Librarians have ceded our control of collections and collection-building in the digital realm to a few commercial vendors. Among other things, this has professional ethical implications. We must host our own digital resources or be subject to censorship and extortion.

The Authors Guild (USA) launched its Human Authored Certification program (29 January 2025). This certification permits its members to register their written works with the Guild as having been created by a human rather than something produced by artificial intelligence (AI). These are some first thoughts I had when reading about the program and reflecting on initiatives with similar goals.

Bellingcat provides a workshop for people with no experience using the command line. The idea is to gain essential skills that will open up the possibility of using a range of other digital tools toward open source investigative work. You can find out more and sign up from this page.

The processes and supports within an institution can, I’ve noticed, demand a bit of effort to change. When we speak of open scholarship or open science, many aspects tie-in or lead out from those concepts, which makes the whole prospect of institutional change quite complex.

The hype over the last few months regarding generative AI has been quite interesting. I’ve facilitated a variety of discussions (and presented some) with faculty, staff, and other librarians regarding these tools and I’ve been following the public discourse. The thing that I keep coming back to and which I don’t feel gets the attention that it merits, is the potential to consider these newer AI systems, LLMs, etc.

Sometimes we see headlines in the news about a book being challenged at a library. People from different perspectives might see the content of the book or other aspects of it as threatening or inappropriate. Understanding these challenges and forming responses is essential to our work as librarians in advocating and supporting intellectual freedom. Now, the work to track this information will receive more coordinated support.

I’ve been thinking about something like an instance Community Pledge becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are.

As a librarian, I talk with other faculty and students about their academic work and the life-cycle of the research process. I’ve always stressed that open access is important for many reasons, including toward making research outputs available to people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to get them.

Paul Penn’s article, How to Study Effectively (Psyche Magazine) provides insights on why common study techniques fail us. Research shows that cramming doesn’t work well for gaining knowledge before a test but there are other techniques that do work.

The 2021 Concordia Library Research Forum will take place on the 27th and 28th of April. There is an excellent lineup of presentations and posters (like always) addressing library or archive research (completed or in-progress).

Gautama Mehta’s recent article “Proposal to install spyware in university libraries to protect copyrights shocks academics” is an important read.