The Distant Librarian

Library Futures Funtime Book Talk w/Chokepoint Capitalism and Data Cartels

On November 17, I was able to attend most of an amazing book talk sponsored by Library Futures. It was with the authors of two timely books, Chokepoint Capitalism (Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow), and Data Cartels (Sarah Lamdan). You can, and should, watch the entire recording!

In Chokepoint Capitalism, "by analyzing book publishing and news, livemusic and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices." (Can everyone say, Taylor Swift?) 

From the introductory chapter of Data Cartels, "Data analytics companies are a relatively new type of information firm, the result of mass consolidation across information markets and a proliferation of data analysis technologies. We think of companies like RELX (Reed Elsevier LexisNexis) and Thomson Reuters as publishers, but they've made a transition away from being traditional content providers. Instead, they're crunching their warehouses of digital content through AI software, machine-learning technology, complex algorithms, and other types of data analytics systems to form new information products to sell."

I grabbed the following links from the chat box during the time I was able to spend watching the first part of the talk. They're in no particular order, but may help contextualize some of the stuff being talked about.

Monopoly - a situation where there is a single seller in the market.
Monopsony - a market with a single buyer.

Progressive Librarians Guild Calls for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity.

WNYC On The Media: Infinite Scroll (audio)

Publishing Giants Are Fighting Libraries on E-Books

Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox

Markets and the Future of the Circular Economy

Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Inoculating Law Schools Against Bad Metrics

 

 

Clipchamp - a VERY cool screencasting option!

The other day, Lifehacker posted that Windows Has a New Tool for Simultaneously Recording Your Screen and Webcam. That tool is Clipchamp, and I am impressed! Oh, and it's free.

MPOW has blocked the Microsoft Store, so I wasn't able to install the desktop version, but I was able to run the web version. I have to imagine the desktop version would provide a more seamless experience, with better performance, but even running it in a web browser was perfectly fine. Maybe a little jerky when doing the editing. The web version requires either Chrome or Edge, but running it in Chrome, I was able to record what was happening in my Firefox browser. I'm not going to bother posting the test video I made, but it did everything I expected. When editing, I was able to clip out sections, I was able to move and resize my video camera feed, and I added some stock music and graphics. When saving, I had the option to export at different resolutions, and then have the option to upload directly to YouTube or 7 other destinations. Exports are .mp4 files.

There is a limit of 30 minutes per recording, and I don't see that the Premium version changes that. For 99% of what you're likely to want to record as a screencast, I think this tool would do the trick. Definitely worth checking out!

At first glance: Misleading figures - How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

When I first saw the article, How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries, of course I had to see how MPOW, the University of Calgary, stacked up. We've long been a proponent of open access; we had the first open access author's fund in Canada, established in 2008!

Imagine my dismay, then, to scroll through the figures to see that we were well below the national average in what this paper looked at, "a six-year span (2014–2019) of librarian-authored publications". Some institutions were rocking 100%, and the UofC was barely above 70% :-(

It's not until you get past the article itself, and into the Appendices, that you learn how many articles from each institution are being examined, and then you realize how misleading the above figures are. I'm not picking on Montreal and Laval, but they jumped out with their 100% compliance and the fact that they were right next to each other, so were easy to highlight. Appendix 1 shows us the following:

None of this changes the findings that, "the data suggest that Canadian academic librarians are personally motivated to self-archive and make their research open." And it's a good article! I just wish U of Calgary didn't look as bad as the tables made it appear. :-/

Tummon, N. & Desmeules, R., (2022) “How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries”, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13831

Quick review: An AI toolkit for libraries

Even more on artificial intelligence. I'm going to create a new category for this blog! I just finished reading An AI toolkit for libraries, by Michael Upshall, in UKSG Insights. I found it to provide a really good background on what artificial intelligence is, and isn't, including some examples of some basic narrow AI currently in use in the academic world (spell check, plagiarism detection, topic discovery, etc.). Then he gets in to what you, as an information professional, should pay attention to when evaluating the use of AI in your workplace. Finally, at the end of the article, we get to the actual toolkit, which is actually a nice checklist. I won't repeat it here, but the main considerations for you to consider are the goal of the product, what's in the corpus used to train it, what's the algorithm, evaluation and metrics, sanity check, dissemination, and feedback.

Even if you don't think you care about AI, or that it doesn't play a role in what you're currently doing at work, this is a great introduction to the topic, and you'll learn something useful. If you already have some knowledge on the topic, it's a great refresher with some good, current references. Oh, and those of you that don't think AI's already in your daily routine, I think you're probably wrong. Go read the article!

Intellectual and unreasonable - AI and male librarians

I've been poking a bit at the multitude of AI image-generation tools, and just ran across this tool that allows one to do a little exploring of the algorithmic bias that's pretty much baked-in, but otherwise not really visible. I learned about it via this article in Vice, and thanks to @ResearchBuzz. Here's what I found:

First, according to Stable Diffusion, all librarians must appear against a background of books. Second, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of librarians present as female. And third, there are only two adjectives in this tool that will return pictures with a majority of male-presenting librarians, "intellectual" and "unreasonable". On the left of each of the images below are the default returns for the profession of "librarian", and on the right are the returns including the above adjectives. Click through to embiggen.

Intellectual Librarians

 

Unreasonable Librarians