carolina_hrndz), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Carolina Hernandez is currently an Instruction Librarian at the University of Houston where she collaborates on creating inclusive learning environments for students. Previously, she was the Journalism Librarian at the University of Oregon, where she co-managed the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program. Her MLIS is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research interests are in critical information literacy, inclusive pedagogy, and most recently, the intersection of digital collections and pedagogy. 

I have been interested in attending the DLF Forum for a few years now, but the timing was never quite right until this year. With the conference being both online and free, it was a no brainer for me to finally attend. Considering I am an Instruction Librarian, though, it may seem like an odd choice for me. However, in part because of my previous experience with curating the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon, I’ve been interested in exploring the many ways digital library technologies and digital collections themselves can be incorporated into information literacy instruction. With COVID-19 entirely moving our instruction to the online realm, this interest has become an imperative. This conference has confirmed for me that there are many ways these areas intersect and could inform my instructional approach.
While many of the sessions I watched did not directly address pedagogy, there was still so much I was able to glean from the presentations that I could take back to my realm. The main thing that popped out at me was the way so many presenters addressed accessibility in one way or another. Of course, this stood out the most with the “Creating Accessible and Inclusive Content” combo session, which began with Rebecca Bayeck’s clarification of the difference between accessibility and inclusivity, two terms that are often used interchangeably. While accessibility is more about making sure that the final product is “usable by people with all abilities,” Bayeck made the important distinction that inclusivity goes a step beyond that to also make sure individuals “feel comfortable/safe when using [it].” This is something I try to keep in mind when lesson planning, how it’s important to not only make sure that students are able to access the learning materials in whatever way works best for them, but that they also find the relevance of information literacy to their own lives.
In another presentation from this session, Daniella Levy-Pinto and Mark Weiler noted some of these issues, such as “unlabeled buttons or links,” which can be hard to identify properly for those using screen readers. In fact, several presenters and attendees emphasized the importance of testing platforms and content with screen readers. Carli Spina also spoke about the importance of including audio descriptions and transcripts for audio-video content and also mentioned specific tools, such as CADET, that can help create these necessary points of access. CADET, or Caption and Description Editing Tool, is free and allows you to create captions and timed scripts, but it can also be used to more easily add audio descriptions. 
Screenshot of the CADET interface. Image credit: Carli Spina
It was helpful to see some of these accessibility best practices in action via the conference itself. Because presentations were recorded in advance, they were able to include both closed captioning and transcripts for each one. Conference coordinators encouraged attendees to make their postings in Slack accessible as well by including image descriptions whenever a picture was included. This emphasized for me how it’s not only important to create accessible learning materials, but to foster a community that encourages others to follow suit. It is a helpful model for my instruction team as we move forward with helping our liaison colleagues with their own instruction.
As I’ve been considering how to build lesson plans and activities around digital collections, the other session that stood out to me was the panel “US Latino DH: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future.” The presenters Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Carolina Villarroel, Linda Garcia Merchant, and Lorena Gauthereau spoke about the US Latino Digital Humanities Program based at the University of Houston, my current institution. This made their work immediately relevant to mine, as they are already working with part of the same community I teach. What stood out to me most, though, was their use of “Omeka as Pedagogy.” Baeza Ventura talked about her specific experience with teaching an undergraduate class wherein students used Omeka to curate an exhibit, thus allowing them to “contribute to knowledge production.” This Freirean approach to teaching is very much in line with our instruction team’s programmatic information literacy outcomes, which focus on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators.
With a lot about the coming year still up in the air, my team and I plan to continue our efforts to strengthen both the synchronous and asynchronous online learning content we offer as it seems likely the demand for online teaching will certainly not go away. I am looking forward to bringing a lot of these ideas from the DLF community back to my department and finding ways to incorporate them into our pedagogy.
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Carolina Hernandez appeared first on DLF.
	Lucidworks: How IoT & Industry 4.0 Relate —  and Why Manufacturers Should Care
Here’s the skinny on Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things and what smart manufacturers are doing to leverage the data they both produce.
The post How IoT & Industry 4.0 Relate —  and Why Manufacturers Should Care appeared first on Lucidworks.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Rebecca Bayeck
This post was written by Rebecca Bayeck (@rybayeck), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a dual-PhD holder in Learning Design & Technology and Comparative & International Education from the Pennsylvania State University. Currently a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she engages in digital research, data curation, and inclusive design. Her interdisciplinary research is at the interface of several fields including the learning sciences, literacy studies, and game studies. At this intersection, she explores literacies and learning in games, particularly board games, the interaction of culture, space, and context on design, learning, research, literacies. 

The year 2020 is, without a doubt, complex, filled with multiple challenges as well as opportunities. From remote working/online learning environments to conferencing in a virtual space, everyone has tried and is still trying to adjust to the “new normal” or maybe “new abnormal”. Among those adjusting to the world of social distancing is the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum. The 2020 DLF Forum was my first introduction to and participation in the work completed by this community of librarians and library enthusiasts.  
The 2020 DLF Forum was in a virtual format. Though I would have loved to visit Baltimore, interact in-person with my CLIR cohort, and experience the food culture of Baltimore restaurants, the virtual space still provided a space for encounters and meaningful interactions. The conference organizers used two platforms: Aviary for pre-recorded presentation viewing and Slack for questions and dialogue with attendees. Both platforms created a unique and complimentary online experience. For instance, each video had captions and a downloadable transcript, making the content more accessible. Slack discussions created a sense of community, and gave me a sense of belonging through the interaction among participants. It was a common practice for participants through emojis to like, applaud, or reply to a post/comment (Figure 1). 
Figure 1. Slack Newcomers Channel DLF 2020 Forms of Interaction
Slack’s direct message option further personalized my experience of the online conference. I directly exchanged with some attendees, and established personal rapport. However, my major takeaway from the 2020 DLF Forum was inclusion, shown in the accessibility efforts deployed by the organizers, and in the diversity of topics covered by presenters. The conference brought to the forefront research/topics that have received less attention in the past, and should be discussed today across disciplines and fields. 
Stacy Reardon and Michael Lange from UC Berkeley presentation on Can We Digitize This? Should We? Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life was so inspiring. In my view, it captured the essence of digitization and how it should be done. It is important for individuals engaged in digitization efforts to always ask whether “the value to cultural communities, researchers, or the public outweighs the potential for harm or exploitation of the people, resources, or knowledge.”  It is about not harming or causing harm to the various stakeholders who will see or engage with our final product. This balancing principle can be applied to any research, design, development, or digitization endeavors. Paraphrasing Stacey Patton, 2020 DLF Forum plenary keynote speaker, “how the knowledge came about, [who it will harm, and who will claim ownership of it] is as important as the knowledge itself.” Juliet Hardesty from Indiana University’s presentation on Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies gave a powerful insight into why it is important to incorporate community vocabulary to broaden access to knowledge/data, and fight biases. 
Being a panelist in the session Creating accessible and inclusive content and presenting on Addressing Issues of Accessibility: Urgency in a World of Social Distancing, added to my experience. My interest in issues of accessibility for blind/low vision, deaf/hard of hearing individuals in this era of social distancing facilitated conversation with other session presenters on the accessibility of this conference for screen reader users. From our conversation, it became obvious that the organizers needed to be commended for providing scripts and captions for the recorded videos. Dee, who is blind and uses a screen reader to access contents, and Micky, who is sighted, but did use a screen reader said about their experiences: 
Dee: I do appreciate knowing that there is a caption and there is like, the scripts and everything. It does make you feel more welcome and it does make you realize yes, they’re making an effort. Applause should be given for, you know, for the effort and definitely you know even the fact there is like, an accessibility session or stream, that’s important.
Micky: But if I could say one thing is, I think, I know people were making efforts into making it accessible. I think applause is very much deserved. and I think keep, we got to keep trying and we gotta keep finding innovative ways of working together and collaborating. So I would want people to feel encouraged that there’s more work to be done. But let’s pursue it as a team and then pursue it together because it’s worth it.
Nevertheless, Dee and Micky did have some suggestions for creating accessible conference experiences: 
Dee: The first thing I may say would be to include in the planning committee. Kind of representation from all the groups that you would like to have at the conference, because they will help think about, in this case, about screen readers and which tool and will it be interactive and you know if we want to make it interactive, is there an option or how can we? You know, it’s necessary for someone to think about those things…ensure to have broad representation in the planning committee, or if not in the planning committee, make a point to reach out and consult. So, engage with people with lived experience of whatever the conference you know is trying to accomplish. 
Micky:  If I could make a suggestion that might just be to have a panel with like, just in this particular case, disabled leaders in the GLAM field. you know there’s, I’m sure, a ton out there that would love to have a platform to share from the perspectives of making libraries you know, gallery’s archives, museums, accessible. Maybe, it’s inviting the leaders to come and present to the whole Forum.
These suggestions for future conferences are so important because Dee and Micky had difficulties using their screen readers with Slack and Aviary. For instance, Dee, on the day of the panel, felt she cheated by relying on Micky and “by accessing the videos directly from the Google Drive not in Aviary because then I had to figure out where the play button was and like the website was a bit clunky with JAWS”. Having Slack and Aviary added:
more things you need to interact with and like, I think we know that Slack is accessible, like it works with screen readers, because we could make it work, but really the extra time that you need to put into learning how to use it and use it effectively (Dee). 
Regarding Slack, Micky said: 
practice beforehand, which I think is helpful. If it was simpler that you could reduce that amount of time it takes to, that’s required to familiarize oneself…And then when it’s active, there’s another layer of complexity of  information overload too. Because of all that activity, I think it just took me a long time. I wonder how long it would take someone who didn’t have, you know, that was pursuing this independently.
Attending the DLF Forum was inspiring not only in terms of the topics addressed, but also in the opportunity it created for me to gain insights into the conference experience of screen reader users. It is critical in the era of online conferences to take into consideration the experiences of these attendees in the choice of conference platforms. Much more can be said, and I believe it is important to not only design/plan for, but also design/plan with individuals with lived experiences (e.g., screen reader users, blind/low vision, deaf/hard of hearing, or individuals with cognitive abilities). 
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Rebecca Bayeck appeared first on DLF.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús
This post was written by Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús will be graduating next spring from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras with a BA in History of Art. Her research interest focuses on education, accessibility and publicity of minority, revolutionary Puerto Rican art including topics such as race, gender and transnationalism. She has interned at Visión Doble: Journal of Criticism and History of Art, and volunteered at MECA International Art Fair 2019 and Instituto Nueva Escuela. Ana works as assistant for the curator and director of the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at UPR. She is currently a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Libraries.

Community, a repeated concept during the 2020 Virtual DLF Forum, transitioned from a word to a mantra. From my home in Puerto Rico, I listened and learned from peers who shared their professional and academic experiences. It was my first time attending this Forum. Lots of questions popped into my mind, particularly: Why would staff insist on creating a virtual “community,” of four days duration, with an audience currently experiencing and being exposed to social injustice within their surroundings and media? What does “building a community” mean? 
I would like to thank the DLF staff’s commitment. When I received notice that I was selected as a Community Journalist, my first observation was my last name. The correct spelling and grammar of my name are much more than my cover letter, it represents and brings value to where I come from and those who came before me. I noticed the correct inclusion of the accent mark on “de Jesús.” In that moment I knew my voice would be respected in the discourse. The physical distance between attendees was no obstacle. The Forum implemented digital platforms such as Slack and Aviary. Presentations included transcripts and, since they were previously recorded, I could pause and rewind the video when a new term was introduced. If anyone had a tech problem or just wasn’t familiar with the apps, staff was available to help immediately. Each speaker mentioned their preferred pronouns and acknowledged the indigenous homelands from where they spoke. Being inclusive both in theory and practice was a priority. As a Puerto Rican woman of color with low resources, a first-generation college student and an undergraduate scholar, I saw benefit in this opportunity.  
The Forum sessions reminded me of particular aspects of archives as spaces of data justice, cultural and social responsibility, knowledge production, and alternate historical narratives. In Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies, Juliet Hardesty explained the importance of being conscious of racial categories, first nation groups, non-binary people, and others when including metadata such as subjects, genres, and languages. As an example, she discussed linked data across institutions and the distinction between “exactMatch” and “closeMatch.” Through this conference, I sought to learn and carry out new interdisciplinary perspectives in my roles as a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Institution Libraries and as an Assistant to the Curator and Director at the History, Anthropology and Art Museum of the University of Puerto Rico. One of the most relevant presentations for me was Curationist: Designing a Metadata Standard and Taxonomy for an Open Cultural Ecosystem by Sharon Mizota. She explained the anti-colonialist, anti-racist, feminist, queer, accessible, and multilingual lens of data. Also, she examined taxonomy guidelines that included sensitive subject areas. To illustrate this, she reflected on adopting the terms “Latinx” instead of “Latino” or “Hispanic,” and “homeless people” instead of “homelessness” or “tramp.” 
I also attended discussions of human rights movements such as BLM, Community Activism and Digital Archiving in the Era of George Floyd. Other social matters were considered in the lightning talk titled Pandemic Pivot: How to Take Your Event Online, Reach New Audiences, and Build Even Stronger Communities, and the panel Creating a Virtual Community for Virtual Reality: Challenges and Solutions for Program Building During a Pandemic. Another engaging talk was US Latino Digital Humanities: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future. I would like to mention a crucial keynote by Dr. Linda Garcia Merchant when discussing Chicana feminist scholar Maria Cotera, [The importance of understanding] “the archive as a living active experience of “encuentro” between the present and the past, with the potential to enact new strategies of allegiance and a new praxis”. I believe that this idea of encounter is linked with the DLF Forum’s “building a community” proposal. We must review our reactions and interactions with each other, including those within academia. Our involvement with the writing of histories makes us judges of how and what is told. Something I learned from this experience is that beyond our professional responsibilities, we have a social contract and accountability. Information must be accessible to traditionally marginalized public. Stories, agents and terms that once were excluded from the official narrative must be taken into consideration. The 2020 Virtual DLF Forum included more than spaces for education. It was about feedback, mutual aid, being open to new perspectives, and building a community. 
 
 
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	Lucidworks: Solr Streaming Expressions Enables Advanced Search and Filtering in Fitch Connect
Learn how Fitch Solutions used streaming expressions to search complex datasets.
The post Solr Streaming Expressions Enables Advanced Search and Filtering in Fitch Connect appeared first on Lucidworks.
	David Rosenthal: RISC vs. CISC
The architectural debate between Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) and Reduced Instruction Set Conputers (RISC) really took off in the 1980s:In particular, two projects at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. Stanford's MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley's RISC gave its name to the entire concept and was commercialized as the SPARC. For the last decade or more the debate has seemed frozen, with the CISC x86 architecture dominating the server and desktop markets, while the RISC ARM architecture dominated the mobile market. But two recent developments are shaking things up. Below the fold, some discussion.SourceLast month, Apple announced three products, Mac Mini, Mac Air, and 13" Macbook Pro based on their ARM-based M1 chip to ecstatic reviews:the Mac mini (and its new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro siblings) has Apple’s M1 system-on-a-chip, which includes an 8-core GPU, a CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores, a 16-core neural processing unit (NPU) called the Neural Engine, and a whole bunch of other stuff.Built on the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ARM ISA), the M1 features 16 billion transistors and was manufactured in a 5nm process. According to Apple, each performance core in the M1 qualifies as the world’s fastest CPU core to date, while the efficiency cores match the performance of some recent Intel Macs. All three replace products using Intel x86 chips, and the head-to-head comparisons showed the RISC completely outclassing the CISC in a market segment it had dominated for decades. Clearly this is a big deal.Now, the are some obvious reasons why Intel is at a disadvantage in these comparisons. Apple's M1 is brand new, where the Intel chips are a couple of years old. And the M1 uses a 5nm process, where Intel has been struggling to upgrade its fabs:Intel's press release also says that yields for its 7nm process are now twelve months behind the company's internal targets, meaning the company isn't currently on track to produce its 7nm process in an economically viable way. The company now says its 7nm CPUs will not debut on the market until late 2022 or early 2023.  But the M1 also compares well to AMD's 7nm x86 CPUs so this isn't the whole explanation.  Erik Engheim's Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? provides an excellent explanation for the lay audience. He starts from the basics (What is a Microprocessor (CPU)?) and goes on to explain that whereas Intel and AMD make CPUs that others build into systems such as PCs and servers, Apple makes systems that are implemented as a single chip, a System-on-Chip (SoC). Apple can do this where Intel and AMD can't because the SoC isn't their product, their product is a Mac that includes a SoC as a component.One thing we understood when we started Nvidia more than a quarter of a century ago was that custom silicon to perform critical functions, such as 3D graphics, was an essential component of a PC. But the custom silicon had to be a separate chip. We used a state-of-the-art 500nm process. At 5nm Apple can put 10,000 times as many gates in the same chip area. So Apple can include the precise set of additional custom processors that match the needs to the product. In this case, not just 8 GPU cores, 16 Neural Engine cores, but also two different implementations of the ARM architecture, 4 optimized for speed and 4 optimized for efficiency to extend battery life.Engheim explains the two main ways of making CPUs faster using the same process and the same clock rate, multiple cores and out-of-order execution, and their limitations. In the server space, having lots of cores makes a lot of sense; the demand is for many simultaneous tasks from many simultaneous users, and the alternative to adding cores to a CPU is to add CPUs to a server, which is more expensive.But in the PC space there is only one user, and although the demand will be for several simultaneous threads, once that demand is satisfied extra cores provide no benefit. The M1's 8 cores are probably more than enough, which is indicated by Apple envisaging that, most of the time, the 4 low-power "efficiency" cores will do all the work. Note that, in adding cores, the only advantage RISC provides is that the simpler instruction set should make each core a bit smaller. Not a big deal.But for compute-intensive tasks such as games, the other 4 cores need to be fast. Which is where out-of-order execution comes in, and RISC turns out to have a big advantage. Out-of-order execution means that instructions are fetched from memory, then decoded into "micro-operations", which can be thought of as instructions for the individual components of the core. The micro-operations are stored in a Re-Order Buffer (ROB), together with information about what data they need, and whether it is available. Instead of executing the micro-operations for each instruction, then executing the micro-operations for the next instruction, the core looks through the ROB finding micro-operations that have all the data they need and executing them. It does instructions as soon as it can, not waiting until the instruction before is complete.Engheim explains the importance of the difference between the x86 ROB and the M1's:It is because the ability to run fast depends on how quickly you can fill up the ROB with micro-ops and with how many. The more quickly you fill it up and the larger it is the more opportunities you are given to pick instructions you can execute in parallel and thus improve performance.Machine code instructions are chopped into micro-ops by what we call an instruction decoder. If we have more decoders we can chop up more instructions in parallel and thus fill up the ROB faster.And this is where we see the huge differences. The biggest, baddest Intel and AMD microprocessor cores have four decoders, which means they can decode four instructions in parallel spitting out micro-ops.But Apple has a crazy eight decoders. Not only that but the ROB is something like three times larger. You can basically hold three times as many instructions. No other mainstream chipmaker has that many decoders in their CPUs. RISC is the reason the M1 can have more decoders than x86. Engheim explains:You see, for x86 an instruction can be anywhere from 1–15 bytes long. On a RISC chip instructions are fixed size. Why is that relevant in this case?Because splitting up a stream of bytes into instructions to feed into eight different decoders in parallel becomes trivial if every instruction has the same length.However, on an x86 CPU, the decoders have no clue where the next instruction starts. It has to actually analyze each instruction in order to see how long it is.The brute force way Intel and AMD deal with this is by simply attempting to decode instructions at every possible starting point. That means we have to deal with lots of wrong guesses and mistakes which has to be discarded. This creates such a convoluted and complicated decoder stage that it is really hard to add more decoders. But for Apple, it is trivial in comparison to keep adding more.In fact, adding more causes so many other problems that four decoders according to AMD itself is basically an upper limit for how far they can go. The result is that the M1's fast cores are effectively processing instructions twice as fast as Intel's and AMD's at the same clock frequency. And their efficiency cores are processing about as many using much less power.Using much less power for the same workload is one of the main reasons ARM dominates the mobile market, where battery life is crucial. That brings us to the second interesting recent RISC development. ARM isn't the only RISC architecture, it is just by a long way the most successful. Among the others with multiple practical implementations, RISC-V is I believe unique; it is the only fully open-source RISC architecture.SourceIn New RISC-V CPU claims recordbreaking performance per watt Jim Salter reports on a new implementation of RISC-V that claims extraordinarily low power for quite respectable performance. Micro Magic's:new prototype CPU, which appears to be the fastest RISC-V CPU in the world. Micro Magic adviser Andy Huang claimed the CPU could produce 13,000 CoreMarks (more on that later) at 5GHz and 1.1V while also putting out 11,000 CoreMarks at 4.25GHz—the latter all while consuming only 200mW. Huang demonstrated the CPU—running on an Odroid board—to EE Times at 4.327GHz/0.8V and 5.19GHz/1.1V.Later the same week, Micro Magic announced the same CPU could produce over 8,000 CoreMarks at 3GHz while consuming only 69mW of power. Some caveats are necessary:The chip is a single-core prototype.The Micro Magic benchmarks are claimed, not independently verified.The Coremark benchmark is an industry standard for embedded systems, it isn't an appropriate benchmark for PC-type systems such as use the CPUs Salter is comparing it to.The power efficiency is impressive, but the raw single-core performance is merely interesting. At 5GHz it is about 1/3 the performance of one of the M1's four fast cores.It is worth noting that the RISC-V architecture has multiple instruction lengths, just much less baroque ones than x86. So the ROB advantage may be less. Nevertheless, if Micro Magic's customers can deliver multi-core SoC products they should provide much more compute for the same power as current embedded chips. Salter is cautiously optimistic:All of this sounds very exciting—Micro Magic's new prototype is delivering solid smartphone-grade performance at a fraction of the power budget, using an instruction set that Linux already runs natively on....Micro Magic intends to offer its new RISC-V design to customers using an IP licensing model. The simplicity of the design—RISC-V requires roughly one-tenth the opcodes that modern ARM architecture does—further simplifies manufacturing concerns, since RISC-V CPU designs can be built in shuttle runs, sharing space on a wafer with other designs....Still, this is an exciting development. Not only does the new design appear to perform well while massively breaking efficiency records, it's doing so with a far more ideologically open design than its competitors. The RISC-V ISA—unlike x86, ARM, and even MIPS—is open and provided under royalty-free licenses. P.S: more evidence of M1's impressive performance in Liam Tung's AWS engineer puts Windows 10 on Arm on Apple Mac M1 – and it thrashes Surface Pro X. The Surface Pro X uses an ARM chip co-developed by Qualcomm and Microsoft.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Arabeth Balasko
This post was written by Arabeth Balasko, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Arabeth Balasko (she/her) is an archivist and historian dedicated to public service and proactive stewardship. As a professional archivist, her overarching goals are to curate collections that follow a shared standardization practice, are user-centric, and are searchable and accessible to all via physical and digital platforms.
She believes that an archive should be a welcoming place for all people and should be an inclusive environment which advocates to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories and histories of diverse voices. By getting individuals involved in telling THEIR story and making THEIR history part of the ever-growing story of humanity, we all win!







The Dawn of the Great Archival Shift



Over centuries, archives and archivists have been heralded as the keepers, the stewards of records, stories, and collective memory. However, at times this stewardship has come from a place of exclusion, centered heavily around white, English-speaking experiences. Countless stories, memories, and events have been omitted from the larger historical narrative or have been rewritten from a skewed perspective.
Now (and unfortunately for centuries) racism and police brutality has permeated our country’s history. Lack of racial equity has led to whitewashed and white supremacy-based collection policies that are geared towards uplifting and showcasing one-sided narratives, while often overlooking, overwriting, and suppressing contributions and accolades of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
So many times, it is easier for folks in the GLAM sectors to claim neutrality, to leave it to the next generation, to look the other way, and focus only on the past and occasionally, the present. From being overworked, under-supported, and oftentimes misunderstood, archivists have grown tired, and with tiredness comes apathy. Other times it is simply not knowing what to do and/or not having the “authority” to make actual changes in an organization. This too leads to burnout, turnover, and once again, apathy. The humanities profession’s lack of diversity and equity has engrained a culture of dysfunction in several of the GLAM organizations across the country.
During the 2020 DLF Forum, it was apparent that I was not the only person who felt this way. Several of the sessions focused on how to become a more proactive, mindful, and accountable steward, while also taking care of your own mental health and well-being. From practicing mindfulness and relaxation techniques, to reflecting upon language choices in metadata and/or finding aids, to reviewing your institution’s digitally available content for equity and inclusiveness; this conference truly spoke to my soul in many different ways. However, during the conference, one overarching question that I continued asking myself was – “How can I, as an archivist, ensure that all folks feel represented in an archive? Is this possible?” Upon a week’s reflection and allowing myself some time to digest the rich information and ideas posed during these diverse sessions, I came to reframe my question as, “What can we as archivists do to support the fight for archival equity?”
In my opinion, one big step archival repositories and the archivists in those repositories can take is to not promote the idea of neutrality. Oftentimes, archives can shy away from hard histories, hard conversations – they can minimize hurts, and maximize virtues, but I feel that is a misstep. History is ugly, sad, beautiful, heartwarming, heartbreaking, and real. It happened. You cannot change that. BUT you can work to showcase how it happened, why it happened, and help reshape it for today’s generation through modernized lenses. By uplifting the stories and voices of BIPOC folks, which have traditionally been omitted from the collected narrative for centuries, and reinterpreting and reclaiming the stories of those lost, overwritten, and marginalized throughout history, archival repositories can truly become beacons of change throughout the GLAM sectors.
Many folks, especially those who identify as BIPOC, feel they are not represented in an archive – or if they are, their stories and experiences have been retold without their voice, their input, or their permission. As an archivist it is so important to work to build relationships and connections with communities and foster and tend to those relationships over the years. So many times, archival organizations take on collections, sign deeds of gift, and then the relationship ends. I think this is a huge misstep for any archival repository. By investing in communities – communities will invest in you. With each new generation comes new opportunities to promote equity and accountability throughout archival repositories. Each generation of archivists should be reflecting and reevaluating how stories are (and traditionally have been) collected, maintained, presented, and made (or not made) accessible.






I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with patrons, students, and volunteers, who have expressed to me that they feel that they are not represented, they are not “seen” amongst the archival collections they are exploring. It truly breaks my heart, and it means that we, as archival professionals are falling short, and we need to do better and be better for ALL users. I feel that inclusivity is key to create a well-rounded narrative, where users/patrons/researchers/etc. can “see themselves” reflected in the archives and collections.
It has been my experience that when someone feels invested in and has input to how they are being represented, there is a higher propensity for folks to champion for the survival and continuation of an archive. By getting community members and groups invested in telling their story, identifying themselves in their own way and own language/words, and by not leaving it up to the archivist to make assumptions, collections that are taken in become more authentic and personal.
During this conference, I also reflected a lot on the right to be remembered and the right to be forgotten. Nobody owes anyone their story. It is so important for archivists (including myself) to remember that. Some stories are too painful for folks to share, some are not ready (and may never be), and some are willing to share it all! No user/donor/patron is alike, and as an archivist, it is important that you do not assign a “predetermined scenario” to each interaction. By creating meaningful relationships, where you are invested in more than just acquiring the “stuff” from the donor, you really can create life-long partnerships, camaraderie, and friendships with users of your repository!
Archives are not neutral – and they never should be. There is a lot of repair work that needs to be done, and it can be done, it just takes folks who are dedicated to making fundamental changes. I was honestly inspired to find like-minded souls at this conference, and for that, I am hopeful that a great archival shift is on the horizon. It is truly great to see archivists and other humanities professionals in action advocating for change and demanding equity checks and re-evaluation of how things “have always been.”
I reflected on the fact that there really are some great opportunities to make proactive changes and create an archive that is more equitable and accessible for all users – an archive of the future. For me, it is all connected – by investing in equity you invest in accessibility – when you invest in communities you have the chance to grow your repository’s stories and collection scope!
The archives truly are for EVERYONE! And, as the great Tupac Shakur says, “You see the old way wasn’t working, so it’s on us to do what we gotta do, to survive.” My hope is that archivists work to make any and all fundamental changes needed, to ensure that an equitable, inclusive, and diverse narrative survives for the future generations to come.



The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Arabeth Balasko appeared first on DLF.
	Ed Summers: 25 for 2020
An obvious follow on from my last post is to see what my top 25 albums of the year are. In the past I’ve tried to mentally travel over the releases of the past year to try to cook up a list. But this year I thought it would be fun to use the LastFM API to look at my music listening history for 2020, and let the data do the talking as it were.


The first problem that while LastFM is a good source of my listening history its metadata for albums seems quite sparse. The LastFM album.getInfo API call doesn’t seem to return the year the album was published. The LastFM docs indicate that a releasedate property is available, but I couldn’t seem to find it either in the XML or JSON responses. Maybe it was there once and now is gone? Maybe there’s some trick I was overlooking with the API? Who knows.


So to get around this I used LastFM to get my listening history, but then the Discogs API to fetch metadata for a specific album using their search endpoint. LastFM includes MusicBrainz identifiers for tracks and most artists and albums. So I could have used those to look up the album using the MusicBrainz API. But I wasn’t sure if I would find good release dates there either as their focus seems to be on recognizing tracks, and linking them to albums and artists. Discogs is a superb human curated database, like a Wikipedia for music aficionados. Their API returns a good amount of information for each album, for example:


{
  "country": "US",
  "year": "1983",
  "format": [
    "Vinyl",
    "LP",
    "Album"
  ],
  "label": [
    "I.R.S. Records",
    "I.R.S. Records",
    "I.R.S. Records",
    "A&M Records, Inc.",
    "A&M Records, Inc.",
    "I.R.S., Inc.",
    "I.R.S., Inc.",
    "Electrosound Group Midwest, Inc.",
    "Night Garden Music",
    "Unichappell Music, Inc.",
    "Reflection Sound Studios",
    "Sterling Sound"
  ],
  "type": "master",
  "genre": [
    "Rock"
  ],
  "style": [
    "Indie Rock"
  ],
  "id": 14515,
  "barcode": [
    "SP-070604-A",
    "SP-070604-B",
    "SP0 70604 A ES1 EMW",
    "SP0 70604-B-ES1 EMW",
    "SP0 70604-B-ES2 EMW",
    "STERLING",
    "(B)",
    "BMI"
  ],
  "user_data": {
    "in_wantlist": false,
    "in_collection": false
  },
  "master_id": 14515,
  "master_url": "https://api.discogs.com/masters/14515",
  "uri": "/REM-Murmur/master/14515",
  "catno": "SP 70604",
  "title": "R.E.M. - Murmur",
  "thumb": "https://discogs-images.imgix.net/R-414122-1459975774-1411.jpeg?auto=compress&blur=0&fit=max&fm=jpg&h=150&q=40&w=150&s=52b867c541b102b5c8bcf5accae025e0",
  "cover_image": "https://discogs-images.imgix.net/R-414122-1459975774-1411.jpeg?auto=compress&blur=0&fit=max&fm=jpg&h=600&q=90&w=600&s=0e227f30b3981fd2b0fb20fb4362df92",
  "resource_url": "https://api.discogs.com/masters/14515",
  "community": {
    "want": 17287,
    "have": 26133
  }
}


So I created a small function that looks up an artist/album combination using the Discogs search API. I applied the function to the Pandas DataFrame of my listening history, which was grouped by artist and album. When I ran this across the 1,312 distinct albums I listened to in 2020 I actually ran into a handful of albums (86) that didn’t turn up at Discogs. I had actually listened to some of these albums quite often, and wanted to see if they were from 2020. I figured that these probably were obscure things I picked up on Bandcamp. Knowing the provenance of data is important.


Bandcamp is another wonderful site for music lovers. It has an API too, but you have to write to them to request a key because it’s mostly designed for publishers that need to integrate their music catalogs with Bandcamp. I figured this little experiment wouldn’t qualify so I wrote a quick little scraping function that does a search, finds a match, and extracts the release date from the album’s page on the Bandcamp website. This left just four things that I listened just a handful of times,which have since disappeared from Bandcamp (I think).


What I thought would be an easy little exercise with the LastFM API actually turned out to require me to talk to the Discogs API, and then scraping the Bandcamp website. So it goes with data analysis I suppose. If you want to see the details they are in this Jupyter notebook. And so, without further ado, here are my to 25 albums of 2020.





25


 Perfume Genius / Set My Heart On Fire Immediately




24


 Roger Eno / Mixing Colours




23


 Blochemy / nebe




22


 Idra / Lone Voyagers, Lovers and Lands




21


 Rutger Zuydervelt and Bill Seaman / Rutger Zuydervelt and Bill Seaman - Movements of Dust




20


 Purl / Renovatio




19


 mute forest / Riderstorm




18


 Michael Grigoni & Stephen Vitiello / Slow Machines




17


 Seabuckthorn / Other Other




16


 Windy & Carl / Unreleased Home Recordings 1992-1995




15


 Mathieu Karsenti / Bygones




14


 Rafael Anton Irisarri / Peripeteia




13


 Mikael Lind / Give Shape to Space




12


 Taylor Swift / folklore (deluxe version)




11


 koji itoyama / I Know




10


 Andrew Weathers / Dreams and Visions from the Llano Estacado




9


 Jim Guthrie / Below OST - Volume III




8


 Norken & Nyquist / Synchronized Minds




7


 Jim Guthrie / Below OST - Volume II




6


 Halftribe / Archipelago




5


 Hazel English / Wake Up!




4


 R Beny / natural fiction




3


 Warmth / Life




2


 David Newlyn / Apparitions I and II




1


 Seabuckthorn / Through A Vulnerable Occur
	Samvera: Save the Date for Samvera Virtual Connect 2021
Mark your calendar for Samvera Virtual Connect 2021!Tuesday, April 21 – Wednesday, April 22, 2021 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM EDT / 8:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT / 16:00-19:00 BST / 15:00-18:00 UTC



Watch for more information coming in early 2021 including a call for Program Committee participation and a call for proposals.
The post Save the Date for Samvera Virtual Connect 2021 appeared first on Samvera.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Jocelyn Hurtado
This post was written by Jocelyn Hurtado, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Jocelyn Hurtado is a native Miamian who worked as an archivist at a community repository for four year. She is experienced in working with manuscript, art and artifact collections pertaining to a community of color whose history has often been overlooked. Ms. Hurtado, understands the responsibility and the significance of the work done by community archivists and has seen firsthand that this work not only affects the present-day community but that it will continue to have a deep-rooted impact on generations to come.
Ms. Hurtado also has experience promoting collections through exhibits, presentations, instructional sessions, and other outreach activities which includes the development and execution of an informative historical web-series video podcast. 
Ms. Hurtado earned her Associate Degree in Anthropology from Miami-Dade College and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She also completed the Georgia Archives Institute Program. 

This year has been full of new experiences and we all have faced the challenges of adapting to the new professional realities of relying on technology to complete our work, promoting the goals of our organization all while staying connected with communities we serve virtually. Our phones and laptops are now on the top of the list of tools we cannot function without and it’s arguably just as valuable as a pencil or finding aid to an archivist, at least from my own personal experience. As a first-time attendee and a community journalist, I was excited and unsure of how the 2020 DLF Forum would operate on a virtual platform. Like millions around the world I’ve been working remotely for months and learned to adapt but I was still hesitant on how attendees would be able to truly connect to the panelist, fellow attendees and with the subject of each talk remotely. It is no secret that librarians, archivists, historians or anyone in a related field have a tendency to be introverted and from my own personal experience starting a conversation, connecting with others and networking can be stressful. However, I was quickly positively surprised on how easy it was to start a conversation at the conference. I enjoyed the Slack application in which attendees were able to share thoughts, ideas and pose questions about each session. I certainly viewed more opinions, concepts and panels virtually than I probably would have in person. I liked the fact that I could have access to the sessions anytime which is great for anyone who has a busy schedule as well as any problems accessing the videos due to the digital divide caused by finances or other factors such as remoteness or environmental factors such as hurricanes or storms.
In the opening plenary I was delighted to hear the acknowledgement of the indigenous people and their lands in regards to the location of the original conference and area that was being discussed. The keynote speaker, Dr. Stacy Patton, was simply incredible and asked us to grapple with a very important question: Do Black Lives Matter in galleries, libraries, archives and museums? I believe we all know and can say historically the answer is no, black lives have systematically been erased and unwelcome in these spaces. 2020 has become the year of reckoning for some institutions and for many in this field that have been part of this problem. Thus, the question becomes what now? How can meaningful and genuine change come about? There is no one size fits all plan and up to in the field to do the work and realize there will never be a timeline or an exact moment where it will be marked as done. I had the opportunity to ask Dr. Patton a question and was also able to see other questions posed by fellow attendees. It created a hub for sharing experiences and problems encountered in our own institutions which was able to foster a connected moment and experience.
Dr. Patton hit the nail on the head when reciting the Claude McKay poem, “If We Must Die.” It was a couple of days before Election Day and oh how the words aptly describe the current era and the rawness of it all. During her speech I reflected on the work of Schomberg and many other black intellectuals whose worked and made centers were black lives do matter and their stories were properly preserved. I also reflected on my experience working at a black community repository, in a space made for black lives to matter. I also recognize another important question: Which Black Lives Matter in these spaces? Women, individuals overlooked due to their sexual orientation, and those from a lower socioeconomic status or position have had their stories overlooked. There is so much work to be done and this has encouraged and highlighted the importance of pushing the boundaries and the sharing of ideas.
The Recording Restorative Justice and Accountability: The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive presented by Gina Nortonsmith, Raymond Wilkes, Amanda Rust and Drew Facklam was inspiring. The work done by the team of telling the stories of victims and giving a voice is imperative. Prior to this session I did not know of The Civil Rights and the Restorative Justice Project and was glad to learn about the research being conducted along with support policy initiatives on racial hate crimes during the Jim Crow Era and that justice is still being pursued for the victims and their families. The statement “I like to think of the investigator as the foundation for an archive, while the archivist is the architect and engineer, providing structure and organization in order to complete the building, i.e. the archive” by Raymond Wilkes beautifully explained the importance of the collaborative efforts and the relationship member of the team had to the task.
I am looking forward to next year’s DLF Forum and hope/expect it to continue the focus on the community.
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Jocelyn Hurtado appeared first on DLF.
	ZBW German National Library of Economics: Building the SWIB20 participants map
 

Here we describe the process of building the interactive SWIB20 participants map, created by a query to Wikidata. The map was intended to support participants of SWIB20 to make contacts in the virtual conference space. However, in compliance with GDPR we want to avoid publishing personal details. So we choose to publish a map of institutions, to which the participants are affiliated. (Obvious downside: the 9 un-affiliated participants could not be represented on the map).
We suppose that the method can be applied to other conferences and other use cases - e.g., the downloaders of scientific software or the institutions subscribed to an academic journal. Therefore, we describe the process in some detail.



We started with a list of institution names (with country code and city, but without person ids), extracted and transformed from our ConfTool registration system, saved it in CSV format. Country names were normalized, cities were not (and only used for context information).


We created an OpenRefine project, and reconciled the institution name column with Wikidata items of type Q43229 (organization, and all its subtypes). We included the country column (-> P17, country) as relevant other detail, and let OpenRefine “Auto-match candidates with high confidence”. Of our original set of 335 country/institution entries, 193 were automaticaly matched via the Wikidata reconciliation service. At the end of the conference, 400 institutions were identified and put on the map (data set).


We went through all un-matched entries and either a) selected one of the suggested items, or b) looked up and tweaked the name string in Wikidata, or in Google, until we found an according Wikipedia page, openend the linked Wikidata object from there, and inserted the QID in OpenRefine, or c) created a new Wikidata item (if the institution seemed notable), or d) attached “not yet determined” (Q59496158) where no Wikidata item (yet) exists, or e) attached “undefined value” (Q7883029) where no institution had been given


The results were exported from OpenRefine into a .tsv file (settings)

Again via a script, we loaded ConfTool participants data, built a lookup table from all available OpenRefine results (country/name string -> WD item QID), aggregated participant counts per QID, and loaded that data into a custom SPARQL endpoint, which is accessible from the Wikidata Query Service. As in step 1, for all (new) institution name strings, which were not yet mapped to Wikidata, a .csv file was produced. (An additional remark: If no approved custom SPARQL endpoint is available, it is feasible to generate a static query with all data in it’s “values” clause.)

During the preparation of the conference, more and more participants registered, which required multiple loops: Use the csv file of step 5 and re-iterate, starting at step 2. (Since I found no straightforward way to update an existing OpenRefine project with extended data, I created a new project with new input and output files for every iteration.)


Finally, to display the map we could run a federated query on WDQS. It fetches the institution items from the custom endpoint and enriches them from Wikidata with name, logo and image of the institution (if present), as well as with geographic coordinates, obtained directly or indirectly as follows: a) item has “coodinate location” (P625) itself, or b) item has “headquarters location” item with coordinates (P159/P625), or c) item has “located in administrative entity” item with coordinates (P131/P625), or c) item has “country” item (P17/P625) Applying this method, only one institution item could not be located on the map.


Data improvements
The way to improve the map was to improve the data about the items in Wikidata - which also helps all future Wikidata users.
New items
For a few institutions, new items were created:
Burundi Association of Librarians, Archivists and Documentalists
FAO representation in Kenya
Aurora Information Technology
Istituto di Informatica Giuridica e Sistemi Giudiziari
For another 14 institutions, mostly private companies, no items were created due to notability concerns. Everything else already had an item in Wikidata!
Improvement of existing items
In order to improve the display on the map, we enhanced selected items in Wikidata in various ways:
Add English label
Add type (instance of)
Add headquarter location
Add image and/or logo
And we hope, that participants of the conference also took the opportunity to make their institution “look better”, by adding for example an image of it to the Wikidata knowledge base.
Putting Wikidata into use for a completely custom purpose thus created incentives for improving “the sum of all human knowledge” step by tiny step.

 
 
 
Wikidata for Authorities
    
          Linked data   
      

Deutsch
	Ed Summers: Diss Music
I recently defended my dissertation, and am planning to write a short post here with a synopsis of what I studied. But before that I wanted to do a bit of navel gazing and examine the music of my dissertation.


To be clear, my dissertation has no music. It’s one part discourse analysis, two parts ethnographic field study, and is comprised entirely of text and images bundled into a PDF.


But over the last 5 years as I took classes, wrote papers, conducted research and did the final write up my research results I was almost always listening to music.


I spent a lot of time on weekends in the tranquil workspaces of the Silver Spring Public Library. After the Coronavirus hit earlier this year I spent more time surrounded by piles of books in my impromptu office in the basement of my house. But wherever I found myself working music was almost always on.


I leaned heavily on Bandcamp over this time period, listening and then purchasing music I enjoyed. Bandcamp is a truly remarkable platform for learning about new music from people whose tastes align with yours. My listening habits definitely trended over this time towards instrumental, experimental, found sound and ambient, partly because lyrics can distract me if I’m writing or reading.


I’m also a long time LastFM user. So all the music I listened to over this period was logged (or “scrobbled”). LastFM have an API so I thought it would be fun to create a little report of the top albums I listened to each month of my dissertation.


So this is the music of my dissertation–or the hidden soundtrack of my research, between August 2015 and November 2020. You can see how I obtained the information from the API in this Jupyter notebook. But the results are here below.





2015-08   White Rainbow / Thru.u




2015-09   Deradoorian / The Expanding Flower Planet




2015-10   James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg / Ambsace




2015-11   Moderat / II




2015-12   Deerhunter / Fading Frontier




2016-01   David Bowie / Blackstar




2016-02   Library Tapes / Escapism




2016-03   Twincities / …plays the brown mountain lights




2016-04   Moderat / III




2016-05   Radiohead / A Moon Shaped Pool




2016-06   Tigue / Peaks




2016-07   A Winged Victory for the Sullen / A Winged Victory for the Sullen




2016-08   Oneohtrix Point Never / Garden of Delete




2016-09   Oneohtrix Point Never / Drawn and Quartered




2016-10   Chihei Hatakeyama / Saunter




2016-11   Biosphere / Departed Glories




2016-12   Sarah Davachi / The Untuning of the Sky




2017-01   OFFTHESKY / The Beautiful Nowhere




2017-02   Clark / The Last Panthers




2017-03   Tim Hecker / Harmony In Ultraviolet




2017-04   Goldmund / Sometimes




2017-05   Deerhunter / Halcyon Digest




2017-06   Radiohead / OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017




2017-07   Arcade Fire / Everything Now




2017-08   oh sees / Orc




2017-09   Lusine / Sensorimotor




2017-10   Four Tet / New Energy




2017-11   James Murray / Eyes to the Height




2017-12   Jlin / Black Origami




2018-01   Colleen / Captain of None (Bonus Track Version)




2018-02   Gersey / What You Kill




2018-03   Rhucle / Yellow Beach




2018-04   Christina Vantzou / No. 3




2018-05   Hotel Neon / Context




2018-06   Brendon Anderegg / June




2018-07   A Winged Victory for the Sullen / Atomos




2018-08   Ezekiel Honig / A Passage of Concrete




2018-09   Paperbark / Last Night




2018-10   Flying Lotus / You’re Dead! (Deluxe Edition)




2018-11   Porya Hatami / Kaziwa




2018-12   Sven Laux / You’ll Be Fine.




2019-01   Max Richter / Mary Queen Of Scots (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)




2019-02   Ian Nyquist / Cuan




2019-03   Jens Pauly / Vihne




2019-04   Ciro Berenguer / El Mar De Junio




2019-05   Rival Consoles / Persona




2019-06   Caught In The Wake Forever / Waypoints




2019-07   Spheruleus / Light Through Open Blinds




2019-08   Valotihkuu / By The River




2019-09   Moss Covered Technology / Slow Walking




2019-10   Tsone / pagan oceans I, II, III




2019-11   Big Thief / Two Hands




2019-12   A Winged Victory for the Sullen / The Undivided Five




2020-01   Hirotaka Shirotsubaki / fragment 2011-2017




2020-02   Luis Miehlich / Timecuts




2020-03   Federico Durand / Jardín de invierno




2020-04   R.E.M. / Document - 25th Anniversary Edition




2020-05   Chicano Batman / Invisible People




2020-06   Hazel English / Wake Up!




2020-07   Josh Alexander / Hiraeth




2020-08   The Beatles / The Beatles (Remastered)




2020-09   Radiohead / OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017




2020-10   Mathieu Karsenti / Bygones




2020-11   R.E.M. / Murmur - Deluxe Edition
	Andromeda Yelton: Of such stuff are (deep)dreams made: convolutional networks and neural style transfer
Skipped FridAI blogging last week because of Thanksgiving, but let’s get back on it! Top-of-mind today are the firing of AI queen Timnit Gebru (letter of support here) and a couple of grant applications that I’m actually eligible for (this is rare for me! I typically need things for which I can apply in my individual capacity, so it’s always heartening when they exist — wish me luck).



But for blogging today, I’m gonna talk about neural style transfer, because it’s cool as hell. I started my ML-learning journey on Coursera’s intro ML class and have been continuing with their deeplearning.ai sequence; I’m on course 4 of 5 there, so I’ve just gotten to neural style transfer. This is the thing where a neural net outputs the content of one picture in the style of another:





Via https://medium.com/@build_it_for_fun/neural-style-transfer-with-swift-for-tensorflow-b8544105b854.



OK, so! Let me explain while it’s still fresh.



If you have a neural net trained on images, it turns out that each layer is responsible for recognizing different, and progressively more complicated, things. The specifics vary by neural net and data set, but you might find that the first layer gets excited about straight lines and colors; the second about curves and simple textures (like stripes) that can be readily composed from straight lines; the third about complex textures and simple objects (e.g. wheels, which are honestly just fancy circles); and so on, until the final layers recognize complex whole objects. You can interrogate this by feeding different images into the neural net and seeing which ones trigger the highest activation in different neurons. Below, each 3×3 grid represents the most exciting images for a particular neuron. You can see that in this network, there are Layer 1 neurons excited about colors (green, orange), and about lines of particular angles that form boundaries between dark and colored space. In Layer 2, these get built together like tiny image legos; now we have neurons excited about simple textures such as vertical stripes, concentric circles, and right angles.





Via https://adeshpande3.github.io/The-9-Deep-Learning-Papers-You-Need-To-Know-About.html, originally from Zeller & Fergus, Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks



So how do we get from here to neural style transfer? We need to extract information about the content of one image, and the style of another, in order to make a third image that approximates both of them. As you already expect if you have done a little machine learning, that means that we need to write cost functions that mean “how close is this image to the desired content?” and “how close is this image to the desired style?” And then there’s a wrinkle that I haven’t fully understood, which is that we don’t actually evaluate these cost functions (necessarily) against the outputs of the neural net; we actually compare the activations of the neurons, as they react to different images — and not necessarily from the final layer! In fact, choice of layer is a hyperparameter we can vary (I super look forward to playing with this on the Coursera assignment and thereby getting some intuition).



So how do we write those cost functions? The content one is straightforward: if two images have the same content, they should yield the same activations. The greater the differences, the greater the cost (specifically via a squared error function that, again, you may have guessed if you’ve done some machine learning).



The style one is beautifully sneaky; it’s a measure of the difference in correlation between activations across channels. What does that mean in English? Well, let’s look at the van Gogh painting, above. If an edge detector is firing (a boundary between colors), then a swirliness detector is probably also firing, because all the lines are curves — that’s characteristic of van Gogh’s style in this painting. On the other hand, if a yellowness detector is firing, a blueness detector may or may not be (sometimes we have tight parallel yellow and blue lines, but sometimes yellow is in the middle of a large yellow region). Style transfer posits that artistic style lies in the correlations between different features. See? Sneaky. And elegant.



Finally, for the style-transferred output, you need to generate an image that does as well as possible on both cost functions simultaneously — getting as close to the content as it can without unduly sacrificing the style, and vice versa.



As a side note, I think I now understand why DeepDream is fixated on a really rather alarming number of eyes. Since the layer choice is a hyperparameter, I hypothesize that choosing too deep a layer — one that’s started to find complex features rather than mere textures and shapes — will communicate to the system, yes, what I truly want is for you to paint this image as if those complex features are matters of genuine stylistic significance. And, of course, eyes are simple enough shapes to be recognized relatively early (not very different from concentric circles), yet ubiquitous in image data sets. So…this is what you wanted, right? the eager robot helpfully offers.





https://www.ucreative.com/inspiration/google-deep-dream-is-the-trippiest-thing-in-the-internet/



I’m going to have fun figuring out what the right layer hyperparameter is for the Coursera assignment, but I’m going to have so much more fun figuring out the wrong ones.
	Mita Williams: Weeknote 49 (2020)
§1



I don’t have much to report in regards to the work I’ve been doing this week. 



I tried to get our ORCiD-OJS plugin to work but there is some small strange bug that needs to be squished. Luckily, next week I will have the benefit of assistance from the good people of CRKN and ORCiD-CA. 



What else? I uploaded a bunch of files into our IR. I set up a site for an online-only conference being planned for next year. And I finally got around to trying to update a manuscript for potential publication. But this writing has been  very difficult as my attention has been sent elsewhere many times this week.



§2







Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch the live Teach-In #AgainstSurveillance on Tuesday but luckily the talks have been captured and made available at http://againstsurveillance.net/ 



So many of our platforms are designed to extract user data. But not all of them are. Our institutions of higher education could choose to invest in free range ed-tech instead. 



§3



Bonus links!



Making a hash out of knitting with datashannon_mattern’s Library | ZoteroMystery File!
	Lucidworks: Enhance Personalization Efforts with New Features in Fusion
Latest Fusion release enhances digital experiences with out-of-the-box merchandising templates and AI recommenders.
The post Enhance Personalization Efforts with New Features in Fusion appeared first on Lucidworks.
	HangingTogether: The way forward to a more open future … together
On 5 November 2020, Astrid Verheusen (Executive Director of LIBER), and OCLC Research program officers Rebecca Bryant and Titia van der Werf presented a webinar to summarize the OCLC-LIBER Open Science Discussion Series. This multi-part discussion series, which took place through the month of October, was based upon the LIBER Open Science Roadmap to guide participants in envisioning an ideal future for Open Science (OS) and to discuss the roles of research libraries at local, national, and global levels in achieving a more open future.



The whole is greater than the sum of its parts



Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash



In total, 53 participants from 18 countries contributed to the seven-part series of small group discussions. Sessions had no more than 14 attendees – just the right number for conducting engaged and stimulating conversations. Discussants liked the free format and the interactive, participatory, and supportive nature of the conversations. They also appreciated that groups had representation from different points of view from both Europe and North America. A summary of each discussions has been shared via posts on HangingTogether.org (the blog of OCLC Research) and the LIBER website:



Scholarly PublishingFAIR PrinciplesResearch Infrastructures and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)Metrics and RewardsSkillsResearch IntegrityCitizen Science



On reflection, we realized that the discussions reinforced each other in many ways and taken together, they offered a unified conceptualization of an open science future and a shared idea of how to overcome the obstacles on the way to this more open future.



Conceptualization of an open science future



The participants’ ideal future state closely matched LIBER’s vision for the research landscape in 2022 – as set out in its Strategy 2018-2022 -, echoing its depiction of a future world where:



Open Access is the predominant form of publishingResearch Data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR)Digital Skills underpin a more open and transparent research life cycleResearch Infrastructure is participatory, tailored and scaled to the needs of the diverse disciplines



Participants added tone, texture and shade to these four basic lines, mostly in terms of what open science wouldn’t be and by describing it as the opposite of what it is now. So, for example, they described the expectation that “. . . in the future, more staff [will] be involved in supporting open science and their time [will] be spent on assisting researchers with actual data management instead of having to defend it or justify it” or “Collaboration will be the motor that drives open science, instead of competition”, or “In this new open science environment, the researcher is central, not the outputs”. The discussions also yielded a long list of requirements for open science to thrive: “We need to be empathetic”, “We need someone (a peer) to translate the open principles for each discipline”, “We need to measure the way open impacts society”.



Wikimedia Commons 



If one would wave a magic wand to resolve the obstacles and satisfy the preconditions, the resulting vision would lead to a rosy picture: one where open is the default and access is frictionless; where collaboration cuts across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, organizational silos and policy areas; where citizens, governments, companies, researchers and students work hand in hand to make research and society better; where diversity and inclusion make open science a truly global endeavor and lead to greater understanding and learning. In this ideal state, librarians have all necessary skills – both soft and hard – and they cooperate with everyone in the research lifecycle. They walk in the shoes of researchers and in those of citizens, with empathy. With all these skills in place, The Library is the best place to go to.



The need for culture change



The discussions yielded a long list of problems to a more open future. There was much overlap across the seven discussion sessions. The following five broad categories encompass the obstacles that received most votes during the polling exercise:



Culture change is necessary



Culture change is necessary because of ingrained attitudes that inhibit the adoption of open science, such as the tendency towards risk-avoidance by librarians and the lack of responsiveness by senior researchers and administrators on campus. Culture change was most often mentioned in relation to the lack of collaboration, engagement, and common ground between librarians and researchers, the silos on campus and the different perspectives of different stakeholders on “Open”. It was also seen as necessary for change in a larger sense: the need to internalize the principles of openness as second nature in life and society. 



Although mentioned as an obstacle alongside the other 4 categories, culture change really encompasses them all and is the precondition for the success of changes in the other categories.



Inadequate rewards and incentives



Recurring themes in this category were: the evaluation of researchers and institutions, the funding of research, the metrics and rewards system, the competitive nature of the rewards system (in which competition trumps ethics) and the lack of recognition, incentives or rewards for “doing Open”. The latter was deplored in particular and listed as a problem in the session on Metrics & Rewards: “Many open science activities don’t directly result in articles (e.g., open methods, open infrastructure, open data) – other stuff also matters but is not measured/supported and based on unpaid and unrecognized”.



Lack of researcher awareness and involvement



Lack of researcher buy-in and ownership of open science principles is problematic. Obstacles range from lack of awareness to lack of involvement, including lack of knowledge (mentioned in relation to research integrity and ethical issues). Lack of involvement may be borne not just from reluctance, but may be due to exclusion in the design stage (this was mentioned specifically during the EOSC session). Finally, researchers perceive open science practices as a burden – ‘this is yet another thing we need to do’ – referring to the administrative overload of having to register their profiles, outputs and projects in multiple, non-interoperable systems. Participants described the tension between ideals and practices as “the Big Divide between open science advocacy and the day-to-day research work”.



Lack of skills relating to open science



The lack of skills was raised as a general problem, not only in librarianship but also in academia. While the need for specific technical skills was mentioned, the discussions primarily focused on the importance of soft skills in librarianship. Librarians are currently not all equally skilled to connect to researchers or other stakeholders and this was felt as an important skills gap. In addition, the necessary skills are not integrated in academic curricula, let alone in those of library schools.



No agreement on standards & interoperability



Lack of interoperability across existing information systems and emerging OS infrastructures is a significant pain point for all stakeholders. Participants deplored the lack of agreed standards, the proliferation of fragmented, non-interoperable solutions, and the overdue implementation of basic standards, such as persistent identifiers (PIDs) for researchers and institutions, in existing systems. They also mentioned the need to unlock metadata, citations, and abstracts which are essential ingredients for the assessment and discoverability of open science.



The library cannot do this alone



Hanabusa Itchō, Blind monks examining an elephant



When we discussed how libraries can overcome these obstacles and make culture change happen, we heard repeatedly about the need to work outside the library: “The library cannot do this alone” and “open science must be a collective effort, not just libraries”. 



Discussions revolved around the theme of collaboration, the need to work with others, including the multiple other open science stakeholders.



It was much more difficult to strategize and ideate around collaboration than it had been to identify and analyze the obstacles. We heard anecdotal evidence of successful collaboration with units on campus (e.g., the Research Office), with Open Science communities (e.g. GO-FAIR) and in the context of national policy initiatives (e.g., Dutch Program for Digital Competence Centers).



There is a multiplicity of stakeholders that libraries must effectively engage with in order to advance open science goals, and we believe it is helpful to categorize them in two groups operating at different levels:



Above the institution stakeholders operate at consortial, national, regional, and global levels. EU-policy initiatives and accompanying funding are strong incentives for collaborative action and for catalyzing structural change that can percolate down at the country level. Research funding agencies are very influential stakeholders with the ability to enact policies and assessment activities that can accelerate change. Open science and scholarly communication coalitions were also mentioned as networks for collaborating on innovation. Other stakeholders were mentioned, such as publishers, PID providers, public libraries, and citizens.Below the institution stakeholders operate at the institutional or campus level. All have a stake in supporting research, but not all are equally aware or supportive of open science. Many different campus units were mentioned as relevant to work with, to influence culture change and develop local infrastructures to support open science.



The examples given reinforced the findings from the OCLC Research Report on Social Interoperability in Research Support: Cross-Campus Partnerships and the University Research Enterprise. This report introduces the term “social interoperability” as a key concept to promote collaboration, communication, and mutual understanding. An important take-away from this report is that other stakeholders on campus see an important role for the library to play as a central campus unit with expertise in many relevant areas. The report discusses several strategies and tactics for successful intra-campus social interoperability, of which we heard echoes in our OCLC-LIBER discussions – such as, for example: “speak their language”, “leverage shared staff”, “be confident in your value”. The discussions contributed strategies and tactics specific for each category of obstacles identified earlier, but ultimately there was a strong realization that collaboration with stakeholders needs to become more ingrained – as one discussant put it: “We need to be more deliberate about those conversations and [cross-campus] collaborations (…) have them be a little more organic to the organization”.



We found the outcomes of the OCLC-LIBER Open Science Discussion Series very inspiring, and it has been a fruitful collaboration between OCLC and LIBER—so much so that we are discussing possible follow-up opportunities. Thank you all for your contributions and stay tuned!
The post The way forward to a more open future … together appeared first on Hanging Together.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Melde Rutledge
This post was written by Melde Rutledge (@MeldeRutledge), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Melde Rutledge is the Digital Collections Librarian at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library. He is responsible for leading the library’s digitization services—primarily in support of ZSR’s Special Collections and Archives, as well as providing support for university departments. 
He earned his MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has served in librarianship for approximately 12 years. His background also includes 8 years of newspaper journalism, where he wrote news, sports, and feature articles for several locally published newspapers in North Carolina. 
He currently lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his wife and three sons.

Since 2016, I’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend and participate in the annual DLF Forum. I look forward to the great takeaways to share with my colleagues back home. Let’s also not forget the wonderful venues where the Forum takes place (Las Vegas, Tampa, etc.). Needless to say, a global pandemic emerged this year, resulting in the 2020 DLF Forum to occur virtually. 
As I reflect on this year’s installment of the DLF Forum, it’s difficult not to compare the Forum’s first virtual event with the previous in-person gatherings—particularly in regards to size. The fact that the 2020 event had more than 2,000 registered participants is a testament to the popularity and value of DLF. Being that it also surpassed the overall in-person attendance record (just over 800 people) of the 2017 DLF Forum in Pittsburgh is also noteworthy.
The segment that I look forward to the most from the DLF Forums are the opening plenaries, because of its great keynote speakers. Stacey Patton provided an excellent talk highlighting the significance of preserving the black experience in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs)—covering several cohesive themes during her one-hour-plus speech—including the COVID-19 pandemic, hiring diverse staff in GLAMs, America’s ongoing issue with racism, and the social and racial parallels of then and now. 
One of my key takeaways of her talk is spotlighting the need for institutions to be “ready and equipped” during the pandemic to educate students. This was suggested to be accomplished by providing research materials remotely, but also asking, “What difference does this make that we’re digitizing things? How is this power to be used to protect documents when we may not know their importance? What about the digital divide and access to these materials?”
These indeed are very important thoughts to me, as a key role of my work is providing digital access to materials tucked away within our special collections and archives. And it was great that presenters addressed Patton’s questions throughout the DLF sessions.
“‘Can We Digitize This? Should We?’” Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life” is a great example. This was presented by Stacy Reardon and Michael Lange from UC Berkeley Library. I was impressed with their Digital Lifecycle Program, and the ethical considerations embedded within their workflow. I have interest in seeing how institutions confront the issue regarding the digitization of materials of underprivileged groups, as well as how they approach the handling of culturally sensitive materials, accessibility, and appropriate metadata creation.
As Julie Hardesty pointed out in her presentation entitled, “Mitigating Bias Through Controlled Vocabularies,” when working with metadata, you can become familiar with several widely used controlled vocabularies. However, working with large common vocabularies can “paint broad strokes that cover up more than they should, that generalize or simplify too much, and show the biases of dominant groups such as the white male viewpoint. Additionally, the process to change and update terms can be slow to keep up.”
When I listen to presentations on this theme, speakers routinely note the value of incorporating community engagement. A nice example of this was shared during the presentation, “Curationist: Designing a Metadata Standard and Taxonomy for an Open Cultural Ecosystem.” Curationist.org is a site that finds and collects important cultural and historical resources that are within the public domain. As explained by presenter Sharon Mizota, community users will be able to include their own metadata to records on this site. 
Overall, I salute all the organizers and presenters for producing an impressive 2020 DLF program. And kudos to the partnership between CLIR/DLF and the HBCU Library Alliance. As an HBCU graduate, I appreciate programming that covers how HBCUs approach digitization, and the stories behind the unique materials that are digitally preserved, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 is indeed a big factor in how many of us in this profession are conducting decision making. The wealth of relevant content in this year’s DLF was very timely in this regard.
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Melde Rutledge appeared first on DLF.
	John Mark Ockerbloom: From our subjects to yours (and vice versa)
(TL;DR: I’m starting to implement services and publish data to support searching across library collections that use customized subject headings, such as the increasingly-adopted substitutes for LCSH terms like “Illegal aliens”.   Read on for what I’m doing, why, and where I would value advice and discussion on how to proceed.)



I’ve run the Forward to Libraries service for a few years now. As I’ve noted in earlier posts here, it’s currently used on The Online Books Page and in some Wikipedia articles to search for resources in your local library (or any other library you’re interested in) on a subject you’re exploring.  One of the key pieces of infrastructure that makes it work is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) system, which many research libraries use to describe their holdings.  Using the headings in the system, along with mappings between it and other systems for describing subjects (such as the English Wikipedia article titles that Forward to Libraries knows how to relate to LCSH) allows researchers to find materials on the same subjects across multiple collections, using common terminology.



There are limitations to relying on LCSH for cross-collection subject searches, though. First of all, many libraries, particularly those outside the US, do not use LCSH.  Some use other subject vocabularies.  If a mapping has been defined between LCSH and another subject vocabulary (as has been done, for example, with MeSH) one can use that mapping to determine search terms to use in libraries that use that subject vocabulary.  We don’t yet have that capability in Forward to Libraries, but I’m hoping to add it eventually.



Changing the subjects



I’m now also seeing more libraries that use LCSH, but that also use different terms for certain subjects that they find more appropriate for their users.  While there is a process for updating LCSH terms (and its terms get updated on a monthly basis) the process can be slow, hard for non-specialists to participate in, and contentious, particularly for larger-scale subject heading changes.  It can also be subject to pressure by non-librarians.  The Library of Congress ultimately answers to Congress (as its name suggests), and members of Congress have used funding bills to block changes in subject headings that the librarian-run process had approved.  They did that in 2016 for the subject heading “Illegal aliens”, where librarians had recommended using other terms to cover subjects related to unauthorized immigration.  The documentary film “Change the Subject” (linked with context in this article) has a detailed report on this controversy.



Four years after the immigration subject changes were blocked, some libraries have decided not to wait for LCSH to change, and are introducing their own subject terms.  The University of Colorado Boulder, for example, announced in 2018 that they would use the term “Undocumented immigrants” where the Library of Congress had “Illegal aliens”.  Other libraries have recently announced similar changes. Some library consortia have organized systematic programs to supersede outdated and offensive terms in LCSH in their catalogs. Some groups now maintain specialized subject vocabularies that can both supplement and supersede LCSH terms, such as Homosaurus for LGBT+-related subjects. And there’s also been increasing interest in using subject terms and classifications adapted to local communities.  For instance, the Brian Deer Classification System is intended to be both used and shaped by local indigenous communities, and therefore libraries in different locations that use it may well use different terms for some subjects, depending on local usage and interests.



Supporting cross-collection search in a community of localized catalogs



We can still search across collections that use local terms, as long as we know what those terms are and how to translate between them.  Forward to Libraries already uses a data file indicating Wikipedia article titles that correspond closely to LCSH subjects, and vice versa.  By extension, we can also create a data file indicating terms to use at a given library that correspond to terms in LCSH and other vocabularies, so we can see what resources are available at different places on a given topics.



You can see how that works in practice at The Online Books Page. As I write this, we’re still using the unaltered LCSH subjects (updated to October 2020), so we have a subject page showing free online books on “Illegal aliens”.  You can follow links from there to see what other libraries have.  If you select the “elsewhere” link in the upper left column and choose the Library of Congress as the library to search, you’ll see what they hold under that subject heading.  But if you instead choose the University of Colorado Boulder, you’ll see what they have under “Undocumented immigrants”, the subject term they’ve adopted there.



Similar routing happens from Wikipedia. The closest related Wikipedia article at present is “Illegal immigration”, and if you go down to the Further Reading section and select links in the Library Resources box, selecting “Online books” or most libraries will currently take you to their “Illegal aliens” subject search. But selecting University of Colorado Boulder (from “Resources in other libraries” if you don’t already have it specified as your preferred library in Wikipedia) will take you to their “Undocumented immigrants” search.  This routing applies two mappings, one from Wikipedia terms to LCSH terms, and another from LCSH terms to local library terms.



 A common data resource



These sorts of transformations are fundamentally data-driven.  My Forward to Libraries Github repository now includes a data file listing local subject terms that different libraries use, and how they relate to LCSH subject terms.  (The library codes used in the file are the same ones that are used in my libraries data file, and are based on OCLC and/or ISIL identifiers.)  The local subject terms file is very short for now– as I write this, it only has enough data for the examples I’ve described above, but I’ll be adding more data shortly for other libraries that have announced and implemented subject headings changes.  (And I’ll be glad to hear about more so I can add them.)



As with other data in this repository, the data in this file is CC0, so it can be used by anyone for any purpose.  In particular, it could be be used by services other than my Forward to Libraries tool, such as by aggregated catalogs that incorporate data from multiple libraries, some of which might use localized subject terms that have LCSH analogues.



Where to go next



What I’ve shown so far is not far removed from a proof-of-concept demo, but I hope it suggests ways that services can be developed to support searches among and across library collections with diverse subject headings.  As I mentioned, I’ll be adding more data on localized subject headings as I hear about it, as well as adding more functionality to the Forward to Libraries service (such as the ability to link from a collection with localized subject headings, so I can support them in The Online Books Page, or in other libraries that have such headings and want to use to the service).  There are some extensions that could be done to the basic data model to support scaling up these sorts of localizations, such as customizations used by all the libraries in a given consortium, or ones that adopt wholesale an alternative set of subjects, whether that be MeSH, Homosaurus, or the subject thesaurus of a national library outside the US.



Even with data declarations supporting those sorts of “bulk” subject mappings, a universal subject mapping knowledge base could get large over time.  I’ve created my own mapping file for my services, and for now I’m happy to grow it as needed and share the data freely. But if there is another suitable mapping hub already available or in the works, I’m happy to consider using that instead. 



It’s important to support exploration across a community of diverse libraries with a diverse array of subject terms and descriptions.  I hope the tools and data I’ve described here will help advance us towards that goal, and that I can help grow them from their current nascent state to make them more broadly useful.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Amanda Guzman
This post was written by Amanda Guzman, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Amanda Guzman is an anthropological archaeologist with a PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a research focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. She applies her collections experience as well as her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge in the classroom through accessible engagement in cultural work. Amanda is currently the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. 

On Belonging:
There is that decisive moment for me at every academic conference that I’ve ever attended – whether it is one that I frequent regularly (even annually) or one that I’m trying out for the first time like the DLF Forum this year – where I’m sketching out my trajectory of movement and negotiating what my belonging might look like in the space. This moment exists in the scanning of the conference program and translating of different panel abstracts. This moment exists in those standstill seconds in the threshold of a panel room as you decide whether to enter or not, perhaps as you notice a familiar or friendly face. 
Our current pandemic moment has transformed how we collectively gather in profound ways and brought into sharp relief the pre-existing structural social inequities of access. And yet, the decisive moment of my new belonging in the space of the DLF Forum was from a distance, and yet was not solitary beginning with a wave of introductions among first-time attendees and offers by long-time Forum-goers of support on Slack and extending to the generosity of time, experience, and transparency offered to me by my DLF mentor, Maggie McCready in our Zoom conversations. The decisive moment ultimately resolved, as I left the metaphorical door threshold to take a seat, during Dr. Stacy Patton’s keynote as she seamlessly moved between commentary on national news, archival text, pedagogical practice and her own powerful personal narrative of coming to belong in spaces not made for her experience and of coming to build new spaces of belonging. 
Activating the Archive by Reframing History as Practice:
One of the most compelling interventions that Dr. Patton articulated in her keynote speech was a call for the DLF community to reframe their implicit understanding of history not only as a physical archive of a material past but also as an active departure point for our contemporary reorientation and empowerment. Interweaving meaning and purpose across institutional case-studies, she referred to the concept of “historical touchstones” that present us with “context, guidance, and perspective” that have the analytical potential to ground our experience in the positionalities as a “keeper of knowledge” with a “traditional role of being…guide” to students.    


Keepers of Knowledge:
This proposal of mobilizing history towards how we critically approach our present-day practice in the field echoed throughout the subsequent forum presentations and was especially materialized for me in the citational acts of emphasizing a theoretical focus on an ethics of care. In the “Combo Session: Implementing responsible workflows and practices,” ethics of care was centered in an appreciation for “relationships with uneven power relations,” a methodological re-framing of both those actors who study and those communities who are studied as equal “independent rational subjects” and a researcher responsibility to identify the multi-faceted capacity of archival work to inflict harm. This work was discussed, for example, with the case-study of the archival process at the University of California, Berkeley for selecting indigenous cultural material for digitization and if to be digitized, under what terms of public access. In other words, professional ways of working were recast beyond the technicalities of how archival material may be best processed and digitally preserved to include and more importantly, to privilege a recognition of academic histories of community extraction and an opportunity for academic futures of more collaborative, equitable workflows.  
Student Guides:
Building on this important reflection on institutional practices, the US Latino DH panel entitled, “Recovering the Past, Creating the Future” brought the historically based practice conversation into the context of the undergraduate classroom. During their presentation, I was reminded of Dr. Patton’s earlier caution that digital work could not be the “end all be all” (even among undergraduates who are often thought to be “digital natives”) given how it is “alien to flow of time…nuances” and “abbreviates how we understand things”.  Presenters Carolina Villarroel, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Lorena Gauthereau and Linda Garcia Merchant accepted the challenge and outlined a pedagogical design that built a student theoretical consciousness of the silences inherent in archival representations of the human experience and equipped students methodologically through programs like Omeka to emerge as digital storytellers of new stories. Moreover, the presenters destabilized the curatorial authority of collection-holding institutions by decolonizing where and how we locate archives with models such as post-custodial archives (describing archival management in which the community maintains physical custody of material records) and migrant archives. Both panels therefore expanded the boundaries of what constitutes archival practice – in terms of how we keep existing knowledge and how we teach knowledge production – by expanding what we care for to who we care with.

At the Close:             
Aliya Reich, Program Manager for Conferences and Events at the Digital Library Federation, remarked at the start of the forum that the goal of our gathering was “building community while apart”.  Joy Banks, Program Officer at the Council on Library and Information Resources, responded on Slack to a participant struggling with the digital conference platform that “there is no behind this year”.  Together, their words bring me – in concert with Dr. Patton’s keynote assertion of our roles as “guardians of the past and present” and “architects of the future” – that we the practitioners – our bodies, communities, experiences, professional practices and all – are directly implicated in the work that we do every day to record and to preserve. That work does not and cannot exist in isolation from the privilege and marginalization of our lived realities whether in terms of arts funding austerity to ongoing national social justice movements.
The archive is a product in large part of human decision-making. We as a community can be reflective in practice with data justice over data ethics models that recognize the source of power and aim to dismantle structural power differentials. We as a community can choose to accept complexity of human behavior and spectrum thinking over binary dichotomies. We as a community can participate in mission-driven archiving in the present that supports restorative justice of the past – by upholding archival protocols that prioritize dignity and respect towards underrepresented, vulnerable communities who have and continue to endure systematic trauma. In building a community while apart we can ask who is and where is the community; the answer is in but also and perhaps in some cases more importantly, beyond our conference panel rooms. 

The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Amanda Guzman appeared first on DLF.
	Lucidworks: New Study: Why Brands that Connect Experiences Win
A recent Forrester study found that companies are struggling to implement omnichannel personalization. Brands that are able to connect EX with CX report greater revenue, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
The post New Study: Why Brands that Connect Experiences Win appeared first on Lucidworks.
	Tara Robertson: Names: respect, inclusion and belonging
Diversity, equity and inclusion is not about just revising HR policies and processes to be more inclusive and equitable, it’s a lens that you need to view everything through. For product organizations it’s a key lens to look at the product and customer experience. 
I’ve been thinking about personal names and how those are a point of inclusion and belonging, or not. Names are personal, and for many of us, an important part of our identity.

How do you say your name? 
My name is Tara. In North America people often mispronounce it, less so in other parts of the world. My name is pronounced Tah-rah, not Terra. For the first 20 years of my life it was easier for me to not speak up when people mispronounced it. When I was in my early 20s I met a woman of colour at a conference who also had a name that was much less common than mine. She said that it was a basic sign of respect to say people’s names properly and that changed how I operate. These days I usually correct people, but I still do the mental arithmetic to calculate if the energy it takes to interject and then to manage people’s apologies is worth it. Our names tell a story and for many of us they’re an important part of who we are. 
The microaggressions I experience are tiny compared to BIPOC people with non-English names. I love this story from actor Uzo Aduba when she told her mom that she wanted to be called Zoe. Her mother replied “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”

"If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka." – @UzoAduba 
Take action for girls and women: https://t.co/OcQi9uwGI4 pic.twitter.com/k9yf4QbTfs
— Global Citizen (@GlblCtzn) February 18, 2018

I recently learned that from 1940-80s the Canadian government “assigned Inuit numbered identification tags that they had to wear around their necks, mainly because white administrators couldn’t pronounce their names.” 
Our names are important and saying them correctly is a basic level of respect. 
Joe Biden’s name sign
I’ve been following some of the conversations in Black Deaf communities about President Elect Joe Biden’s name sign. In Deaf culture people have name signs that represent them and people with close ties to the Deaf community or well known figures also given name signs by the Deaf individuals or community.
Here’s what Nakia Smith has to say:

I signed what I signed  pic.twitter.com/MBYR9l14u5
— It’s Charmay To You (@realcaunsia) November 9, 2020

She’s quoted in this LA Times article saying that this name sign looks like “a “C” sign used by members of the Crips gang in some American cities and could be dangerous for signers of color and embarrassing to the incoming administration.”
Names are important and have layers of meaning from our families, histories, cultures and communities. 
Names in databases
When I worked at Mozilla I documented the various places someone transitioning their gender at work would need to update their name and gender marker. There were so many systems: the HR Information System, LDAP logins, payroll system, benefits providers, the company we used to book travel’s system, Bugzilla, Github, and the internal staff directory and likely others that I’m forgetting. 
Doing this work I learned there were more than a few people who didn’t fit neatly in these systems, including: 

People who only have a first name
People with non-English characters in their names
People with non-English names who also have English names
People who get married and change their last name to their spouse’s last name
People who get married and change their last name to a hyphenated name with their spouse’s last name
People who get divorced and change their name back
People who change their first name to something that fits them better

People with very short names
People with very long names

Patrick McKenzie’s Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names is the most comprehensive list of assumptions about names that I’ve read. If you’re designing anything that will include people’s names, this is required reading. Emma Humphries’ Adventures in Renaming is also a useful resource. 
This study by R. Ruiz-Pérez, E. Delgado López-Cózar, E. Jiménez-Contreras in the Journal of Medical Library Association looked at how “Spanish names are handled by national and international databases and to identify mistakes that can undermine the usefulness of these databases for locating and retrieving works by Spanish authors”. This study listed 17 name format variations with these two being the most common: 

First name first surname second surname
First name middle name first surname second surname

I can imagine how this would impact search, retrieval and therefore how often the work is cited, which could in turn impact prestige through tenure, promotion and grants. 
original article in Business Insider
article in Gale Academic Onefile
In Gale Academic Onefile, Vernā Myers, the VP of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, name is spelled incorrectly. I’m assuming that the data ingest from Business Insider choked on the macron over the “a” at the end of her first name. Changing Verna to Vern makes it seem like the VP is male. Also, if I was searching for articles that mention Vernā Myers, this one wouldn’t come up. 
Just like with in person interactions, how we design databases to include (or exclude) people’s names is about respect and impacts the feeling of belonging (or not) and who can be found (or not). 
Names in products
The way names show up in products and services can be a point of inclusion and belonging. This summer Mastercard launched True Name:
For many in the LGBTQIA+ community, the name on their credit, debit or prepaid card does not reflect their true identity.
That’s why we’re working with partners to bring products to market that will allow for chosen names to appear on the front of cards, helping ease a major pain point for the transgender and nonbinary communities.
It’s a big deal having a credit card or debit card that matches your gender presentation and who you are. This video tells some of those stories: 

This goes beyond corporate platitudes during pride month. This is something concrete that Mastercard did to make their products more inclusive of trans and non-binary people and make it a little easier for trans and non-binary people to buy things. 
This summer LinkedIn added a feature that allows you to record your name. In October Greenhouse added the Say My Name feature, where candidates can “pre-record the correct pronunciation of their names when recruiters request their interview schedule availability through Greenhouse”.
I’d love to learn about other product examples where the people building the product put specific care and attention on getting people’s names right. 
Thank you
Thank you to Cara Hall and Carolyn Arthur for feedback and editing help.
	Jodi Schneider: Paid graduate hourly research position at UIUC for Spring 2021
Jodi Schneider’s Information Quality Lab (http://infoqualitylab.org) seeks a graduate hourly student for a research project on bias in citation networks. Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. Our goal is to find quantitative measures of network structure that can indicate the existence of citation bias. This job starts January 4, 2021. Pay depending on experience (Master’s students start at $18/hour). Optionally, the student can also take a graduate independent study course (generally 1-2 credits IS 589 or INFO 597). Apply on Handshake



Responsibilities will include:



Assist in the development of algorithms to simulate an unbiased networkCarry out statistical significance tests for candidate network structure measuresAttend weekly meetingsAssist with manuscript and grant preparation



Required Skills



Proficiency in Python or RDemonstrated ability to systematically approach a simulation or modeling problemStatistical knowledge, such as developed in a course on mathematical statistics and probability (e.g. STAT400 Statistics and Probability I https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2021/spring/STAT/400 )



Preferred Skills



 Knowledge of stochastic processesExperience with simulationKnowledge of random variate generation and selection of input probability distributionKnowledge of network analysisMay have taken classes such as STAT433 Stochastic Processes (https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2021/spring/STAT/433) or IE410 Advanced Topics in Stochastic Processes & Applications (https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2020/fall/IE/410)


MORE INFORMATION:https://ischool.illinois.edu/people/jodi-schneiderhttp://infoqualitylab.org


APPLICATION DEADLINE: Monday December 14th.



Apply on Handshake with the following APPLICATION MATERIALS:



ResumeTranscript – Such as free University of Illinois academic history from Banner self-service (https://apps.uillinois.edu, click “Registration & Records”, “Student Records and Transcripts”, “View Academic History”, choose “Web Academic History”)Cover letter: Just provide short answers to the following two questions:1) Why are you interested in this particular project?2) What past experience do you have that is related to this project? 
	Lucidworks: Don’t Fear the Cloud (or Kubernetes): Your Google Security Questions Answered
Mike Chesnut from Lucidworks and Tiffany Lewis from Google talk us through why data encryption in this new cloud-native world is more secure than ever. 
The post Don’t Fear the Cloud (or Kubernetes): Your Google Security Questions Answered appeared first on Lucidworks.
	Ed Summers: 25 Years of robots.txt
After just over 25 years of use the Robots Exclusion Standard, otherwise known as robots.txt is being standardized at the IETF. This isn’t really news, as the group at Google that is working on it announced the work over a year ago. The effort continues apace, with the latest draft having been submitted back in the middle of pandemic summer.


But it is notable I think because of the length of gestation time this particular standard took. It made me briefly think about what it would be like if standards always worked this way–by documenting established practices, desire lines if you will, rather than being quiet ways to shape markets (Russell, 2014). But then again maybe that hands off approach is fraught in other ways. Standardization processes offer the opportunity for consensus, and a framework for gathering input from multiple parties.


It seems like a good time to write down some tricks of the robots.txt trade (e.g the stop reading after 500kb rule, which I didn’t know about). What would Google look like today if it wasn’t for some of the early conventions that developed around web crawling? Would early search engines have existed at all if a convention for telling them what to crawl and what not to crawl didn’t come into existence? Even though it has been in use for 25 years it will be important to watch the diffs with the existing de-facto standard, to see what new functionality gets added and what (if anything) is removed.


I also wonder if this might be an opportunity for the digital preservation community to grapple with documenting some of its own practices around robots.txt. Much web archiving crawling software has options for observing robots.txt, or explicitly ignoring it. There are clearly legitimate reasons for a crawler to ignore robots.txt, as in cases where CSS files or images are accidentally blocked by a robots.txt and which prevent the rendering of an otherwise unblocked page. I think ethical arguments can also be made for ignoring an exclusion. But ethics are best decided by people not machines– even though some think the behavior of crawling bots can be measured and evaluated (Giles, Sun, & Councill, 2010 ; Thelwall & Stuart, 2006).


Web archives use robots.txt in another significant way too. Ever since the Oakland Archive Policy the web archiving community has used the robots.txt in playback of archived data. Software like the Wayback Machine has basicaly become the reading room of the archived web. The Oakland Archive Policy made it possible for website owners to tell web archives about content on their site that they would like the web archive not to “play back”, even if they had the content. Here is what they said back then:



Archivists should provide a ‘self-service’ approach site owners can use to remove their materials based on the use of the robots.txt standard.


Requesters may be asked to substantiate their claim of ownership by changing or adding a robots.txt file on their site.


This allows archivists to ensure that material will no longer be gathered or made available.


These requests will not be made public; however, archivists should retain copies of all removal requests.



This convention allows web publishers to use their robots.txt to tell the Internet Archive (and potentially other web archives) not to provide access to archived content from their website. It also is not really news at all. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham wrote in 2017 about how robots.txt haven’t really been working out for them lately, and how they now ignore them for playback of .gov and .mil domains. There was a popular article about this use of robots.txt written by David Bixenspan at Gizmodo, When the Internet Archive Forgets, and a follow up from David Rosenthal Selective Amnesia.


Perhaps the collective wisdom now is that the use of robots.txt to control playback in web archives is fundamentally flawed and shouldn’t be written down in a standard. But lacking a better way to request that something be removed from the Internet Archive I’m not sure if that is feasible. Some, like Rosenthal, suggest that it’s too easy for these take down notices to be issued. Consent on the web is difficult once you are operating at the scale that the Internet Archive does in its crawls. But if there were a time to write it down in a standard I guess that time would be now.


References




Giles, C. L., Sun, Y., & Councill, I. G. (2010). Measuring the web crawler ethics. In WWW 2010. Retrieved from https://clgiles.ist.psu.edu/pubs/WWW2010-web-crawler-ethics.pdf




Russell, A. L. (2014). Open standards and the digital age. Cambridge University Press.




Thelwall, M., & Stuart, D. (2006). Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy, and denial of service. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20388
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Shelly Black
This post was written by Shelly Black (@ShellyYBlack), who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Shelly Black is the Cyma Rubin Library Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries where she supports digital preservation in the Special Collections Research Center. She also works on a strategic project involving immersive technology spaces and digital scholarship workflows. Previously she was a marketing specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries and promoted library services and programs through social media, news stories, and newsletters.
Shelly was recently selected as a 2020 Emerging Leader by the American Library Association and is a provisional member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. She received a MLIS and a Certificate in Archival Studies from the University of Arizona where she was a Knowledge River scholar. She also holds a BFA in photography and minor in Japanese from the UA.

The weekend protests began in response to George Floyd’s murder, I was driving across the country for my first post-MLIS job. I listened to the radio, scrolled through the news and felt the country in pain. Reflecting on how volatile 2020 has been, I’m grateful that the DLF Forum was freely open to all and held online. As a graduate student, my exposure to digital curation and preservation focused on theory more than practice. So I was eager to learn about current strategies and tools. Considering the anti-racist commitments made recently by numerous organizations, I also looked forward to hearing about projects to improve discoverability of marginalized people in the historical record.
Many sessions covered computational methods used by librarians, archivists, and researchers to improve our understanding of, and increase access to, digitized materials. Juan Manuel García Fernández and Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara presented on “Digital El Diario and Archival Justice in the Digital Humanities Graduate Classroom.” Their work involved creating a corpus from a digitized 1970s Chicanx newspaper and showing students how to use text analysis tools, such as MALLET and Voyant, for the purpose of historical recovery. In “Images as Data with Computer Vision,” Carol Chiodo shared that Harvard University Library is using a Python package to analyze and provide descriptive metadata at scale for photographic collections. This includes protest photography, so the project will also result in the creation of ethical guidelines for applying automation to sensitive materials.
Throughout the Forum, a theme that resonated with me was the ethics of care. I learned how multiple presenters have adopted this feminist approach that emphasizes relationships and considers power imbalances. During “Can We Digitize This? Should We? Navigating Ethics, Law, and Policy in Bringing Collections to Digital Life,” Stacy Reardon explained that she adopts an ethics of care when deciding whether to make materials available online. She noted how this framework urges us to consider the potential for harm not just to individuals but also communities. Lorena Gauthereau, one of the panel members of “US Latino DH: Recovering the Past, Creating the Future,” imparted that community outreach should be approached with an ethics of care. She said we have a responsibility to make the people represented in archives feel valued, which can be achieved through post-custodial methods, consent, decolonial spaces, and trusting relationships.
As a Mexican Japanese American, increasing representation and reclaiming the humanity of historically oppressed people has personal significance. I wholeheartedly agree with Gauthereau who expressed: 
“By recovering the past, we can project toward our future. While working with recovered archives, we make space for healing by making visible not only painful histories, but also resistance, survival and joy, to acknowledge where we come from and where we are going.” 
These presentations reminded me to think critically about the interplay between people, archival collections, and technology. While I see promise in the application of computational methods for understanding and expanding access to stories beyond the dominant narrative, I’m also wary of the challenges. Algorithms used for facial recognition, screening job applicants, and identifying high-risk patients continue to oppress communities of color. Mixed race people like myself don’t fall neatly into metadata categories and likely aren’t seen by algorithms applied to textual or visual corpora.
Meanwhile, libraries have started using machine learning for appraisal, description, and other laborious tasks. Many collections await being described—or re-described using anti-oppressive language—and made available online. Algorithms offer efficiency, but when people create them with training data which centers whiteness, they further harm communities. 
Another challenge is the layering of biases when working with digitized collections. We lose more than visual details and aesthetic qualities through reproductive technologies and migration of formats. There are racial consequences. We scan photographs made from color film stocks originally calibrated for light skin. Art historian Lyneise Williams has also called attention to the erasure of Black people through the high contrast process of microfilming. So what happens when we use biased machine learning models to process images that inherit white normativity? 
Growing digitized collections make the adoption of machine learning compelling. At the same time, an ethics of care and diverse voices are needed when new tools are being designed. Knowledge produced from analyzing collections at scale will only be as inclusive as the human beings who designed the algorithms and the digitized material’s source medium. As Stacey Patton reminded us in her keynote, digitization isn’t a be-all and end-all, particularly when there is still the digital divide. The DLF Forum inspired me to think about the opportunities and issues ahead. I hope to attend future Forums where discussions on using technology in ways which uplift communities of color continue.
The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Shelly Black appeared first on DLF.
	In the Library, With the Lead Pipe: Culturally Responsive Community Engagement Programming and the University Library: Lessons Learned from Half a Decade of VTDITC
By Craig E. Arthur, Dr. Freddy Paige, La’ Portia Perkins, Jasmine Weiss, and Dr. Michael Williams







(Good Homie Signs’ “Hip Hop @ VT” mural 7/18)



In Brief



VTDITC: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech is an award-winning series of experiential learning-focused, culturally responsive community engagement programs. It is deeply rooted in hip hop culture and is cosponsored by numerous organizations both on campus and in the community; the heart of the program is undoubtedly the Virginia Tech University Libraries. We have hosted more than 350 programs over the past five academic years. Notably, our Community Engagement Fellows, a team of undergraduate and graduate students, helped design and co-teach approximately forty-five media literacy workshops in the community beyond campus in the ‘19-’20 academic year. Our guiding mission is to remove barriers to entry, to recognize art as scholarship, to learn by doing, and, importantly, to create an expressive and collaborative environment which allows for creative freedom. 



Introduction



VTDITC: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech, or, more commonly, Virginia Tech Digging in the Crates, is a practitioner-focused, student-driven, culturally responsive community engagement program that prioritizes experiential learning. The multifaceted and ever-evolving program is based in Southwest Virginia on the campus of Virginia Tech (a public, land grant university with a student body of approximately 30,000). VTDITC was co-created by a diverse transdisciplinary team and is now in our fifth consecutive academic year of programming. The program has iteratively developed since the Fall 2016 semester; we have successfully hosted more than 350 events. 



Importantly, VTDITC builds on a 22 year history of hip hop based curricula and approximately 35 years of hip hop based co-curricular programming at the University. VTDITC’s ability to connect and engage such a large group of people is a special attribute of the program. Many universities have similar clubs or groups that bring together dancers with dancers or rappers with rappers, for instance, but VTDITC is a unique community engagement program in that it prioritizes unity over stratification. The hip hop community at VT can be relatively small if people were counted solely by an arbitrary declaration like ‘hip hop scholar.’ However, when we invite our community to engage in hip hop as a culture, our participation numbers dwarf many other programs that could be considered our peers. VTDITC’s success is at least partially due to the fact that a dynamic group of hip hop practitioners who embody the culture beyond our connection to the University co-create and care for it. We shift the university setting and resources to support hip hop culture, not the other way around.



This article does not aim to chronicle the important role hip hop culture plays in education and college campuses (see Rawls & Robinson, 2019, as well as Petchauer, 2009 and 2012, Gosa & Fields, 2012, and Nielson, 2013) nor does it seek to record hip hop culture’s history at Virginia Tech (see Fralin, et al., 2018). We also are not seeking to describe a hip hop ethos (see Harrison and Arthur, 2019). Rather, we look forward to sharing this case study as an exemplar of culturally responsive programming supported by a university library. In this article we explain how as engaged scholars we commit to understanding the role of culture in education as flexible, local, and global. 



Hit the Crates & Create



The VTDITC community chose our name as a way to recognize one of the many research processes inherent to traditional hip hop arts communities as well as a nod to specific cultural stalwarts. The term ‘digging in the crates’ refers to the traditional information seeking/archival research process that hip hop DJs and sample-based producers use to find their source material. Digging, understandably, is the physical and intellectual labor of the discovery process in this context – or the work required to locate, sort, and analyze vinyl records. The crates are the acid free archival box equivalent for the vinyl DJ. A DJ or producer who spends time in the crates has a larger musical vocabulary as a result – just as time spent in library archives benefits a research writer (Craig, 2013 & Rice, 2003). Beyond our name, the VTDITC program utilizes effective engagement practices from the broader hip hop community to increase the reach of the Virginia Tech University Libraries’ programming. Providing opportunities for community members to engage with hip hop culture’s productions old and new, local and global, is an objective of many of our efforts. 



Our Guiding Principles and Mission Statement



Early in the development of the program, our Leadership Board co-created our guiding principles: to remove barriers to entry, to recognize art as scholarship, to learn by doing, and, arguably most importantly, to establish an expressive and collaborative environment which allows for creative freedom. Nearly half a decade later, applying these principles still guides the program in the direction of success. 



Our mission statement was created shortly after founding the program. Although it has been remixed and edited slightly over the years, the essence has remained the same. The latest iteration of our mission statement is as follows: 



Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech, or VTDITC, exists to foster community-based learning among hip hop artists, fans, practitioners, and scholars digitally and globally. We aim to model that students, faculty, and staff’s personal interests are worthy of academic study and publication as well as further institutionalize Hip Hop Studies’ presence on Virginia Tech’s campus.



Another motivator that guides our programming is the need to challenge the white heteronormativity of higher education and, especially, library spaces (Rosa & Henke, 2017). We build upon the work of scholars such as Ladson-Billings (1995, 2014), Gay (2000), and Rawls and Robinson (2019) in an effort to nurture both the shared and divergent cultural backgrounds and sensibilities of our community members. Removing misconceptions that specific groups are not to be included in the socially constructed identity of a hip hop scholar or practitioner requires intentional effort toward increasing representation of excluded identities. Recognizing that hip hop culture was birthed and nurtured in Black and brown working class communities, our Leadership Board prioritizes creating opportunities for hip hop arts practitioners and scholars of color. Beyond considering race and ethnicity, we are deliberate about requiring gender parity among compensated guest artists and scholars. These are two examples of how the VTDITC community acts as agents of change to redress historical and contemporary oppression in educational spaces (NYSED, N.D.). 



The Origins of VTDITC



The first meeting of what would eventually become our Leadership Board, the program’s decision making body, took place on December 9, 2016 in Newman Library. Newman is Virginia Tech’s main campus library. It is also home to a modest recording studio (now known as Media Design Studio B). The focus of this initial meeting was to create a monthly hip hop-focused seminar series that would take place in the largest venue in Newman, the Multipurpose Room or MPR. Volume 1: Intro to DJing and Fair Use occurred a couple of months later in February 2017. 



Along with the University Libraries, representatives from a variety of both student organizations and campus units served as co-sponsors and worked hard to make the event a success. To start the event, students Dylan Holiday and Alayna Carey (Alayna is a member of our Leadership Board at present) taught a workshop with librarian Craig Arthur. The workshop addressed the intersections and divergences of DJing and fair use principles. Afterwards, the sixty or so attendees had the opportunity to each try their hand at DJing with a variety of equipment set up for their use. The vast majority of the equipment belonged to members of the Leadership Board. Virginia Tech’s own Breaking (also known as breakdancing) Club ended the event with an informal cypher. The event’s sponsoring organizations included the Africana Studies Program, the Black Cultural Center, the Flowmigos (another name for the VT Breaking Club), the Intercultural Engagement Center, the Gloria D. Smith Professorship in Black Studies, Students of Hip Hop Legacy (a club related to hip hop fandom), VT Expressions (a club focused on hosting open mic events), the VT Women’s Center, and WUVT 90.7FM (the University’s student-run radio station). This workshop is now considered a foundational component of our  seminar series. It kicks off every year as a welcome event to our community members both old and new. The second iteration of this workshop received front-page coverage in the local newspaper; the article highlighted how hip hop culture was connecting students, faculty, staff, and community members in the Newman Library (Korth, 2018). (For an approximation of the vibes at this recurring workshop, see VTDITC, 2018A.)



The Six Elements of VTDITC: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech



VTDITC is comprised of six main components: 1) the seminar series, 2) media literacy workshops, 3) weekly studio hours, 4) the community engagement fellows program, 5) credit-bearing curriculum, and 6) practitioners for hire. Each of these elements serves a unique subset of our community; for instance, the audience of our media literacy workshops are typically K-12 students while our practitioners for hire element connects local artists with campus units for opportunities for the artists to be compensated for their talents. While the program originated with the seminar series, the majority of our labor is spent on the other components.



1) The Seminar Series: VT’s Longest Running Monthly Event



Since that first seminar in February 2017, we have hosted 22 additional iterations of the seminar. Approximately two dozen artists and scholars from beyond the campus have been compensated to share their expertise with the community we foster. The series, which takes place (originally in-person, now virtually [due to COVID-19], and, in due time hopefully, both virtually and in-person) on the second or third Thursday evenings of September, October, November, February, March, and April. Our seminars specifically occur during these months because that is when the regular school semesters take place. December and May are skipped due to the harried nature of the exam season.



The seminars have addressed a wide range of topics including but not limited to gender, artistic ethics, heteronormativity, entrepreneurship, race, and police brutality. A recent example of how we addressed a topic using a hip hop lens was at our seminar VTDITC Volume 22: Hip Hop & Police Brutality. We hosted several scholars to discuss how hip hop music has long documented police violence. We selected hip hop songs that featured lyrics chronicling artists’ personal interactions with police over the course of three decades. Throughout this seminar, we conducted a group temporal analysis of how artists use their music to express the climate of police brutality across time periods and geographic differences. Ideally each year the planning committee develops seminars that directly discuss music creation as well as seminars that engage other hip hop practitioners in topics such as dance, the visual arts, journalism, and entrepreneurship. 



While including academic voices is important, intentionally prioritizing the perspectives of hip hop arts practitioners is essential to our program. Our seminar series does not regularly follow the typical academic panel format. Even the events that do resemble a more traditional academic seminar feature a single artistic performance at a minimum. The information discussed in our seminars applies and appeals to a wide range of individuals. As a result, attendees include Virginia Tech students, faculty, staff, that of nearby institutions, and community members from the broader New River Valley and Roanoke Valley. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, guests must now virtually attend our seminars. Over the past few months, we have had individuals from across the United States check out our events. Previously (before COVID-19), guests would need to physically come to Virginia Tech’s Newman Library to attend these events. 



When attendees arrive at our seminars, they are greeted by a live DJ mix of hip hop music curated by our own DJ C. Sharp. After the welcome mix, the event’s Creative Director and MC (roles currently occupied by Jasmine and La’ Portia) bring the community together for announcements. We begin by expressing gratitude to our community partners as well as acknowledging the Tutelo/Monacan Nations as well as the enslaved African people (Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus was formerly the site of the Smithfield Plantation) who occupied this land before us. Following our announcements and land acknowledgements, we introduce our artists, scholars, and/or practitioners and they begin their presentations. Throughout the seminar there are often exercises where the community interacts with the practitioners. When meeting in person, food was provided midway through the seminar for the community to share. This feature of our seminar series symbolizes a hip hop tradition of breaking bread, but also serves as an opportunity to (albeit marginally) help reduce food scarcity on campus (US GAO, 2019). At the conclusion of our seminar, we make sure to allow time for an open question and answer session so that the community can have another opportunity to engage with the practitioners and as well as each other. We have also hosted numerous more participatory, performance-based events such as beat and MC battles. (See VTDITC, 2018B for highlights of our second annual beat battle as an example of how we are reimagining the seminar format.) 







(Some members of the VTDITC Leadership Board 9/17; L-R: Eric Luu (‘18-’19 Creative Director, VT ‘19), Craig Arthur (University Libraries), Juel Downing (Black Cultural Center Student Assistant ‘17-’18, VT ‘18), Yamin Semali (Atlanta-based MC, Producer, DJ, & Recording Engineer), Mallory Foutch (former Program Coordinator, VT Women’s Center), and Dr. A. Kwame Harrison (Professor, Department of Sociology & the Africana Studies Program); image courtesy of Richard Randolph [VT ‘20])



2) Do Things for the Kids: Media Literacy Workshops for the Broader Community



This important component predates the program and is arguably our community’s favorite element of the VTDITC program. Craig has offered free DJ classes throughout the New River Valley for close to a decade. He had already integrated his twenty-year DJ practice into his librarian praxis prior to joining Virginia Tech. Recognizing that Virginia Tech University Libraries was in the process of creating its Digital Literacy Initiative shortly after his arrival, he realized that these workshops would dovetail well with many of the learning outcomes therein and could support the Initiative’s efforts. Since that time, we have offered more than 100 creation-focused workshops for the larger community. 



Throughout the years, some of our more regular community partners have included – but are by no means limited to – the Boys and Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia, numerous iterations of the local alumnae chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated’s annual STEAM Camp, Roanoke Public Libraries, Higher Achievement, Incorporated, Vinton Public Library, and the West End Center for Youth. Each of these organizations excels in providing programming to populations that Virginia Tech has traditionally underserved. 



Although the pandemic has put a temporary stop to our in-person media literacy workshops, we are currently re-developing our lesson plans to work in an online synchronous learning environment. We have hosted three such virtual workshops this semester. Our workshops previously prioritized providing both access to music production equipment and utilizing an experiential learning approach to connect hip hop’s creative practices to STEAM education. Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) education is enhanced by hip hop practices which encourage students to engage in inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. Unlike STEM, the addition of the arts component adds opportunities for students to thrive and connect with abstract concepts (Liao, 2016). While it is difficult to replicate the hands-on experience – such as time with turntables, records, DJ mixers, samplers, drum machines, and microphones – the online environment is well equipped for other creative practices like writing raps, critiques, and reflections. Online students are also able to engage activities which allow them to explore the relationship of beats per minute in a song and other numerical factors. Engineering is an emerging area of interest in the VTDITC media literacy workshops. We hope to explore the connection between the built environment and community impacts. Hip hop artists regularly communicate their experiences within their environmental context. Billboard charting hip hop artists have published songs that reflect the impacts that natural disasters, environmental injustice, and unsafe infrastructure systems have had on Black communities. Through a lyrical analysis of songs to introduce engineering issues, students are encouraged to consider engineering as a career path to serve their communities. 



3) Cooking Up: Studio Hours



Studio Hours are a weekly (every Friday afternoon) three hour open studio session for any member of our VTDITC community to record, refine the mixes of their existing recordings, write new material, and seek guidance from their fellow artists. Importantly, Studio Hours serves as a fellowship-focused space and a markedly strong community of practice is evident. This component of the program began in the Spring semester of 2018 and has persisted since. It takes place in the location of our initial planning meeting back in December 2016: Media Design Studio B in Newman Library. MDS B offers a recording booth, several audio interfaces, condenser microphones, and two computer workstations – one for audio recording and mixing and another for audio-visual production and/or audio pre-production work. The studio can comfortably accommodate approximately a dozen people. We prioritize the artists’ comfort  and have long been intentional about not overpacking MDS B. The VTDITC community has not only hosted the longest continuous program in MDS B with Studio Hours, we have also provided valuable user feedback to the team that runs the space. Our programming has helped transition the space and equipment therein from a faculty-focused curriculum development lab to a more outwardly-focused recording studio marketed to the broader community.



Numerous songs have been recorded in MDS B by VTDITC community members during Studio Hours. Students retain ownership of their work and are guided through the process of publishing their music in both digital and analog formats. The Black Cultural Center Mixtape is an example of a community project that came into being largely as a result of Studio Hours. The BCC Mixtape can be found on Virginia Tech’s Black Cultural Center’s Soundcloud page; it was a long term, intensive project that was the brainchild of former BCC Director Kimberly Williams. The project’s production, which took place over the course of two semesters, was largely orchestrated by the VTDITC community. 



VTDITC students have also performed live on WUVT90.7fm, the University’s student-run radio station, and as opening acts for several major artists when they have performed on campus. We are particularly proud that multiple VTDITC alumni have gained employment in creative arts-focused organizations. Many have continued their connection to VTDITC by collaborating with the current community. We have also hosted regionally and internationally renowned artists and recording engineers as a component of our Studio Hours program. They include Stimulator Jones, Tim Donovan, Omar Offendum, Sum, Ian Levy, and Emcee Lioness. As a result of these particular studio sessions, several collaborative songs have been released; they feature students, faculty members, and community members. 



Each semester, a VTDITC community member – often the Lead Technical Director – serves as the resident recording engineer and Studio Hours community manager. We also attempt – with varying degrees of success – to ensure that we have an aspiring engineer in the wings to sustain the program’s momentum. There are relatively many Virginia Tech students who create their own music, but there are a limited number of students wanting to learn the engineering process necessary to record music. As a result, we intentionally promote the engineer mentor/mentee experience in hopes that we find interested individuals. Our current Creative Director, Jasmine, has expressed interest in music engineering and our Leadership Board is working to ensure that our current Lead Technical Director shares all of their knowledge. These student leaders have been essential to the success of our constantly evolving and co-constructed studio etiquette guidelines as well. The guidelines ultimately reflect the values of the program and, in turn, ensure that the media co-created during Studio Hours is indicative of what we are trying to accomplish as a community. Since the guidelines are prominently on display and reiterated at each of our sessions, they rarely need to be actively enforced.







(VTDITC Studio Etiquette guidelines – Fall 2019)



4) Learning by Doing: The VTDITC Community Engagement Fellows



The faculty members on the Leadership Board created the VTDITC Community Engagement Fellows program as a way to intentionally transfer skills. Students apply to partner with faculty members and dedicate time specifically to cultivating their expertise. This requires a relational process of shared responsibility with students and faculty. Inasmuch, the VTDITC Community Engagement Fellows program helped us achieve an aspirational goal – to increase the agency of students within the community. The fellows – a team of approximately half a dozen undergraduate and graduate students – are essential to the success of our seminar series, our media literacy workshops, and Studio Hours. Fellows comprise an interdisciplinary team that represent a wide swath of campus life and student organizations. Oftentimes, the seemingly sole unifying feature of this team is that nearly all of the fellows are hip hop arts practitioners – be it DJs, MCs, beat makers, visual artists, or dancers. 



Each fellow is classified as either a technical director or a creative director depending on their interests and skill sets. The technical directors, led by a Lead Technical Director, are responsible for the more mechanical aspects such as setting up and striking equipment as well as DJing and running audiovisual equipment (and, lately, monitoring chat and moderating attendees) during our programs. The creative directors, led by a Lead Creative Director, handle the more visionary aspects of the program. They help determine the upcoming topics for our seminar series and identify artists and scholars with whom we should engage. They also shape the visual and virtual identity of the program via graphic design and actively maintaining our social media presence. Despite the differentiation of duties, both technical and creative directors play an active role in co-designing and co-leading our media literacy workshops. Inasmuch, the VTDITC program allows for unrivaled and, importantly, compensated experiential learning opportunities on campus and in the community. Numerous alums are now working in hip hop arts-based or adjacent professions – as recording engineers in commercial studies or as a community manager for an international breaking school, for example – due in part to this experience.



5) Not So Formal Learning: The Curricular Components



VTDITC is, without question, a largely co-curricular program. However, along with founding Leadership Board member Dr. A. Kwame Harrison, Craig has co-taught two iterations of a credit bearing course that was directly tied to the VTDITC program: Africana Studies 4354/Sociology 4124: Foundations of Hip Hop. This course was offered in Fall 2017 (63 students) and Spring 2019 (39 students). In keeping with the emphasis on experiential learning evident in the rest of the VTDITC program, students were afforded the opportunity to create media projects rather than traditional academic essays in both iterations of this course. Many students made use of the resources – equipment loans and the Media Design Studio B, for instance – provided to them by the University Libraries to do so.



We have partnered with the Department of Sociology and the Africana Studies program, largely thanks to Dr. Harrison, to co-teach several independent study courses as well. Foci of these courses have included MCing, coordinating events on campus, and internships in commercial recording studios. 



6) You Can’t Pay Your Bills with Exposure: Practitioners For Hire



As previously mentioned, the VTDITC program intentionally prioritizes hip hop arts practitioners in all that we do. We do our best to leverage our campus relationships to connect these practitioners with compensated work. There are typically many opportunities – and unfortunately the majority pay with only exposure – for visual artists, DJs, photographers, videographers, and dancers to share their work on a college campus. Over the years, we have successfully connected members of our community with rare paid opportunities provided by the University.



One example of our practitioners for hire component is the relationship we have fostered with North Carolina based muralist Good Homie Signs and the University. Good Homie has created six of the seven murals (the remaining mural was created by MEME of the CBS and Few & Far crews) VTDITC has coordinated since the beginning of the program. “Narrative Art”, commissioned in April 2019 for a co-sponsored program on the rhetorics of graffiti with the Department of English and Dr. Jonathan Gross (Purdue University), has been on display in a popular meeting room in Shanks Hall, the home of the English Department, since June of last year. This component of the VTDITC program is an innovation to the best of our knowledge; we hope to continue to connect hip hop arts practitioners with similar paid opportunities on our campus in the coming years.







(Good Homie Signs’ “Narrative Art” mural completed 4/19 and permanently installed in the Department of English’s conference room – 6/19)















(Good Homie Signs’ Ut Prosim [or “that I may serve” – the University’s motto] mural completed 9/20 and installed permanently in Newman Library 10/20; note: third image courtesy of Cat Piper [VT ‘21])







(Good Homie Signs’ Bobcat Studios mural completed 11/20 and located in the Bobcat Studios recording studio at Radford High School [Radford, VA])



The Voice of the Community



To help assess the program, community members are asked to share their feedback. The following quotes are excerpts from testimonials, post-event interviews, and event planning meetings. Quotes were selected to describe how members of our community speak to the connection that the VTDITC programming supports.



 “Even outside of breaking, VTDITC always brings a really cool vibe to whatever they have going on, whether it’s a rap sesh or Craig spinning records or even just chilling and talking about current issues. It’s like a hip hop family, which is nice to see anywhere, especially in a place like Blacksburg.”– Virgil Thornton



Love is an important ingredient in our events to balance the work required to discuss the tough issues our community faces. Academia is dominated with debates and lectures, and while both of those formats are present in VTDITC programming, many of the discussions at our events are modeled to mimic a family dinner conversation. Food is present and our crowd separates into small focus groups. “My favorite memories were the beat battles–more specifically, seeing professors and students compete, champion, and show a bombastic love for each other.” – Kimberly Williams 



Breaking down hierarchy is extremely important to empower voices. The VTDITC community creates opportunities for faculty, staff, students, and non-University affiliated community members to compete on a level playing field. Healthy competition allows for supportive energy to be transferred from the community into individuals and their creations. Many of the artistic works shared in our competitions are works in progress that are improved through community input. 



“VTDITC is more than a library program; it is a community program, yet I continue to discuss its connection to the library and my librarianship. This is because working with VTDITC showed me the value of leaving the library to listen to the people the library serves, and this is a lesson I am extremely grateful for as it makes me a better librarian.”– Kodi Saylor



“I learned to listen better, respect better, and uplift better by being in that environment, which is something that came about naturally because that positive energy was already present.”– Jon Kabongo



Listening to others and valuing what they have to say is a non-negotiable community requirement of VTDITC. The success of the VTDITC program is greatly due to our ability to listen to what community members want and need. Our community members feel listened to and reciprocate our efforts by listening to others at our events. Virginia Tech has aspirational community guidelines which unfortunately are not always upheld. Our community is not without flaw, but it is apparent that we are committed to superseding the expectations and standards of the broader university environment. We are not building a utopia but an incredible amount of trust is being developed within our community where open mics and vulnerable identities co-exist. 



Plans for the Future



We feel confident that we have the program more or less dialed in both in practice and in theory, however we would like to increase the number of people that participate in the program. To date, the VTDITC community has been funded largely by the University Libraries (approximately $10,000-$15,000 per year) via departmental support for outreach programming as well as by financial support from campus units and internal grants. The vast majority of these funds have gone directly to student wages, artist and scholar honorariums, and purchasing the equipment necessary to support the program. We have received several internal grants (ranging from $500 to $10,000) in additional funding. To increase our impact in the broader community, we plan to aggressively seek external funding and sponsorships beyond campus. 



Additionally, we also hope to further refine our programmatic assessment. Qualitative data have been collected from events and engagements which has helped VTDITC grow. A student collected several testimonials at our events as a part of a journalism project which was continued by our event staff in hopes of finding opportunities for improvement. Participant testimonials have helped tune the amount of time allotted for discussion at events as well as the importance of communicating to students opportunities to become the hosts of our events. Testimonial data also helped the VTDITC event team create  “no-photos please” lanyards to protect student privacy, especially when engaging in politicized topics. Planning meetings for VTDITC events are open to anyone, and insights provided by visiting community members have improved our events – especially as new topics are explored in conjunction with new partners. In particular, visiting community members have helped us take an iterative approach to how we promote our events and spread the reach of our programming.



VTDITC hosts the most attended and longest running series in the Newman Library, and while the participation rates are impressive, we strive to develop richer quantitative measures of success to explore and assess the program’s success. With the program growing in scale, quantitative measures are beginning to become more applicable for measuring program success through standard statistical procedures. For our online programming, which has connected over 160 participants in the same virtual meeting, a survey is being designed to accompany our registration process which will collect likert scale data to record participant perceptions of engagement and knowledge gains. This likert scale data will be recorded and used to help the Leadership and Advisory Boards make decisions about the program’s trajectory. We also plan to leverage this data as evidence of the program’s impact for external grant funding. 



Conclusion



Community practices are established over long periods of time. Although the program is almost half a decade old, VTDITC is just getting started. Constructing, deconstructing, and re-envisioning the program has been a repetitive process. Working in the university environment, VTDITC was designed to be dynamic and capable of growing even with a large number of individuals whose tenures are relatively brief. Many challenges are present when engaging with communities as volatile as those in higher education, especially with respect to continuity, trust, and funding. Our guiding principles and engagement practices help to mitigate several common failures. Post graduation VTDITC students have open lines of  communication with the program and provide guidance to the generations that follow. VTDITC only engages in community partnerships that are designed to meet community needs, and prioritize community empowerment, not the further establishment of the academic institution. Financial constraints are considered opportunities to develop alternate paths towards success, while maintaining a high standard for the quality of our outputs. While the VTDITC community cannot be duplicated at other institutions, by presenting our process, we hope to provide others with the ability to sample our program to create their own sound engagement practices with their community.  



Acknowledgements



This article would not have been possible without the scores of students, artists, community members, as well as Virginia Tech faculty and staff who have played varying – but all vital – roles in the VTDITC crew over the last half decade. 



Arthur J. Boston, Ian Beilin, and Ryan Randall’s formal peer-reviews were also invaluable as we wrote, remixed, and reworked this articles’ numerous drafts. Thank you for your patience, kindness, and support.The VTDITC community dedicates our work to the memory of:James “Trigganamatree” Maples (5/23/93-10/8/18) – the reigning VTDITC MC Battle ChampionChris “DJ G-Wiz” Gwaltney (3/12/87-11/21/20) – early supporter of the program and co-teacher of numerous VTDITC media literacy workshops



References



Craig, T. (2013). “Jackin’ for Beats”: DJing for citation critique.” Radical Teacher, 97, 20-29.



Drake, D. (2006, March 27). “Hip-Hop’s unknown legends: the Diggin’ In The Crates Crew.” Stylus Magazine. http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/hip-hops-unknown-legends-the-diggin-in-the-crates-crew.html



Fralin, S., Foutch, M., Arthur, C., Harrison, A.K., Paige, F., Luu, E., & Downing, J. (2018). Hip Hop @ VT. Exhibit displayed in Newman Library from August 2018 to November 2018. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/89299



Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.



Gosa, T. & Fields, T. (2012). “Is hip-hop education another hustle? The (ir)responsible use of hip-hop as pedagogy.” In Porfilio, B. & Viola, M. (Eds.), Hip-hop(e): The cultural practice and critical pedagogy of international hip-hop (pp. 195–210). Peter Lang.



Harrison, A.K. & Arthur, C. (2019). “Hip hop ethos.” Humanities, 8(39), 1-14. 



Korth, R. (2018, February 26). “Students digging monthly hip hop event.” Roanoke Times. https://roanoke.com/news/education/higher_education/virginia_tech/students-digging-monthly-hip-hop-event/article_d3face79-2e2a-5e86-aa6f-24f390c1f620.html



Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). “Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy.” American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). “Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.K.A. the remix.” Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.



Liao, Christine (2016). “From Interdisciplinary to Transdisciplinary: An Arts-Integrated Approach to STEAM Education,” Art Education, 69:6, 44-49.



New York State Department of Education. (N.D.). Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework. http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/crs/culturally-responsive-sustaining-education-framework.pdf 



Nielson, E. (2013, April 29). “High stakes for Hip-Hop Studies.” The Huffington Post. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/erik-nielson/high-stakes-for-hip-hop-studies_b_3170794.html



Petchauer, E. (2009). “Framing and reviewing Hip-Hop educational research.” Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 946–978. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308330967



Petchauer, E. (2012). Hip-Hop culture in college students’ lives: Elements, embodiment, and higher edutainment. Routledge.



Rawls, J.D. & Robinson, J. (2019). Youth culture power: A #HipHopEd guide to building teacher-student relationships and increasing student engagement. Peter Lang. 



Rice, J. (2003). “The 1963 hip-hop machine: Hip-hop pedagogy as composition.” College Composition and Communication, 54(3), 453-471.



Rosa, K. & Henke, K. (2017). 2017 ALA Demographic Study. American Library Association. http://www.ala.org/tools/research/initiatives/membershipsurveys



U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Food Insecurity: Better Information Could Help Eligible College Students Access Federal Food Assistance Benefits.” U.S. Government Accountability Office, January 9, 2019. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-95.



VTDITC [VTDITC Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech]. (2018A, October 19). #VTDITC vol 10: Intro to DJing & Fair Use [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/OOLWlylnKlI 



VTDITC [VTDITC Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech]. (2018B, November 2). #VTDITC vol 11: Beat Battle & Music Production Workshop featuring BeatsByJBlack [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/NbOFSk20S-A



Appendix



VTDITC: A Rough and Incomplete Timeline



5/29/2016: Craig was invited by Dr. Karen Davis to teach a DJ-based media literacy workshop for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated’s Tau Mu Omega Chapter’s first STEAM Camp. The camp happened on the campus of Radford University which was both Dr. Davis’ and Craig’s employer at the time. Although Craig had been DJing for 18 years and had taught numerous individuals the craft by this point, this workshop was the first time he had the opportunity to teach a group of middle school students from a media literacy perspective.6/4/2016: Craig was invited back to teach a DJ-based media literacy workshop for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.’s Tau Mu Omega Chapter’s second annual STEAM Camp. This collaboration continues annually to the present. 9/10/2016: Craig began working at his alma mater in the role of Teaching & Learning Engagement Librarian.12/9/2016: The first meeting of what would become the VTDITC Leadership Board took place in what is now the Media Design Studio B in Newman Library.2/14/2017: VTDITC collaborated with Roanoke Public Libraries for the For The Love of Hip Hop program at their main branch. RPL and VTDITC have partnered roughly a dozen times over the interceding years and our relationship with RPL is one unquestionably one of our strongest community partnerships.2/16/2017: VTDITC vol 1: Intro to DJing & Fair Use. This event – along with every other in-person seminar series event – took place in Newman Library’s Multipurpose Room. VT students Dylan Holliday and Alayna Carey served as workshop co-teachers alongside Craig. Alayna (VT Class of ‘20) is still a member of the VTDITC Leadership Board.3/16/2017-3/18/2017: First VT Hip Hop Appreciation Weekend – a three day collaboration between Students of Hip Hop Legacy, the Flowmigos/VT Breaking Club, and VTDITC – occurred.3/16/2017: VTDITC vol 2: Hip Hop Entrepreneurship featured DJ Zomanno (Los Angeles based DJ and VT alum), Justin Kim (Los Angeles based musican and model), and VT student Nathan Zed. Dr. A. Kwame Harrison (VT Department of Sociology and Africana Studies Program) moderated the discussion.3/18/2017: Give Me A Break 3 versus 3 B-Boy/B-Girl Jam (sponsored by the Flowmigos/VT Breaking Club with assistance from VTDITC) took place in the Newman Library Multipurpose Room.4/20/2017: VTDITC vol 3: Gender & Hip Hop featured legendary poet and VT faculty Nikki Giovanni. VT PhD student Corey Miles and the Black Cultural Center’s Director Kimberly Williams moderated the discussion.9/14/2017: VTDITC vol 4: Beat Battle & Music Production Workshop featured Yamin Semali (Atlanta based producer, DJ, MC, and recording engineer). Local music producer Electrobro won first place.10/12/2017: VTDITC vol 5: MC Battle & Workshop featured DayTripper (Atlanta based producer, DJ, and MC) and Emcee Lioness (Maryland based MC and VT alum). Trigganamatree (aka James Maples who passed tragically the following year) won the battle.11/2/2017: VTDITC vol 6: Hip Hop & Digital Literacy featured Dr. AD Carson (UVA Department of Music), Sum (Los Angeles based MC), VT student Nathan Zed, and Stimulator Jones (Roanoke based musician). Dr. A. Kwame Harrsion moderated the discussion.Spring semester 2018: We began hosting VTDITC Studio Hours in what is now the Media Design Studio B in Newman Library. The sessions occurred from 11am to 2pm every Friday that semester as well as during the summer.2/11/2018-2/17/2018: VTDITC Artist/Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Los Angeles based artist Sum served as the University Libraries first (and only thus far) artist/entrepreneur in residence. Sum met with over 30 members of the campus community during his residency. Afterwards he presented a document with numerous recommendations and debriefed interested members of the University Libraries with his findings via a virtual meeting.2/15/2018: VTDITC vol 7: The Hour Challenge – a collaborative music creation competition – took place. Three teams of approximately half a dozen randomly chosen local hip hop artists were given an hour to create a full song. The crowd picked their favorite at the conclusion of the event. Logistically it was a nightmare but it all worked out somehow. Recap video2/28/2018: The Roanoke Times publishes a front page story on the VTDITC program.3/15/2018-3/17/2018: 2nd Annual VT Hip Hop Appreciation Weekend transpired. SOHHL, the Flowmigos, and VTDITC served as co-sponsors.3/15/2018: VTDITC vol 8: Hip Hop & Liberation featured Dr. Brandy Faulkner (VT Department of Political Science), Omar Offendum (Los Angeles based MC), Dumi Right (VT alum and Virginia based MC), and Saba Taj (Durham based visual artist). Recap video3/17/2018: VTDITC Park Jam featured muralists Icue (Atlanta) and Good Homie Signs (North Carolina) as well as Atlanta based DJ and MC Daytripper.4/19/2018: VTDITC vol 9: Gender & Hip Hop II featured Blair Ebony Smith (University) and Kyesha Jennings (NC State). Recap videoFall semester 2018: VTDITC Studio Hours continued in MDS B. We altered hours to Fridays from 2 to 5 to better serve our community’s needs.8/23/2018: The Hip Hop @ VT Exhibit opened in Newman Library. This exhibit – which was created in collaboration with the University Libraries’ Course Exhibits Program – was on display on the main floor of Newman Library through nearly the entirety of the fall semester. Mural timelapse video9/20/2018: VTDITC vol 10: Intro to DJing & Fair Use – the Return consisted of a workshop by Craig and numerous VT DJs/students who also served as small group coaches. Recap video10/11/2018: VTDITC vol 11: Beat Battle & Music Production Workshop featured BeatsByJBlack (Northern Virginia based music producer) and was hosted by VT student Eric Luu. VT student SamWMTA won first place. Mike Abstrakt, a Roanoke-based high school student and music producer, took home second place. Recap video11/12/2018: VTDITC vol 12: Hip Hop & Mental Health featured Dr. Ian Levy (Manhattan College), Dr. Freddy Paige (Virginia Tech Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), Dr. Brandy Faulkner, and Emcee Lioness. 2/7/2019: VTDITC vol 13: Hip Hop & Interrogating Civility. This event, in collaboration with the Office of Student Conduct, took a critical view of the imperative of civility on our campus. Dr. Andrea Baldwin (VT Department of Sociology), Yolanda Avent (VT Community and Cultural Centers), VT student Juan Pachecho, and Dr. AD Carson (UVA) served as panelists. 2/28/2019-3/2/2019: 3rd Annual VT Hip Hop Appreciation Weekend took place. SOHHL, the Flowmigos, and VTDITC again served as co-sponsors.2/28/2019: VTDITC vol 14: Gender & Hip Hop III – the Return of the B-Girl. Graffiti artist Meme, dancer BGirl Macca, and Emcee Lioness served as panelists for this iteration of our seminar series. 3/2/2019: 2nd Annual VTDITC Park Jam featured muralists Good Homie Signs and Meme. Recap video4/7/2019: Black Cultural Center (BCC) Mixtape released. This collaborative project – the culmination of a semester and a half of work largely done during VTDITC Studio Hours – was formally released at a celebration at the BCC.4/18/2019: Words of the Prophets: Graffiti as Political Protest in Greece, Italy, and Poland. This collaborative program with the VT Department of English featured Dr. Jonathan Gross (Professor of English at Purdue University). He shared his research regarding the rhetorics of graffiti art. Good Homie Signs created a 4’ by 16’ mural prior to this event. It is now on display in the Department of English’s conference room (Shanks Hall 380).4/18/2019: VTDITC vol 15: Show & Prove. This event was an all elements open battle for local hip hop arts practitioners. Members of the Flowmigos won first place.8/2019: The VTDITC Leadership Board established our inaugural Advisory Board. The first Advisory Board consisted of Juel Downing (VT Class of ‘18 and original Leadership Board member), Dr. J. Rawls (DJ/producer and educator), Sum (MC), Emcee Lioness (VT Class of ‘07 and MC), Dumi Right (VT Class of ‘95 and MC), and Dr. Joycelyn Wilson (Assistant Professor of Black Media Studies, Georgia Tech).‘19-’20 Academic Year: Notably, the VTDITC Community Engagement Fellows co-designed and co-taught 45 media literacy workshops for the broader community. Roughly a dozen partner organizations helped facilitate these workshops.9/19/2019: VTDITC vol 16: Hip Hop & Race – What Hasn’t Been Said. This event consisted of small group discussions led by a team of moderators. 10/17/2019: VTDITC vol 17: Soul Sessions – Rebel Voices. This iteration of our seminar series was a collaboration with Roanoke-based open mic series Soul Sessions and celebrated of LGBTQ+ History Month.11/14/2019: VTDITC vol 18: 3rd Annual Beat Battle & Music Production Workshop. This recurrence of one of our most anticipated events was judged and hosted by Stimulator Jones (Roanoke based musician, DJ, and producer). VT student and music producer Prince Predator (VT Class of ‘21) won the battle. February 2020: Bobcat Studios Project. VTDITC was awarded a $3000 internal grant by VT’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology to create a recording studio and the culturally-relevant curriculum necessary to support it at Radford High School (Radford, Virginia). 2/20/2020: VTDITC vol 19: Intro to DJing and Fair Use III. This workshop was taught by UCLA Department of Africana Studies’ Lynnée Denise and focused on their research regarding the DJ as scholar.2/28/2020: VTDITC held a master class with legendary recording engineer Tim Donovan in Media Design Studio B. Mid March 2020: VTDITC Studio Hours transitioned to a virtual-only format.3/19/2020: VTDITC vol 20: Gender & Hip Hop IV’s original date. We rescheduled this event to 10/15/2020 and transitioned to a virtual format due to the COVID-19 pandemic3/21/2020: 3rd Annual VDITC Park Jam’s original date. We rescheduled this event to 9/19/2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.6/4/2020: VTDITC vol 21: Black Communities & the Police. This was our first virtual-only seminar series event and it transpired shortly after George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department. Community stalwart Dr. Brandy Faulkner kindly shared her expertise with us yet again.Mid August 2020: VTDITC Studio Hours reinstated in-person programming in MDS B.9/17/2020: VTDITC vol 22: Hip Hop and Police Brutality. Our second virtual only seminar series event featured Dr. Brandy Faulkner, Dr. Ellington Graves (VT Office for Inclusion and Diversity and Department of Sociology/Africana Studies Program), Roanoke-based recording artist Macklyn, and Radford University Department of Social Work’s Dr. Deneen Evans. Panelists analyzed both current and classic hip hop songs as foundational texts describing instances of police violence. 9/19/2020: 3rd Annual VTDITC Park Jam – the Do-Over. North Carolina based artist and regular VTDITC collaborator Good Homie Signs created a 4’ by 16’ mural of the Virginia Tech motto Ut Prosim (or “That I May Serve”) outside of Newman Library. The mural was installed in Newman Library the following month. 10/15/2020: VTDITC vol 20 – the Do-Over: Gender & Hip Hop IV featured Dr. Shante Paradigm Smalls (St. John’s University). This event was our third virtual-only seminar series event. Dr. Smalls presentation focused on their research regarding queer hip hop historiographies.11/12/2020: VTDITC vol 23: Hip Hop Entrepreneurship II featured Stacy Epps (Atlanta-based artist and attorney). At our fourth virtual-only seminar series event, Stacy’s workshop focused on the steps necessary for aspiring artists to professionalize their creative practices.11/13-11/15/2020: Good Homie Signs created the Bobcat Studios mural (12’ by 24’) at Radford High School. 



IMAGES: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RmesxfMPCqJjRDJmRPcYqDeBJxwsjVSs?usp=sharing 



TESTIMONIALS:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ND0B8qqrZRVpw1toJhWLmOG1yRAZQv89ypeKcoymvWo/edit?usp=sharing
	Ed Summers: Curation Communities
As I indicated in the last post I’ve been teaching digital curation this semester at UMD. I ended up structuring the class around the idea of abstraction where we started at a fairly low level looking at file systems and slowly zoomed out to file formats and standards, types of metadata, platforms and finally community. It was a zooming out process, like changing the magnification on a microscope, or maybe more like the zooming out that happens as you pop between levels in the pages of Istvan Banyai’s beautiful little children’s book Zoom (pun intended).




I’m curious to hear how well this worked from my student’s perspective, but it definitely helped me organize my own thoughts about a topic that can branch off in many directions. This is especially the case because I wanted the class to include discussion of digital curation concepts while also providing an opportunity to get some hands on experience using digital curation techniques and tools in the context of Jupyter notebooks. In addition to zooming out, it was a dialectical approach, flipping between reading and writing prose and reading and writing code, with the goal of reaching a kind of synthesis of understanding that digital curation practice is about both concepts and computation. Hopefully it didn’t just make everyone super dizzy :)


This final module concerned community. In our reading and discussion we looked at the FAIR Principles and talked about what types of practices they encourage, and to evaluate some data sources in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability.





For the notebook exercise I decided to have students experiment with the Lumen Database (formerly Chilling Effects) which is a clearinghouse for cease-and-desist notices received by web platforms like Google, Twitter and Wikipedia. The database was created by Wendy Seltzer and a team of legal researchers that wanted to be able to study how copyright law and other legal instruments shaped what was, and was not, on the web.


Examining Lumen helped us explore digital curation communities for two reasons. The first is that it provides an unprecedented look at how web platforms curate their content in partnership with their users. There really is nothing else like it unless you consider individual efforts like GitHub’s DMCA Repository which is an interesting approach too. The second reason is that Lumen itself is an example of community digital curation practice and principles like FAIR. FAIR began in the scientific community, and certainly has that air about it. But Lumen embodies principles around findability and accessibility: this is information that would be difficult if not impossible to access otherwise.


Lumen also shows how some data cannot be readily available: there is redacted content, some notices lack information like infringing URLs. Working with Lumen helps students see that not all data can be open, and that the FAIR principles are a starting place for ethical conversations and designs, and not a rulebook to be followed. The Lumen API requires that you get a key for doing any meaningful work (the folks at Berkman-Klein were kind enough to supply me a temporary one for the semester).


At any rate, if you are interested in taking a look the notebook (without the Lumen key) is available on GitHub. I’ve noticed that sometimes the GitHub JavaScript viewer for notebooks can timeout, so if you want you can also take a look at it over in Colab, which is the environment we’ve been using over the semester.


The notebook explores the basics of interacting with the API using the Python requests library, while explaining the core data model that is behind the API, which relates together the principal, the sender, the recpipient and the submitter of a claim. It provides just a taste of the highly expressive search options that allow searching, ordering and filtering of results along many dimensions. It also provides an opportunity to show students the value of build functional abstractions to help reduce copy and paste, and develop reusable and testable curation functions.


The goal was to do a module about infrastructure after talking about community. But unfortunately we ran out of time due to the pace of classes during the pandemic. I felt that a lot was being asked of students in the all online environment and I’ve really tried over the semester to keep things simple. This last module on community was actually completely optional, but I was surprised when half the class continued to do the work when it was not officially part of their final grade.


The final goal of using Lumen this week was to introduce them to a resource that they could write about (essay) or use in a notebook or application that will be their final project. I’ve spent the semester stressing the need to be able to write both prose and code about digital curation practices and the final project is an opportunity for them to choose to inflect one of those modes more than the other.
	David Rosenthal: 737 MAX Ungrounding
My post 737 MAX: The Case Against Boeing is a year old and has accumulated 58 updates in comments. Now the aircraft is returning to service, it is time for a new post. Below the fold, Bjorn Fehrm has two interesting posts about the ungrounding.In the first, Boeing 737 MAX changes beyond MCAS, Fehrm lays out the cascade of warnings that resulted from a single angle-of-attack sensor failure:As FAA and Boeing played through what happened in the MAX crashes in Boeing’s engineering simulators, the cascading alerts triggered by a faulty single Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor stood out:      Stick shaker went on on the affected side from rotation and stayed on all the time, despite the aircraft flying with the correct speed and not being close to stall.    IAS (airspeed) UNRELIABLE alert triggered      ALT (altitude) UNRELIABLE alert triggered    AOA (Angle of Attack) UNRELIABLE should have shown but didn’t because of a bug in MAX’s software that tied it to the optional display of AoA on the Pilot’s Primary Flight Display (PFD, the Pilot’s electronic horizon display).    The speed tapes on the Pilot’s Primary Flight Display behaved strangely, showing too low speed and high speed concurrently in the ET302 case.    Several trim related failures in such an environment relied on the Pilots identifying the trim misbehavior within four seconds. When flight crews from different airlines were flying these scenarios, it became clear such assumptions were unrealistic.This is an example of the hand-off problem that is inherent in sophisticated automation (see First We Change How People Behave and the numerous comments). Clearly, giving even expert pilots only 4 seconds to comprehend and react to this confusing rush of warnings would have been unrealistic, even if the pilots had been informed about and trained on the MCAS system that was causing them, which they weren't.   In the second, Fehrm points out an interesting difference between the FAA's and the EASA's requirements for re-certifying the 737 MAX in 737 MAX ungrounding, ANAC’s and EASA’s decisions:The other condition has its root in the disconnection of Speed Trim, MCAS, Autopilot, and Flight Directors should the two Angle of Attack systems disagree. EASA will temporarily revoke the 737 MAX certification for Required Navigation Performance – Authorization Required (RNP AR) approaches....Should the AoA monitor trip, Speed Trim, MCAS, and more importantly, Autopilot and Flight Directors disconnect, it puts a crew in a very tight spot as the difficulty of such approaches are high (they require special crew training and certification). You need all the tools you have in such approaches and don’t want a sudden disconnect of the Autopilot and Flight Directors combined with Speed Trim warning, followed by AOA, IAS and ALT DISAGREE.The revoke of the RPN AR approach certification is temporary. One can guess it will be allowed again once a synthetic third AoA sensor is introduced to the MAX. It creates a voting “two versus one” situation when one of the sensors presents suspicious values. It would then result in an AOA DISAGREE warning, but the Autopilot and Flight directors would stay on and IAS and ALT would still get the required AoA corrections. The AOA DISAGREE is then an indication for required maintenance rather than a major system hiccup. Duplicating systems is never a good approach to fault tolerance, they must be triplicated. In the 70s BA used Tridents on the Edinburgh to London shuttle. Their autoland systems were triplcated, and certified for zero-visibility landing. I experienced my first go-round when, on my way from Edinburgh to Miami for a conference, the approach to LHR in heavy cloud was interrupted by the engines spooling up and an abrupt climb. The captain calmly announced that one of the autopilots disagreed with the other two and, as a precaution, we were going around for another try. On the second approach there was no disagreement. We eventually landed in fog so thick I couldn't see the wingtips. Only the Tridents were landing, nothing was taking off. My Miami flight was delayed and after about 10 hours I was re-routed via LGA.
	Digital Library Federation: DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Hsiu-Ann Tom
This post was written by Hsiu-Ann Tom, who was selected to be one of this year’s virtual DLF Forum Community Journalists.
Hsiu-Ann is the Digital Archivist at The Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, LA where her work focuses on born digital collection development. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University in Boston in 2019. She is a graduate of Columbia University (BA, Sociology) and Harvard University (MA, Religion and Politics), and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Prior to working in the archival field, Hsiu-Ann served in the United States Army intelligence field as a cryptolinguistic analyst, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Before coming to Amistad, Hsiu-Ann worked on the archives staff of Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center working with the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Collection. She recently obtained the Society of American Archivist Digital Archivist Specialist certification and enjoys supporting students and new professionals in their educational development through her work as a member of SAA’s Graduate Archival Education Committee.  





I am thankful for the opportunity to have helped cover this year’s conference as one of 12 Community Journalists. Given all of the challenges of 2020, I was looking forward to hearing how my colleagues were finding ways to navigate unfamiliar situations and overcome obstacles. As a new graduate in my first full-time position out of library school, it was both inspiring and encouraging to listen to so many in the field describe their innovations over the course of the conference. I am thankful to the conference organizers and attendees for assembling such a rich program for everybody to enjoy.
As I gathered my thoughts about what to write, I was overwhelmed by the achievements and innovations of the DLF community. Each session was packed with more information than I could absorb and it was a joy to hear such dedicated professionals talk about their work. Yet, when I thought about the conference experience, what stuck out to me the most was the conference design itself and its alignment with DLF’s mission and values. I considered the introductory comments of Charles Henry and the DLF mission:
DLF: advancing research, learning, social justice, & the public good through the creative design & wise application of digital library technology

The conference felt like a model for how to implement these community values. It was exciting to see ideas in action and to feel like I was included in that as a newcomer to this group.
From before the start of the conference, I appreciated the efforts of conference staff to make conference content accessible to attendees of all abilities. In light of the pandemic and the turn to online communication platforms, transcription and closed captioning services for the hearing impaired are sometimes overlooked by conference organizers. As a US Army veteran with hearing impairment who does not read lips, this was something I struggled with on my own until this year when online meetings meant I had to start asking for more accommodations. This is not always a comfortable or easy thing for anyone to do despite how accepting society says we are to helping those who need accommodations. DLF conference staff began reaching out by email prior to the conference to address these concerns and confirm the availability of captioning and transcription services for all sessions – something that has not been my experience at other conferences.
On the first day of the conference when I could not understand how to make the captioning features work, DLF had staff on hand via Zoom link to jump on a screen share to show me how things worked on the Aviary platform in real time. They emailed me links to sessions I missed, coached me through the features as I tested the captioning, showed me how transcriptions worked and even where I could have emailed transcripts of the conference sessions and slide notes to access at a later time. Normally I would have to stop videos and play them back multiple times to get content for note taking. Personally, these tools meant participating in the conference with fewer distractions and less stress. As the conference progressed, I thought more about the importance of these tools for our user community and how we can employ them to improve their experiences.








Dr. Stacey Patton’s words during her opening address stayed with me throughout the conference as I considered the topic of accessibility in my daily work. She asked attendees to consider our role as archivists. As a new archivist trying to develop policies, procedures and workflows that encourage access and use for those coming to my archive, how can I perform my work more inclusively? Are there communities being overlooked? What needs are going unmet and how do I address them? Current discussions and work around accessibility are critical to ensuring that all patrons have access to the work we perform. The DLF Forum was a great experience for me in that I was able to learn about new tools to help with accessibility like Otter.ai and how to use it. I also learned about adjusting on the fly, accepting that sometimes technology will malfunction even with the best laid plans, having a backup plan to back up your plan is a great plan and finally, asking your community of peers for help may be your best plan.
I am fortunate to have been able to attend DLF this year and to see the hard work of so many colleagues on display, learn new skills and connect with a community of professionals working in my field. There are many ways organizations demonstrate to their community of users “You are welcome here. We want you here and you are part of this community.” These simple steps taken by the DLF conference team through the accessibility tools helped me to feel part of the community this year.
Thank you to staff who provided assistance with transcription and captioning services, and to those who helped with platform support.




The post DLF Forum Community Journalist Reflection: Hsiu-Ann Tom appeared first on DLF.
	Journal of Web Librarianship: Evolutional Librarianship: From Supermarket to Smorgasbord
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	Casey Bisson: Every journalist
Ryu Spaeth on the dirty job of journalism:
[E]very journalist […] at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own. Every journalist knows this flushed feeling, a mix of triumph and guilt, of securing the story that will redound glory unto them, not the subject.
	Ed Summers: Mystery File!
We started the semester in my Digital Curation class by engaging in a little exercise I called Mystery File. The exercise was ungraded and was designed to simply get the students thinking about some of the issues we would be exploring over the semester such as files, file formats, metadata, description, communities of practice and infrastructure.


The exercise also gave me an opportunity to introduce them to some of the tools and skills we would be using such as developing and documenting our work in Jupyter notebooks. The students had a lot of fun with it, and it was really helpful for me to see the variety of knowledge and skills they brought to the problem.





The mystery file turned out to be bundle of genetic data and metadata from the public National Center for Biotechnology Information a few minutes drive from UMD at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. If the students were able to notice that this file was a tar file, they could expand it and explore the directories and subdirectories. They could notice that some files were compressed, and examine some of them to notice that they contained metadata and a genetic sequence.








Once they had submitted their answers I shared a video with them (the class is asynchronous except for in person office hours) where I answered these questions myself in a Jupyter notebook running in Google Colab. I shared the completed notebook with them for them to try on their own. It was a good opportunity to reacquaint students with notebooks since they were introduced to them in an Introduction to Programming class that is a pre-requisite. But I wanted to show how notebooks were useful for documenting their work, and especially useful in digital curation activities which are often ad-hoc, but include some repeatable steps.


The bundle of data includes a manifest with hashes for fixity checking to ensure a bit hasn’t flipped, which anticipated our discussion of technical metadata later in the semester. I thought it was a good example of how a particular community is making data available, and how the NCBI and its services form a piece of critical infrastructure for the medical community. I also wanted to highlight how the data came from a Chinese team, despite the efforts of the Chinese government to suppress the information. This was science, the scientific community, and information infrastructures working despite (or in spite of) various types of social and political breakdowns.


But I actually didn’t start this post wanting to write about all that, but rather to comment on a recent story I read about the origins of this data. It gave me so much hope and reason to celebrate data curation practices to read Zeynep Tufekci’s The Pandemic Heroes Who Gave us the Gift of Time and Gift of Information this afternoon. She describes how brave Yong-Zhen Zhang and his team in China were in doing their science, and releasing the information in a timely way to the world. If you look closely you can see Zhang’s name highlighted in the pictured metadata record above. It is simply astonishing to read how Zhang set the scientific machinery in motion which created a vaccine all the way back in January, just days after the virus was discovered and sequenced. Sending my students this piece from Zeynep here at the end of the semester gives me such pleasure, and is the perfect way to round out the semester as we talk about communities and infrastructure.


(P.S. I’m planning on bundling up the discussion and notebook exercises once the semester is finished in case it is useful for others to adapt.)
	Islandora: Islandora 8 Open Meeting: December 15th, 2020
Islandora 8 Open Meeting: December 15th, 2020
manez
Mon, 11/30/2020 - 18:32

      Body
    
          Our first general open meeting for Islandora 8, held on November 17th, went great! We didn't have a moment of down time in four hours, and we ended up covering everything from basic introductory demos to detailed looks under the hood of Islandora 8 sites in production.

We will be holding another open drop-in session on December 15th, from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM Eastern. Full details, and the Zoom link to join, are in this Google doc. The meeting is free form, with experienced Islandora 8 users on hand to answer questions or give demos on request. Please drop in at any time during the four-hour window.

Registration is not required. If you would like a calendar invite as a reminder, please let us know at community@islandora.ca.
	Digital Library Federation: Announcing a Portuguese Translation of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix
Portuguese Translations of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix 
The NDSA is pleased to announce that Version 2 (2019) of the Levels Matrix has been translated into Portuguese by Laura Vilela R. Rezende.
This document enriches the scientific studies on Digital Preservation and Research Data Curation developed by the Brazilian research group of which the researcher is part:
The Research Network – DRIADE: Digital Preservation Studies and Practices  
Links to these documents are found below as well as on the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation OSF project page: https://osf.io/qgz98/

V2.0 (2019) 

If you would be interested in translating the Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0 into another language please contact us at ndsa.digipres@gmail.com. 
 
Tradução para o Português da Matriz dos Níveis de Preservação Digital de 2019 
A NDSA tem o prazer de anunciar que a versão 2.0 (2019) da Matriz dos Níveis de Preservação Digital foi traduzida para o Português por Laura Vilela R. Rezende.
Este documento enriquece os estudos científicos sobre Preservação Digital e Curadoria de Dados de Pesquisa desenvolvidos pelo grupo de pesquisa brasileiro do qual a pesquisadora faz parte: 
Rede de Pesquisa DRIADE – Estudos e práticas de Preservação Digital
 A seguir os links para acesso a este documentos. É possível acessar também pela página do projeto OSF: https://osf.io/qgz98/

V2.0 (2019)  

Caso tenha interesse em traduzir os Níveis de Preservação Digital V 2.0 em outro idioma, por favor entre em contato conosco pelo e-mail: ndsa.digipres@gmail.com  
The post Announcing a Portuguese Translation of the 2019 Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix  appeared first on DLF.
	Terry Reese: MarcEdit 7.5 Update Status
I’m planning to start making testing versions of the new MarcEdit instance available around the first of the year broadly, to a handful of testers in mid-Dec.  The translation from .NET 4.7.2 to .NET 5 was more significant than I would have thought – and includes a number of swapped default values – so hunting down behavior changes.  Currently, the follow updates have been completed.


Framework used: .NET 5.0
RDA Helper: 100$e process modified. Added criteria to $e generation. Previously, if a $e is already present, an new $e wasn’t added. Now, if a $e or $4 is present, a $e won’t be generated.
RDA Helper: Changes related to RDA updates
Added new elements to the new window programs for pinning
XML Editor: Delete Block element added
XML Editor: XQuery processing option
If a set of records include bibliographic and authority records, the RDA helper will skip the authority records
Updated Installation Wizard (allows migration of 6.x and 7.x content into the tool)
Updating OCLC Integration to use new Metadata API Search
Delimited Text Translator — added ability to use custom mnemonic replacements
Delimited Text Translator — no longer a stand alone program

App part of main marcedit app
Command line options folded into marcedit app

[in process] linked data rules file version 2

Enhancements to the rules file schema



-tr
	Journal of Web Librarianship: What Metadata Matters?: Correlation of Metadata Elements with Click-Through Rates for E-Books and Streaming Video in the Academic Library Catalog
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	Max Planck Digital Library: MPG/SFX server maintenance, Tuesday 01 December, 5-6 pm
The database of the MPG/SFX server will undergo scheduled maintenance. The downtime will start at 5 pm. Services are expected to be back after 30 minutes.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
	Casey Bisson: The three tribes of the internet
Authors Primavera De Filippi, Juan Ortiz Freuler, and Joshua Tan outline three competing narratives that have shaped the internet: libertarian, corporate, and nationalist. This matters because our physical lives are now deeply intertwined with and codependent on our internet activities. The latest information about Covid regulations in many communities is first released on Twitter, for example.
A declaration is a political act, which describes what should be done. A narrative is a political tool, which elaborates on why it should be done.
	Mark Matienzo: Perfecting a favorite: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
I have a horrible sweet tooth, and I absolutely love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I tend to bake as a means to cope with stress, and of course, more often then that means making these cookies. After making many iterations, I’ve settled upon this recipe as the ultimate version to which all compare.
	Mark Matienzo: Perfecting a favorite: oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
I have a horrible sweet tooth, and I absolutely love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I tend to bake as a means to cope with stress, and of course, more often then that means making these cookies. After making many iterations, I’ve settled upon this recipe as the ultimate version to which all compare.
	Casey Bisson: Happy D.B. Cooper Day
D.B. Cooper day is celebrated on this day, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, every year.
	Peter Murray: User Behavior Access Controls at a Library Proxy Server are Okay
Earlier this month, my Twitter timeline lit up with mentions of a half-day webinar called Cybersecurity Landscape - Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure. 
What had riled up the people I follow on Twitter was the first presentation: “Security Collaboration for Library Resource Access” by Cory Roach, the chief information security officer at the University of Utah. 
Many of the tweets and articles linked in tweets were about a proposal for a new round of privacy-invading technology coming from content providers as a condition of libraries subscribing to publisher content. 
One of the voices that I trust was urging caution:

I highly recommend you listen to the talk, which was given by a university CIO, and judge if this is a correct representation. FWIW, I attended the event and it is not what I took away.— Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (@lisalibrarian) November 14, 2020

As near as I can tell, much of the debate traces back to this article:
Scientific publishers propose installing spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights - Coda Story https://t.co/rtCokIukBf— Open Access Tracking Project (@oatp) November 14, 2020

The article describes Cory’s presentation this way:

  One speaker proposed a novel tactic publishers could take to protect their intellectual property rights against data theft: introducing spyware into the proxy servers academic libraries use to allow access to their online services, such as publishers’ databases.


The “spyware” moniker is quite scary.
It is what made me want to seek out the recording from the webinar and hear the context around that proposal. 
My understanding (after watching the presentation) is that the proposal is not nearly as concerning.
Although there is one problematic area—the correlation of patron identity with requested URLs—overall, what is described is a sound and common practice for securing web applications. 
To the extent that it is necessary to determine a user’s identity before allowing access to licensed content (an unfortunate necessity because of the state of scholarly publishing), this is an acceptable proposal.
(Through the university communications office, Corey published a statement about the reaction to his talk.)

In case you didn’t know, a web proxy server ensures the patron is part of the community of licensed users, and the publisher trusts requests that come through the web proxy server. 
The point of Cory’s presentation is that the username/password checking at the web proxy server is a weak form of access control that is subject to four problems:


  phishing (sending email to tricking a user into giving up their username/password)
  social engineering (non-email ways of tricking a user into giving up their username/password)
  credential reuse (systems that are vulnerable because the user used the same password in more than one place)
  hactivism (users that intentionally give out their username/password so others can access resources)


Right after listing these four problems, Cory says: “But anyway we look at it, we can safely say that this is primarily a people problem and the technology alone is not going to solve that problem. Technology can help us take reasonable precautions… So long as the business model involves allowing access to the data that we’re providing and also trying to protect that same data, we’re unlikely to stop theft entirely.”

His proposal is to place “reasonable precautions” in the web proxy server as it relates to the campus identity management system. 
This is a slide from his presentation:



    
    
    
    
    
        Slide from presentation by Cory Roach
    


I find this layout (and lack of labels) somewhat confusing, so I re-imagined the diagram as this:



    
    
    
    
    
        Revised 'Modern Library Design'
    


The core of Cory’s presentation is to add predictive analytics and per-user blocking automation to the analysis of the log files from the web proxy server and the identity management server. 
By doing so, the university can react quicker to compromised usernames and passwords. 
In fact, it could probably do so more quicker than the publisher could do with its own log analysis and reporting back to the university.

Where Cory runs into trouble is this slide:


    
    
    
    
    
        Slide from presentation by Cory Roach
    


In this part of the presentation, Cory describes the kinds of patron-identifying data that the university could-or-would collect and analyze to further the security effort. 
In search engine optimization, these sorts of data points are called “signals” and are used to improve the relevance of search results; perhaps there is an equivalent term in access control technology.
But for now, I’ll just call them “signals”.

There are some problems in gathering these signals—most notably the correlation between user identity and “URLs Requested”.
In the presentation, he says: “You can also move over to behavioral stuff. So it could be, you know, why is a pharmacy major suddenly looking up a lot of material on astrophysics or why is a medical professional and a hospital suddenly interested in internal combustion. Things that just don’t line up and we can identify fishy behavior.”
It is core to the library ethos that we make our best effort to not track what a user is interested in—to not build a profile of a user’s research unless they have explicitly opted into such data collection. 
As librarians, we need to gracefully describe this professional ethos and work that into the design of the systems used on campus (and at the publishers).

Still, there is much to be said for using some of the other signals to analyze whether a particular request is from an authorized community member.
For instance, Cory says: “We commonly see this user coming in from the US and today it’s coming in from Botswana. You know, has there been enough time that they could have traveled from the US to Botswana and actually be there? Have they ever access resources from that country before is there residents on record in that country?”

The best part of what Cory is proposing is that the signals’ storage and processing is at the university and not at the publisher. 
I’m not sure if Cory knew this, but a recent version of EZProxy added a UsageLimit directive that builds in some of these capabilities. 
It can set per-user limits based on the number of page requests or the amount of downloaded information over a specified interval. 
One wonders if somewhere in OCLC’s development queue is the ability to detect IP addresses from multiple networks (geographic detection) and browser differences across a specified interval. 
Still, pushing this up to the university’s identity provider allows for a campus-wide view of the signals…not just the ones coming through the library.

Also, in designing the system, there needs to be clarity about how the signals are analyzed and used.  I think Cory knew this as well: “we do have to be careful about not building bias into the algorithms.”

Yeah, the need for this technology sucks.

Although it was the tweet to the Coda Story about the presentation that blew up, the thread of the story goes through TechDirt to a tangential paragraph from Netzpolitik in an article about Germany’s licensing struggle with Elsevier.

With this heritage, any review of the webinar’s ideas are automatically tainted by the distain the library community in general has towards Elsevier. 
It is reality—an unfortunate reality, in my opinion—that the traditional scholarly journal model has publishers exerting strong copyright protection on research and ideas behind paywalls. 
(Wouldn’t it be better if we poured the anti-piracy effort into improving scholarly communication tools in an Open Access world? Yes, but that isn’t the world we live in.) 
Almost every library deals with this friction by employing a web proxy server as an agent between the patron and the publisher’s content.

The Netzpolitik article says:


  …but relies on spyware in the fight against „cybercrime“

  Of Course, Sci-Hub and other shadow libraries are a thorn in Elsevier’s side. Since they have existed, libraries at universities and research institutions have been much less susceptible to blackmail. Their staff can continue their research even without a contract with Elsevier.

  Instead of offering transparent open access contracts with fair conditions, however, Elsevier has adopted a different strategy in the fight against shadow libraries. These are to be fought as „cybercrime“, if necessary also with technological means. Within the framework of the „Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI)“, which was founded together with other large publishers, Elsevier is campaigning for libraries to be upgraded with security technology. In a SNSI webinar entitled „Cybersecurity Landscape – Protecting the Scholarly Infrastructure“*, hosted by two high-ranking Elsevier managers, one speaker recommended that publishers develop their own proxy or a proxy plug-in for libraries to access more (usage) data („develop or subsidize a low cost proxy or a plug-in to existing proxies“).

  With the help of an „analysis engine“, not only could the location of access be better narrowed down, but biometric data (e.g. typing speed) or conspicuous usage patterns (e.g. a pharmacy student suddenly interested in astrophysics) could also be recorded. Any doubts that this software could also be used—if not primarily—against shadow libraries were dispelled by the next speaker. An ex-FBI analyst and IT security consultant spoke about the security risks associated with the use of Sci-Hub.


The other commentary that I saw was along similar lines:


  
    
      
        
          [Is the SNSI the new PRISM?
          bjoern.brembs.blog](http://bjoern.brembs.net/2020/10/is-the-snsi-the-new-prism/)
        
      
    
  
  
    
      
        
          [Academics band together with publishers because access to research is a cybercrime
          chorasimilarity](https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2020/11/14/academics-band-together-with-publishers-because-access-to-research-is-a-cybercrime/)
        
      
    
  
  
    
      
        
          [WHOIS behind SNSI & GetFTR?
          Motley Marginalia](https://csulb.edu/~ggardner/2020/11/16/snsi-getftr/)
        
      
    
  


Let’s face it: any friction beyond follow-link-to-see-PDF is more friction than a researcher deserves. 
I doubt we would design a scholarly communication system this way were we to start from scratch. 
But the system is built on centuries of evolving practice, organizations, and companies. 
It really would be a better world if we didn’t have to spend time and money on scholarly publisher paywalls.
And I’m grateful for the Open Access efforts that are pivoting scholarly communications into an open-to-all paradigm.
That doesn’t negate the need to provide better options for content that must exist behind a paywall.

So what is this SNSI thing?

The webinar where Cory presented was the first mention I’d seen of a new group called the Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI). SNSI is the latest in a series of publisher-driven initiatives to reduce the paywall’s friction for paying users or library patrons coming from licensing institutions. 
GetFTR (my thoughts) and Seamless Access (my thoughts).
(Disclosure: I’m serving on two working groups for Seamless Access that are focused on making it possible for libraries to sensibly and sanely integrate the goals of Seamless Access into campus technology and licensing contracts.)

Interestingly, while the Seamless Access initiative is driven by a desire to eliminate web proxy servers, this SNSI presentation upgrades a library’s web proxy server and makes it a more central tool between the patron and the content.
One might argue that all access on campus should come through the proxy server to benefit from this kind of access control approach.
It kinda makes one wonder about the coordination of these efforts.
Still, SNSI is on my radar now, and I think it will be interesting to see what the next events and publications are from this group.
	Coral Sheldon-Hess: The Online Unconference of Niche Interests
If you’re looking for a fun and educational thing to do this weekend, you might consider attending the second quarterly(??) Online Unconference of Niche Interests (“OUNI” for short), scheduled to run from 2pm until a bit after 5pm Eastern Standard Time, this Sunday, November 29. We have a set of volunteer presenters who will each talk for up to 15 minutes about a niche topic they’re into. Sign up here if you’re interested in this or future OUNIs, and we’ll send you a link to the Zoom session, the talk schedule, and the Discord chat space.* You are welcome to drop in and out of the Zoom, if there are only a few talks that interest you; of course, you’re also invited/encouraged to stay the whole time!



Our list of topics for this Sunday:



Knitting but ScaryMaking Herbal SalvesFanfiction: the Sometimes Sensational World of Transformative FictionMagnificent Moose: Animal, Culture and RepresentationAll the Fair DiceGlass Sponges: Delicate AliensPost Office Trivia You Will Enjoy, and a plug for writing letters and postcards



The schedule, with full session descriptions, is here.



I know, I didn’t ever actually blog about the First Online Unconference of Niche Interests, sorry. The recordings we have permission to share are on this playlist, though. (Yes, the one about owls was me. :)) Topics not in the playlist included adaptive clothing, birdwatching, capture the flag (security games), octagon houses, and approval voting.



I mention the previous list of topics in the hopes that they give you ideas. :) We do already have 2-3 talks pre-proposed for the next OUNI, which is very exciting! The form for talk submissions is open now, and we’ll schedule the third OUNI around the availability of presenters. If we get more talks than will fit in a nice 3-4 hour block (with breaks!), we’ll do community voting to decide which ones run. Or we’ll schedule multiple weekends in a row? Whatever, this whole thing is designed to be flexible and fun, and if we’re going to err, I’d really prefer to err on the side of including more people, not fewer.



* We promise not to share your email address or to use it for anything except OUNI announcements. (“We” is my spouse and me. I don’t foresee other volunteers needing email address access, but if this thing grows, I promise we’ll continue to be cautious and opt-in with everything.)

Note: the featured image on this post appears to have made its first appearance online at dudecraft.com (which is currently throwing a security error, so I won’t link it); it appears unattributed in many other places, though.
	Mita Williams: Weeknote 48 (2020)
§1







First off is this recommended read from the November 17th issue of The New Yorker, The rise and fall of getting things done by Cal ‘Deep Work’ Newport. As Newport himself describes his work, 



It’s not, however, really about David Allen’s productivity system, which longtime readers (and listeners) know I really admire. It’s instead about a deeper question that I hadn’t heard discussed much before: Why do we leave office workers to figure out on their own how to get things done?With the notable exception of agile software development teams, companies in this sector largely leave decisions about how work is assigned, reviewed, and organized up to individuals. We promulgate clear objectives and construct motivating corporate cultures, but when it comes to actually executing these tasks, we just hook everyone up to an email address or Slack channel and tell them to rock and roll. This has led to a culture of overload and fragmented attention that makes everyone involved miserable.



I don’t want to spoil the conclusions of this article, but I will tip you off that I’m filling this article away in my notebook about visualizing workflow. 



§2



I discovered this work from CARL’s e-alert newsletter, Thinking Politically About Scholarly Infrastructure (A.J. Boston, LPC Blog – Fellows Journal, November 12).  Parts of it hit a little too close to home for my liking…



I’m sure I’m being unfair in my stance. To capture a diverse constituency, a big-tent approach can be effective. Compromise can cause cynicism about our politics, but sometimes a little progress can be better than a lot of regression. That’s the story I’ve told myself, at least, while making my daily compromise as a ScholComm librarian who manages our Elsevier-owned institutional repository service, Digital Commons. My school contracted with bepress (then an independent company) shortly before hiring me to manage it, and my values felt fully aligned as I made the pitch across campus to deposit green OA manuscripts there. But that feeling changed with the announcement of Elsevier acquiring bepress in August 2017 (MacKenzie, 2017).Since 2017, the Digital Commons service hasn’t worsened, but the premise that many customers initially bought into, of supporting an independent platform in the scholarly communication ecosystem, has eroded. And what do people do when they face a deterioration of goods and services? For A.O. Hirschman (1970), there are three choices (which later scholars have revised upon): exit, voice, and loyalty. In my case, exit seems out of the question: a diverse constituency of groups on my campus have now integrated the software, and a swap would be overly-costly and damage relationships in the process. I don’t know whether I’d categorize what I am doing now as voice or loyalty, but what I do know is that there is a strong glimmer of recognition when Sen. Harris walks her fracking-issue tightrope, or when grant-funding institutions rock the boat just lightly enough that it doesn’t risk a capsize.



§3



Also from aforementioned e-alert, 



AAP and CCC End Georgia State ‘E-Reserves’ Copyright Litigation (P. Anderson, Publishing Perspectives, November 12)After a 12-year fight, the Association of American Publishers and Copyright Clearance Center have declined to pursue any further appeals in their lawsuit against Georgia State University regarding their reliance on fair use in making materials available via e-reserves. Read more @pubperspectives 



I used to refer to the Georgia State E-Reserves case as an example of selective enforcement of copyright by publishers in which educational use of works behind an authentication system was vigorously challenged in court, while rampant open distribution of works under copyright via Academia.edu and ResearchGate was ignored for years. 



§4



I only read the headline and the abstract of this article but I am sharing it anyway because I liked the conclusion that Tyler Cowan [ht] drew from it: Open access improves the quality of citations.



§5



Earlier this week Hugh Rundle published a blog post called Empathy Daleks that gave me life:



Her studies indicate that diversifying the authors, perspectives, representations and examples in standard textbooks is not simply “more inclusive” or “just” in an abstract way (though that would be good anyway). Students who feel they belong — who feel validated as members or potential members of a profession or academic discipline — are more likely to succeed and complete their degrees. That is, Lambert suggests that diversifying the authors and even the examples or hypothetical actors in university textbooks by itself has a positive effect on completion rates, engagement, and student satisfaction with courses. Amy Nusbaum shows in a recent article that OER is an effective way to accelerate this, because with licenses allowing “remixing” of content the examples used within open textbooks can be updated to suit local needs without having to rewrite the entire text….But it was Lambert uttering the magic words about diverse texts improving “student success” that suddenly felt quite subversive. To understand why, we need to interrogate what universities usually mean when they talk about “student success”, and particularly the infrastructures universities have been building around it.Hugh Rundle, Empathy Daleks, November 23, 2020



And on that note… I liked this tweet about university rankings some days ago.




"None of these ‘flagship’ rankings considered #openaccess, equality, diversity, sustainability or other society-focused agendas." https://t.co/am0cTePUOM— Peter Suber (@petersuber) November 24, 2020








 



Speaking of society-focused agendas, while I was doing some of the more rote collection development tasks this week (reviewing lists of duplicate titles, finding missing titles that were of need of replacing), I listened to a number of episodes of Terry Greene’s Getting Air: The Open Pedagogy podcast and I enjoyed them very much. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and spending time with some of the guests on his show and it is such a treat to hear them speak about the careful thought and thoughtful care they put into their work of teaching.
	Ed Summers: Kettle
kettle boiling kitchen table two windows daylight reaching leaves kettle boiling   again