Category Archives: General

IFLA WLIC 2023 Grant Winners Congress Experience

This post features  Ezequiel Vallejo Ríos who is one of the 2023 IFLA ARL Grant winners. from México.

Attending the IFLA WLIC 2023 Congress certainly opened an opportunity for those of us who are not in mainstream librarianship to see the various aspects of the profession. I experienced this through my interactions with colleagues who are involved in the day to day activities of the profession, their challenges and successes and other experiences from their various perspectives.

The various presentations at the congress were another source of great experience for me as they provided me with the latest trends in the profession, as well as new ideas which I can implement in my own environment. Some general topics which were discussed included  open access, inclusive publication, copyright, adaptation of copyrighted materials to formats accessible with the Marrakesh Treaty, access to culture and the future roles of the librarian in the environment of access to information. Again, there were discussions that addressed how the role of the librarian changes as society demands it, the implementation of technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) or Chat GPT and with this the development of new digital skills to respond to the constant change in the knowledge society, and innovations in libraries.

Again, attending this congress has helped expand my panorama about the profession also to network with librarians from other institutions, as well as exchange ideas, knowledge, and success stories from their libraries which will help guide me in my work going forward.

Without a doubt, it is gratifying to have experienced professionals sharing their lives, and interests with the new generation of librarians who are barely getting involved in the relevant issues of the profession in order to be able to contribute to the discipline. In turn, it is gratifying that young professionals who came with fresh ideas were given the space to contribute to the profesión and also enrich themselves intellectually. Being in these congresses of global trajectory offers us an excellent environment to get involved with the dynamics of the profesión and thus contributing to the profession.

Inclusion, the theme and topics of the congress are a determining factor for more people to be involved in the development and participation of these congresses. As such, the congress organisers could be more open in their ideas, regardless of gender, religion, social status, political ideology or some kind of motor weakness. This would allow for a more inclusive congress.

 

Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens

This posting is sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG and published in cooperation with the ARL Section. Members of the Library Publishing SIG reach out to library publishers and invite them to respond to a series of questions.

This post features Dave Ghamandi who is the Open Publishing Librarian at the University of Virginia and Managing Editor, Aperio.

What attracted you to work in library publishing?

These comments are from me as an individual and not on behalf of my employer. I worked in two different roles at the University of Virginia (UVA) Library before applying to become the inaugural Open Publishing Librarian. I had built some scholarly communication duties into my first position and wanted an opportunity to do that type of work full-time. The library publishing job was attractive for a few reasons. Mainly, it allows me to be some version of the change I wish to see in scholarly publishing. It’s full of contradictions, but I’m able to lead a diamond open access (no author or reader fees) press as opposed to merely advocating for such change. Advocacy and education are also part of my work, but library publishing allows us to be protagonists in scholarly communication. Building something is often harder work, but at times also more rewarding, than exhorting about exploitative publishing systems.

 

Library publishing is older than most people probably realize. Virginia Tech has been doing it for decades, for example, so it’s worth noting that we’re engaged in a decades-long practice. Library publishing, even at a small press like Aperio, provides irrefutable, material proof of diamond OA’s benefits. After doing this work for several years, my expectations have tempered though. At the same time, I have a better feel for how library publishing is situated within the larger scholarly publishing landscape, where it’s headed, and the forces it’s in opposition to.

 

What values and principles inform your work?

The main principle that’s enacted in my library publishing work is decommodification. The articles that Aperio publishes are not exchanged for money, meaning they never become a commodity. Aperio has been a diamond OA press to date, and I hope it remains that way. Working as a publisher with editors, authors, reviewers, and readers in a way that’s not mediated through markets is powerful. The work is riddled with contradictions and shortcomings, but, even in a small way, a certain portion of the literature isn’t subject to profit-motives and the perversities that they bring. No author has ever been turned away for not being able to pay an article processing charge (APC). Authors’ libraries are not billed an APC through a high-priced “transformative agreement.” Authors are not tricked into paying Aperio an APC under the pretense that it would help them satisfy federal deposit requirements. Editors are not pressured into increasing acceptances by 700% or to “cascade” rejections to another journal within Aperio’s portfolio. Library publishers are often relatively modest operations, but there is virtue in scaling small.

 

What do you think is the impact of library publishing in the broader scholarly communications landscape?

The impact of library publishing is still to be determined, and I struggle to find literature specifically on library publishing that would help answer this question. I’ve been trying to take a more dialectical approach to analyzing library publishing, which entails focusing on contradictions. One such contradiction is how library publishing perpetuates the use of exploited labor (ex. library employees and un(der)compensated editors, reviewers, and authors). This is at the heart of Meetz and Boczar’s article. Another major contradiction is between university support for diamond OA (ex. library publishing and membership programs for the Open Library of Humanities and the Open Book Collective) vs. support for commercial models of OA and green OA. “Transformative agreements,” for example, allow OA to be more fully captured by corporate publishers. Even the OSTP memo is insufficient because it doesn’t create the necessary change at the sites of production. Green OA mandates simply don’t match the severity of the problems we face mainly because they don’t put a real dent into corporate power. It’s difficult to make these points succinctly, but library publishing on its current path doesn’t threaten the publishing oligopoly or the status quo.

 

What are your hopes and aspirations for the global library publishing community?

My hopes listed here are directly aimed at the fellow rank-and-file publishing librarian:

Hopefully we can do all these things in a way Cornel West suggests—with style and a smile.

 

Tell us about a book that changed your life.

There have been a few moments in my life where events yanked me off the sidelines and onto the playing field. One was after tiki-torch-bearing fascists almost killed my co-worker. An earlier moment was watching Richard Wolff’s lecture Capitalism Hits the Fan and reading his book Democracy at Work. Wolff makes a compelling case to reorganize society by democratizing the place where we spend a great deal of time: the workplace. He notes that democracy is an ideal we mostly profess to share, but our workplaces are hierarchical and extractive. Through self-organization, self-management, and collective ownership of our workplaces, we can begin to practice actual democracy, build power, and self-emancipate. It’s a whole lot more complicated than that, hence the plea for political education in the previous answer. But what would scholarly communication look like if researchers, scholars, and associated workers self-managed it and weren’t beholden to “funders” or part-time governing boards? What power would need to be amassed to make that vision a reality?

 

I need books to fortify the spirit as well, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Fire in the Hole: The Spirit Work of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors. This beautiful book is a collaborative ethnography that dives into the world of Black Masking Indians in New Orleans, Louisiana and chronicles the life of Fi Yi Yi, Big Chief of the Mandingo Warriors. The Black masking culture is rooted in maroonage, resistance, dignity, and African pride. This culture is represented in both the book’s content and form. The concluding chapter, titled “How We Did It,” details the collaborative production process that included oral storytelling, a multiplicity of voices, community peer review, and striking visuals.

Dave Ghamandi, University of Virginia, Blog at http://ghamandi.hcommons.org

 

ARL’s Hot Topics session to discuss the potential of AI to change the mission of academic and research libraries

Author: Siviwe Bangani, Director, Research Services, Stellenbosch University Library, South Africa

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially the latest tool, ChatGPT, is the hottest topic in academic and research libraries (ARLs) at the moment. Many ARLs around the world have started to think about ways to adopt and adapt AI tools to improve their services and workflows.  However, the pace with which these libraries adapt and adopt AI technologies seem to differ by continent and country and even among libraries within the same country. There is much to learn from the early adopters of these technologies that can be shared with other ARLs around the world. In addition, it is important to learn about the immediate challenges that the adoption of these technologies poses and what the long-term opportunities are and whether these pose an existential threat to ARLs in general. There are growing concerns about the potential risks and ethical implications of these technologies.

Naturally, IFLA’s ARL chose the fascinating theme of AI as a hot topic for its session that will be held on 22 August 2023 at 10:15 am during the IFLA Congress in Rotterdam. The title of the session is: “From Gutenberg to ChatGPT: Will AI change the mission of academic and research libraries”?  As expected, this Hot Topic theme generated a lot of interest from all regions of the continent. It is scheduled for 60 minutes and will have two parts:  three ignite talks (8 minutes each) and round table discussions where the audience can learn and share more about their experiences with AI in their own libraries, campuses or countries. The ignite talks session will have a diversified mix of speakers from Africa, Asia and United States of America.

African representatives from Nigeria, Cecilia Adewumi and Adetoun Oyelude, will speak to “Anfang – Bot – Schluß” : Visualizing Future Academic and Research Libraries”. The speakers will take us through the future of academic and research libraries, presenting ideas of future ARLs as seen through the lens of library and information professionals working in those libraries and projecting the future. The questions raised in the study will be directed to participants of the Hot Topic session and conclusions and recommendations will be made based on the results obtained.

Asian representatives from India, Satveer Nehra and Sadanand Bansode, will bring an Asian perspective to the debate. Their topic will cover “Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT in academic and research libraries: challenges and opportunity”. In their proposal, Nehra and Bansode noted that AI can help reshape librarianship by thinking outside the box, enabling better search and retrieval of information, personalised recommendations, and efficient customer service. In their presentation, the authors will touch on the challenges and limitations of using AI and ChatGPT, such as the potential for more dependability of users on AI instead of Library resources which may affect their reading habits. The authors will also raise the issue of how the non-availability of skilled staff in underdeveloped nations, among others, is a potential hindrance to the implementation and maintenance of AI systems as well as the risk of job losses in an AI-intensive environment.

Mimi Calter from the United States of America will bring the North American perspective to the discussion focussing on “Large language models: immediate challenges, long-term opportunities”. This ignite talk will summarise recent developments in the technology and highlight the challenges and opportunities libraries face in embracing and incorporating those technologies into their future operations. Calter notes that AI tools are bringing changes to many aspects of academic life such as copyright law, journal submission policies, grading and assessment processes. Regarding libraries, AI has the potential to streamline collection description and processing, and add new approaches to discovery. However, the potential to leverage AI technologies would depend on the extent to which ARL libraries build new skills in ways that will enhance their mission.

All members of academic and research libraries and other interested parties are invited to attend what promises to be a truly Hot Topics session. ARLs Hot Topic sessions are always among the highlights at IFLA Congresses.

Siviwe Bangani, Director, Research Services, Stellenbosch University Library, South Africa

 

Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens

This posting is sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG and published in cooperation with the ARL Section. Members of the Library Publishing SIG reach out to library publishers and invite them to respond to a series of questions.

This post features Ursula Arning who is Head of the Open Science Department at ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences. Ursula is responsible for the Open Access Publishing Platform PUBLISSO (https://www.publisso.de). Since 2020 she is also Professor of Open Access and Management of Digital Resources at TH Cologne (University of Applied Sciences). 

What attracted you to work in library publishing?

I like the idea that open access is a possibility to contribute to equality in the world. (I am aware of the limitations, but we can try to do something about them.) We offer all researchers in the Life Sciences the opportunity to publish their research results in our journals (https://www.journals.publisso.de) or Living Handbooks (https://www.books.publisso.de) for free or for moderate fees. With this, we enable the connection of researchers all over the world. Our journals are listed for example in PubMed Central and in our Discovery System LIVIVO (https://livivo.de) as well as in other important databases like DOAJ, to assure the best dissemination for the research results.

What infrastructure are you working with?

Our PUBLISSO open access platform is based on the content management system Drupal. We are continuously developing new features in order to be state of the art in the field of library publishing. This means that we are a single source publisher using the versioning option of Drupal to facilitate our authors to publish new research results connected to the previous version. We offer enhanced publications, allowing for archiving the support material in our repository and assigning a DOI to this material so that it can be considered as a stand-alone publication. HTML and PDF formats are standards while XML publishing is on its way. Moreover, all our publications are published under a CC-BY licence to facilitate the accessibility and reusability of research results. Currently, we are working on the implementation of a discussion platform, which will permit commentaries (post publication review) to enable the communication between authors and researchers in the field. Last but not least, we put a lot of effort in the implementation of fully accessible PDF and HTML publications – with an implementation rate of 90 percent; signifying a huge step towards true inclusiveness.

What partners do you collaborate with?

Our main partner is the AWMF (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Wissenschaftlichen Medizinischen Fachgesellschaften; English: Working Group of the Learned Societies for Medicine), but we are open for other learned societies from other disciplines like social and political sciences in order to publish and disseminate their research with our PUBLISSO-System.

What do you think is the impact of library publishing in the broader scholarly communications landscape?

The big commercial publishers are still making too much money while there is still too much emphasis on the Journal Impact Factor. However, there are now more efforts in library publishing, or scholar-led publishing, and higher acceptance from researchers. With cooperation and collaboration, we can do a lot to develop technical platforms, with all necessary features, to offer the researchers what they need to publish easily and to enable them to receive credits and to enhance reputation.

If you were not a library publishing professional, what would you be?

I would organize workshops or events, for children or adults, to promote reading or highlight Citizen Science. I still think that libraries are a democratic place not only to enable the freedom to read in a (mostly) free and accessible manner, but also to come together and discuss different opinions in a civilized and respectful way. In addition, they are the perfect place to develop the best method and give the necessary tools to understand and enhance the research process and results.

Jane Buggle, Institute Librarian, Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (IADT), Dublin, Ireland and Convenor, Library Publishing SIG.

 

 

Rotterdam: City of Labour and Books

Author: Roman Koot, Librarian of the Rotterdamsch Leeskabinet and Curator Special Collections at the EUR University Library

For those of you who decided to come to Rotterdam for this year’s conference: you made the right decision for you will encounter a remarkable city. Not the Dutch capital The Hague, not the emblematic historical Amsterdam, but a truly modern and international city, with a population comprising 175 nationalities.
Rotterdam has the reputation of a city of labour: it is one of the world’s largest port cities, characterized by a no-nonsense mentality, in contrast to Amsterdam (‘money is earned in Rotterdam, and spent in Amsterdam’). Of course, these are stereotypes. I love Amsterdam, for its museums, liveliness, history, and libraries, but Rotterdam is something else.

Rotterdam used to be a historic city as well, until the bombers of Nazi Germany destroyed the inner city on May 14, 1940. A disaster, for sure, but an opportunity as well, to design and build a completely new city center. Nowadays, you see a city famous for its bold, modern architecture. The latest addition: the spectacular vessel-shaped depot building of the Boijmans Museum.

Did you know, Rotterdam was once an intellectual hub in Europe? At the end of the seventeenth-century refugees from France and England found shelter in the Netherlands. Among them many intellectuals and artists. From France, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) settled in Rotterdam, where he compiled and published the first scientific book journal, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. John Locke (1632-1704) came from England and completed his influential An essay concerning human understanding in Rotterdam. ‘De Lantaarn’ (The Lantern), the house of the British Quaker Benjamin Furly, was the meeting point, as well as one of the best equipped libraries in town.

Some centuries earlier, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was born in Rotterdam. The importance of his writings and his influence on religious and intellectual thinking can hardly be overrated. His Praise of folly is still a joy to read and a welcome antidote to orthodox and fundamentalist thinking of any time. Although Erasmus travelled all of Europe and never returned to his birthplace, he called himself Erasmus Roterodamum, ‘Erasmus from Rotterdam’. The city is proud of its famous son, and you will meet him everywhere in town, crossing the Erasmus Bridge, on your way to study at the Erasmus University or when you visit the Central Public Library, which houses the Erasmus Collection, the world’s largest and most important collection of his published writings and studies on his thinking. Not surprisingly, the collection was recently included in the prestigious UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Some shelves from the Erasmus Collection at the Central Public Library

That brings us to libraries. Rotterdam has several wonderful libraries. Apart from the Central Public Library, which is housed in a soon to be renovated, but still a remarkable example of post-modern architecture in the city center, we have a well-equipped University Library.

Part of the reading room at the EUR University Library (photo Roos Alderhof)

Situated on the lively campus Woudestein, in a fine example of ‘béton brut’ (of course tastes differ), it is also the location of the Rotterdamsch Leeskabinet (Rotterdam Reading Cabinet), the oldest functioning private public library in the Netherlands (established in 1859). It functions today as the humanities library of the university, but also as the library for many private citizens, for their daily consumption of (new) novels, poetry and studies on history and culture. The bombing of 1940 destroyed the library, but with the support of many Rotterdam citizens it was soon after revived. It houses an interesting heritage collection of old and rare printed books as well, among which is the private library of Elie van Rijckevorsel, the last member of an elite family of entrepreneurs from nineteenth-century Rotterdam.

As a harbour city, Rotterdam of course houses a Maritime Museum. Its library contains literature on maritime, colonial and trade history, privateering and piracy, travel descriptions, ship (model) building, maritime law, and many other related subjects. A real gem is the ensemble of c. 500 old travel descriptions from the collection of W.A. Engelbrecht.
And then, don’t forget to visit the very rich collections of the library of the City Archive, where you will find everything you want to know about the history of Rotterdam. I already mentioned the new depot building of Museum Boijmans. Although the museum itself is closed for renovation, the library, which documents the collection of the museum and holds an internationally famous collection of surrealist and avantgarde literature, is open for consultation in the depot building.
And there is more: the extensive collection of books and archives on the history of architecture at the New Institute (the former Dutch Architectural Institute), and the library of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

These heritage libraries are working together under the banner ‘Rotterdam: City of Books’, with the goal to stimulate book history research and to promote our collections. At the WLIC we will present ourselves in one of the conference venues at the Ahoy, so please pay us a visit. And, if you have time between the conference sessions, the librarians will give you a warm welcome in their institutions!

Roman Koot, Librarian of the Rotterdamsch Leeskabinet and Curator Special Collection

Inclusiveness through Openness

Author: Jim O’Donnell, Arizona State University, United States

IFLA’s section for Academic and Research Libraries is proud to be organizing and hosting a satellite conference in Rotterdam, on the Friday and Saturday before WLIC 2023, on Inclusiveness through Openness. This satellite is a collaboration with Erasmus University Library,  Continuing and Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL),   Serials and other Continuing Resources,   Health and Biosciences Libraries,  IFLA Open Access Group,   Women, Information and Libraries,   Max Planck Digital Library – Open Access 2020 Initiative and The British Library.

Our assumption is that we are moving into a world in which open science and open access publishing are the rule not the exception, the norm not an experiment.  Ever since “open” became an ambition in academic libraries (one of our organizers has been an OA publisher since 1990!), we have believed and assumed that a critical benefit will be opening up science and scholarship to those who are disadvantaged in the world of high paywalls and closed systems.  The time has come to make sure the publishing and library worlds are ready to deliver on that promise.

Accordingly, this conference will start with our assumption and focus on the issues that arise and the steps that need to be taken in order to make a more open world a genuinely more inclusive world.  What mistakes must we avoid?  What strategies succeed?  What considerations do we need to keep “top of mind”?  Much of our focus will be on the global south as a region whose development and advancement will be critical to the health, prosperity, and sustainability of the human family in the coming decades.  A keynote speaker coming to Rotterdam from Zambia will set the tone and a rich variety of presentations by stakeholders and colleagues from many diverse places will frame the discussion.

The website for the satellite is here.  We will meet at Erasmus University in Rotterdam for a day and a half, August 18 and 19, with a full program but with time for what we hope will be lively and productive discussion.  The question we hope will be uppermost in participants’ minds will be, how can and should IFLA understand these issues and seek to make a difference?  What, in short, is our message from the satellite conference for all the colleagues joining WLIC and sharing in the work of IFLA?

Jim O’Donnell
University Librarian
Arizona State University, United States

 

 

Trending Around the World with ARL

Author: Marisa King, Secretary, ARL Section, IFLA, New Zealand

While reading through the latest country trends reports provided by Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Section members from across the globe, three words come to mind: Open, open and open.

In fact, I can’t put it better than the writer of this abstract for ARL’s upcoming Satellite Conference:

Twenty years after the start of the open access movement, the scholarly communication ecosystem is rapidly evolving into an open paradigm, and we can easily imagine a not-so-distant future in which open scholarship is the norm.
(For more information on the conference, see https://www.eur.nl/en/library/ifla/inclusiveness-through-openness)

Every year, ARL’s twenty section committee members provide a summary of the most important issues and trends that are occupying the minds of academic and research librarians in their country. There is a wealth of diverse information contained within these reports and providing a “summary of the summaries”, as I am attempting to do in this blog, is a challenging but stimulating task.


Let’s start with transformative agreements, an important step towards a fully open access model in academic publishing.
Many examples of transformative agreements are referred to by ARL members in their reports. These agreements are often negotiated on behalf of many institutions by a national association. For example, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, representing 81 research institutions, has been actively negotiating transformative agreements on behalf of members e.g. Sage. Other examples are evident in Finland, Germany, South Africa and Australia.
Much is also happening in the broader field of open scholarship. For example, the Association for College and Research Libraries in the US has set itself a strategic goal of supporting an “accelerated transition” to more open and equitable systems of scholarship, while national open scholarship policies and practical guidelines have been drafted in Finland (https://avointiede.fi/en/policies). Much is also happening to support open scholarship at a grassroots level. Open science and open research toolkits have been created in Estonia and Australia; library users in Bangladesh are being educated about the benefits of using open access resources; and workshops, conferences and symposiums supporting the adoption of open science are ongoing at both an institutional and national level in Botswana.

The concept of open and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data is also receiving its share of attention. In Denmark, the rollout of institutional policies and support for data stewardship and research data management is a major trend. And various research data services have been rolled out in Hong Kong’s academic libraries, supported by universities.

Now, let’s take a step away from the “open” paradigm to consider some of the other issues and initiatives that are top of mind for the world’s academic and research librarians.

On the technology front, moves are underway in Denmark, Hong Kong and Estonia to develop a single common library system to unite academic and research libraries across countries. In some cases, new technologies also feature in staff development programmes; librarians in Botswana, for example, are learning the finer points of data wrangling in Open Refine, while topics like cybersecurity and the GDPR (the EU’s new data protection law) are on the staff development menu in Estonia.

Moves are also afoot in some countries to develop more inclusive library services. In New Zealand, for example, there is a focus on providing library services that are relevant to indigenous (Māori) students, and working towards the broader goal of decolonising libraries and communities.

Among these many new developments, the usual suspects of managing costs, providing effective leadership, managing physical spaces effectively, building staff capacity, and promoting digital and information literacy also feature in the list of country trends provided by ARL members.

And remember digitisation? The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany has seen greatly increased digitisation in academic libraries, along with more virtual consulting and online seminars for library users. And France’s Bibliothèque Nationale plans to set up new premises in the city of Amiens in northern France to develop a National Newspapers Repository providing storage, restoration and digitization capacity, along with on-site services.

Whatever conclusions we may try to draw from these many and diverse trends, one thing is for sure. It’s an exciting but challenging time to work in the academic and research libraries sector.

Marisa King
Secretary
ARL Section, IFLA