The Distant Librarian

One of the best uses of GenAI I've seen yet - CanLII the Canadian Legal Information Institute

A colleague alerted me to the existence of this project, which had flown under my radar. The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) has used "a commercially available Large Language Model (LLM)" to generate summaries of primary case law, and legislative documents for Alberta, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Saskatchewan.

It's the summaries of legislative documents that excites me. Legalese doesn't seem very approachable to the layperson, yet some of this stuff can be pretty important to at least know about. Here's the Alberta Libraries Act: https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/laws/stat/rsa-2000-c-l-11/latest/rsa-2000-c-l-11.html As soon as I start scrolling I want to quit. But now I can click on the AI analysis tab and have a summary that even I can understand! Yeah, if it turns out to be something that should involve a lawyer, that's not going to change, but at least this summary gives me a decent chance of understanding what's going on with any given legislative document.

Generative AI courses for your mom

I know it's cliché, but I AM actually trying to help my mom understand Generative AI a little more (hi, mom!).

I just completed this free course, and recommend it as a gentle introduction to generative AI: Destination AI: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. It will require an investment of time, though maybe not quite the 6 hours it claims. The only big drawback is that if you fail a quiz, you'll have to wait a full 24 hours before you can re-take it. That said, you CAN move on to another module even if you don't pass the quiz, so not that big a deal.

What will you learn?

• What AI really is (and what it’s not!).
• The impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace and on society as a whole.
• Go behind the scenes of an artificial intelligence project and get familiar with concepts like deep learning and machine learning.

What if your mom's a teacher? I haven't actually taken this course, but Google offers Generative AI for Educators, which is shorter, at only 2 suggested hours.

You’ll learn how to use generative AI tools to:

• Save time on everyday tasks like drafting emails and other correspondence
• Personalize instruction for different learning styles and abilities
• Enhance lessons and activities in creative ways

With whom did Danielle Smith actually consult on her transgender rights policy?

In January 2024, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced "sweeping changes to Alberta's student gender identity, sports and surgery policies" aimed at the province's transgender community. According to news reports, "Alberta’s premier says she’s had many conversations with members of the trans community before and since drafting a suite of policy proposals dealing with transgender rights." I could find no mentions from members of the transgender community of such consultations, so I submitted a FOIP request to the government. My first request was, apparently, too narrow, so upon advice from several readers I resubmitted the following request, which yielded a result:

Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.

I am seeking all documents, including correspondence, that describe or make reference to the planning of that consultation, including but not limited to references to parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.

Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024

Attached is the response, which shows a single, 30-minute meeting, with one person whose name has been redacted.

EC000-2024-G-12 Applicant Copy (PDF)

As mentioned in that CTV report, Premier Smith also said,

“It’s not a single voice and it’s not a single perspective.” Danielle Smith said during a Feb. 5 press conference in Ottawa. But it was one individual’s experience in particular, Smith says, that prompted the province to take action.

Yet my FOIP request suggests it was, in fact, a single voice that persuaded Danielle Smith to announce this ideological policy.

Can anyone shed light on that Organizer: MDS Final line? Is that an Outlook thing, or is it possibly related to the meeting? It looks like the former, but Google doesn't seem to think so...

#TRAHR

Seeking Alberta FOIP advice

I recently put in a FOIP request to the Alberta Executive Council and got a pretty quick response that no records exist (EC000-2024-G-10 closure letter).

I asked for clarification, and received,

"Based on your very specific request for a list, a thorough search was undertaken to locate the records, and it was discovered that no such list (record) exists with Executive Council. FOIP is unable to interpret results of a search other than convey the results."

That wording makes me think something does exist, but I have to re-word, or ask a different department. Anyone have any advice?

My original request was,

Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.

I am requesting a list of all parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.

Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024
Eliminations: duplicate records, draft records, email records which are duplicated in the final longest string, records subject to solicitor/client or litigation privilege, records containing third party business information, and records containing third party personal information.

Should I not have asked for a "list"?

Jeremy Singer-Vine's Data Liberation Project

Not to be confused with Canada's Data Liberation Initiative, Jeremy Singer-Vine is spending his time on the Data Liberation Project, "an initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest." There's not yet a lot to look at there, but there's plenty in the pipeline.

I just attended a webinar he gave in conjunction with MuckRock and DocumentCloud (I think I'd missed the memo or forgotten that MuckRock and DocumentCloud had merged in 2018) You can watch a recording of it here. Jeremy described how he built an add-on for DocumentCloud that allows him to subscribe to an email distribution list, turn the content of the emails that are received to RSS, and then parse the RSS looking for PDFs which are then automatically loaded to DocumentCloud, where the PDFs become searchable. Pipelines!

Unfortunately, at this time Jeremy's pretty much focussed on US data sources, which is completely understandable for a one-man show, but I couldn't help thinking about the recently-launched Canadian Investigative Journalism Foundation. Even if they don't end up working together, there are definitely some tools available in Jeremy's project that could be of use to IJF, and indeed anyone who's interested in surfacing data that should be public.

What's that, you say, you don't already know about DocumentCloud? That's probably because it's geared towards journalists, but I think I got in when I was working on a project I thought it would help with. Your mileage may vary for gaining full access as a non-journalist, but if you've got a good use-case, your odds are probably good. It's pretty frickin' cool, and I've just made a mental note to spend some more time with it :-)

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

 

 

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

Why you should pay attention to your Creative Commons licenses

I have never given a second thought to ensuring I've chosen the correct/most recent version of a creative commons license. That's changed, because I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's post, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator. In it, he outlines the emergence of the Copyleft troll, someone who posts images with an outdated CC license, and then sues people for using those images as they were intended to be used, but who may (or may not!) have neglected to completely comply by the letter of the license.

I don't know whether any of this would even apply to the textual works I would more likely post with a CC license, and maybe that doesn't matter because I'm not going to be going after anyone for using my works that may have an old license, but here at MPOW we're really starting to move to Open Educational Resources, and I could easily see the authors of such resources including images that are CC licensed earlier than 4.0 (or whatever the current version is by the time you read this). Going back to Cory's post, it seems that license version 2.0 is the really problematic one, but perhaps 1.0 and 2.5 are bad for the same or similar reasons? Please let me know if you know!

Does anyone know of a tool that allows me to search a specific site for content that has any creative commons license? So I'm looking for something like https://wordpress.org/openverse/ that includes something like Google's "site:" option. Bonus points if it could allow a search to be limited to content that applies a specific CC license! @researchbuzz? @cogdog?

Resources:

• Creative Commons FAQs
• Creative Commons version 4.0
• Creative Commons history of license versions

I love these quotes from Cory:

If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

If you send threats instead of requests for correction, you are a terrible person and you should feel really bad about yourself.

Stay safe, all, and do let me know if you have answers to any of my questions above!

 

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta charted

Last month, I posted about how a patron request prompted me to collect the historical COVID-19 R-values for Alberta. That data is available on a public Google Sheet, but I had meant to throw up a chart as well. The other day I was reminded about Datawrapper, so I used that to make this:

Hopefully it will update itself as I continue to update the source...

I could've also done it right on Google Sheets, but with fewer customization options. I think. Maybe I'll go add that there now!

Update (June 22, 2021): Apparently this chart will not automatically update, which seems a glaring oversight on the part of Datawrapper. From their site: "The data will be updated from the spreadsheet every time you open the chart in Datawrapper, but not after the chart is published."

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta

Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not to make previously-reported numbers available. Anywhere.

Here are the Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta in a Google Spreadsheet. I'll continue to manually update.

 

Initial Thoughts on Alberta's FOIP Process

On December 8, I noticed the Govt. of Alberta had posted a new video to YouTube titled, FOIP Request Service Guided Tour. You know what? I've honestly always wanted to submit a FOIP request!

Here are some initial thoughts on how it went, and I'll report back if/when I hear something.

So we start at https://foip.alberta.ca, where we learn that,

Alberta's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP Act) provides a method to request records, your own personal information, and to request correction of your own personal information in records held by public bodies. The FOIP Request Service allows you to make requests to the Government of Alberta and some provincial public bodies. If you want to make a request to another public body not covered by this service, please contact the FOIP Coordinator for the appropriate FOIP Office.

At the suggestion of a friend, I thought I'd see what I could learn about one of the firms the current government seems to use as a go-to for so many of their reports, McKinsey & Company. This is what I ultimately came up with, and this was submitted on Dec. 16:

I would like to obtain a list of all contracts awarded by the Alberta Government to McKinsey and Company for the calendar years 2019 and 2020. I would also like to obtain a list of all reports finished by McKinsey and Company for the Alberta Government during the calendar years 2019 and 2020. These two lists should be delivered in an open format such as CSV.

I already had an Alberta ID, so was able to log in right away. I was immediately disappointed to realize that I wasn't going to be able to request records across the entire government :-( Right off the bat I had to choose a specific department. Fair enough, Advanced Education it is.

FOIP Request Body

The first unanswered question is what's the difference between a General and a Personal request? No idea or explanation. I guess from later questions that a Personal request is a request for data about oneself.

FOIP Request Details

Question #2 comes right after that. Scrolling down the screen I have lots of options. What, exactly, do they mean? Will it cost more, or take longer, if I select or deselect some of these options? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

FOIP Request Options

The last question on the form itself is about supporting documentation. In the video I just rewatched, it does note that this is optional, but wouldn't it be nice to mention that on the form too?

FOIP Supporting Documents

Huh. Neither at the end of the submission nor in the email receipt is there any indication of what comes next, or how long this might take. I did some searching, and eventually found a PDF from 2009 that suggests I'll hear back within 30 days.

FOIP Received

I just logged in to check the status of my request, and am left with a final question. Did I miss something, or does this just mean, as I hope, that the request is still open? Too many questions!!!

FOIP Request Status

So yeah, a $25 experiment. Stay tuned, and Happy Holidays!

January 26, 2021 update: I realized the 30-day period had passed, so I logged back on and saw that the status still read "Online Incomplete". I poked at it a few times and finally realized when I hit the Continue button (screenshot above) it was not in fact asking me to submit a new request, which is what the screen looked like to me.  I clicked next on each existing page looking for some indication that I had missed some information, and eventually got to the page that showed I had paid, and when I clicked the next screen it then said the status was Submitted. So NOW the 30-day clock starts. See you again at the end of February. (smh)

An RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page

I got tired of there not being an RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page, so I made one. You can use it too! https://feed43.com/8203235035481320.xml

3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere (Gizmodo)

AnyDesk is totally new to me, so I thought I'd make note of Gizmodo's post on 3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere. I use Chrome Remote Desktop at least weekly, and have used TeamViewer to good effect in the past, so can vouch for each of those. The commenters overwhelmingly choose TeamViewer. I'll certainly explore AnyDesk and likely add it to my arsenal.

Good tools to know about for sure!

Factiva filters for Fake News Phenomenon

Thanks to a tip from my colleague Dani I learned that Factiva has recently added a filter for fake news. Like many things with Factiva (IMHO), it's not terribly intuitive to find, so here are the steps. You can either add this as a filter to a  search you've already run, or just use it to see what all is out (in) there.

From the main search page choose Subject, then Political/General News, and finally, Fake News Phenomenon. If you simply click on the blue arrow to the right and then run the search you'll see all there is on the subject within Factiva. According to the scope note, it looks like this category was added on March 14, 2017.