Access to information is vital for sustainable development and equity, but obstacles like internet shutdowns, misinformation, and expensive paywalls hinder this. Libraries historically provide access to knowledge, empowering individuals and communities. In the digital age, librarians can combat misinformation through information literacy and promote open licenses for community storytelling. African librarians are urged to embrace library activism to ensure libraries remain relevant and powerful agents of change. Training programs by AfLIA aim to equip librarians with the skills to advocate for libraries as vital institutions in Africa.

Atla is a membership association of librarians and information professionals, and a producer of research tools, committed to advancing the study of religion and theology. The 2023 Annual Report is now available. ATLA is among the data sources of the ISSN Portal.

The spread of Open Access represents one of the successes of the library and research fields over the last quarter century. It is essential, across the library field, to work together to make a reality of open access through librarians’ advocacy and practice. To help in this, IFLA’s Open Science and Scholarship Advisory Committee is happy to share its Open Access vocabulary, which brings together the most widely used terms and definitions. This is intended to act as a reference guide, providing a route for more librarians into advancing openness.

This article is the fourth in a series of blog posts on AI developments at Ex Libris.

Ex Libris, part of Clarivate, has developed an AI-driven metadata generator that has already been able to enrich Alma Community Zone Bibliographic records for books. The current enrichment is focused on generating metadata for three specific MARC fields: Language (041 and 008), Summary (520), LC subject headings (650). As of February 2024, Ex Libris’ AI metadata generator is live with 200 ebook titles from ProQuest EBook Central. For more details and updates on the evolving status of the project, read the article.

This document summarizes recent work, in particular reports by the SPARC association and the Committee for Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (AWBI) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). These reports document and alert us to the serious threats to the privacy of users of information resources. A growing proportion of publishers have moved towards licensing access to online content that remains hosted on their servers. Therefore, publishers have acquired considerable control over the collection, storage and analysis of library users’ reading and research data, including personal data.

Libraries have a significant role in promoting responsible research practices, including transparency and reproducibility, by leveraging their connections to academic communities and collaborating with stakeholders like research funders and publishers. Recommendations for libraries include:

1) Partnering with researchers to promote a research culture that values transparency and reproducibility,

2) enhancing existing research infrastructure and support,

3) investing in raising awareness and developing skills and capacities related to these principles.

This document is meant to supplement the American Library Association’s Core Competences of Librarianship. The revision team worked during 2023 to update the 2017 document. Their effort was informed by 2022 survey about the current usage of the Core Competencies document and potential changes and additions to the document. The revision team incorporated competencies relating to artificial intelligence and large language models, emphasized ethics, and moved the examples to an appendix for easier updating over time.

Look at the table of contents.

The British Library began restoring access to its online catalog on 15 January 2024, following a ransomware attack last October.

The loss of the main British Library catalogue has been perhaps the single most visible impact. The online system, for now, will be the only way to see the rarest books, maps, journals and music scores held by the library. The system for taking those physical objects into reading rooms is not yet running again. The majority of the Library’s key special collections – the archives, manuscripts and other unique items, will be accessible in an on-site capacity.

This post discusses seven contexts in which artificial intelligence (AI) is used. This post transitions from the more general AI discussion in earlier posts to one more focused on libraries, before looking more closely at potential library services and responses in an upcoming fourth post. The author concludes that the library discussion is necessarily moving towards forms of engagement, cautiously. For now, extra care and special attention are certainly warranted.

You can read the previous posts:

1. Generative AI and large language models: background and contexts
2. Generative AI, scholarly and cultural language models, and the return of content

This webinar, organized by OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association), was held in November 2023.

For the past decade or so, new jobs have emerged that illustrate an acknowledgment that libraries need to engage with evolutions in scholarly communication. At the same time, the creation of these positions and units strengthens a pressing need to develop new skills and expertise. Several questions were addressed during this webinar about the sense of preparedness of librarians to face the open access world; the role libraries play  in scholarly communication in a context which is not only digital but also OA.

Please find the panelist presentations:  Joanna Ball, Lai Ma, Rachael Samberg, Anna Clements, the responses to attendee questions and the recordings.