Thinking about the ethical care of information, knowledge, culture, and what we do for societies over a very long time.

Joshua Chalifour

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.

Artificial Intelligence to Examine Us

Open data is a well-defined concept but in the public sector, there is some difficult work ahead for its digital curation. Although the support and production of open data from governments around the world varies (with many not yet supporting it at all) there are clear movements to encourage and grow open government data initiatives.

Digital Curation Issues Involving Open Government Data

This is the second part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11

 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal Download the whole document (PDF). Archives face inexorable problems with the duty to preserve massive quantities of information, stored on frail digital media.

Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

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.

Could Mastodon Instances Make a Pledge to Their Communities?

A common way to model the relationships of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is the DIKW pyramid. Starting with its base, each concept builds on top of the former. The gist is that we require data to form information † we use information to gain knowledge † and we use knowledge toward developing wisdom. This model is one doorway to understanding the relationship between these concepts.

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Our Pragmatic Ignorance

This morning, upon learning of the newly negotiated NAFTA or as it seems to be called now USMCA, I sent the following letter to ministers of the current Canadian government. I appreciate the very difficult and complex work involved in negotiating the new version of NAFTA with the USA and Mexico.

Letter to Ministers Regarding the New NAFTA / USMCA &amp; “Intellectual Property”

Communia published its

 Public Domain Manifesto

. The manifesto identifies the public domain concept with respect to historical development and more urgently, its relevance to culture today. I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business.

First Take on the Public Domain Manifesto

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

Publishers Proposing Surveillance Tech on Libraries

Recent copyright legislation prevents archives from legitimately fulfilling key requirements for the long term preservation and provision of access to digital fonds.

How Recent Copyright Legislation (C-11) and TPMs Prevent Digital Preservation

I’d been concerned with what I had once called digital cultural amnesia. Though in reflecting on the word “amnesia” I no longer think it’s the best way to express the problem. Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, writes about the phenomenon in

 The Observer

. She takes the personal analogue and raises it to a national level.

Ephemera and the National Memory

This is the third part in a series of three posts.

Part 1 — The TPM Environment and Copyright Change from C-11 Part 2 — Long Term Digital Preservation and the Role of TDRs

 Part 3 — Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

Download the whole document (PDF). The Canadian Council of Archives (CCA) identifies five categories of appraisal criteria.

Copyright Law, TPMs, and Appraisal

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.

Tracking the Challenges Made to Canadian Library Books

I’ve been reading the draft consultation version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy (PDF). The strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the report addresses regarding culture;

Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft

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.

Institutional Change toward Open Scholarship and Open Science

I first read an e-book a few years ago when I decided to see how War and Peace felt on my phone. Engrossing. And probably no less so than it is on paper. Now I like both paper books and e-books but the spread of e-books is about more than just enjoying them or not.

E-books: New Experiences and Problems with Access

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.

Talk about the Broad Value of Open Access

Chroknowlogy

Gautama Mehta's recent article "[Proposal to install spyware in
university libraries to protect copyrights shocks
academics](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/spyware-in-libraries/)"
is an important read. I appreciate the many issues it raises and the
great links to additional commentary about Elsevier's and Springer's
problematic Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI).

Although the article mentions digital rights advocates and scientists, I
did not see much written about the fact that ***librarians** are not
passive recipients of technology* in their libraries.

The article says "...the proposal to install surveillance software in
university libraries is only hypothetical." but nobody gets to come in
and just install software in university libraries. Librarians actively
engage in making well-informed technology decisions. As an academic
librarian, I would like to call attention to the perspective that
librarians could be expected to have with respect to the SNSI's
hypothetical proposals.

Libraries are the living results of ongoing development, change, care,
and preservation by many people in collaboration. We make *intentional*,
*studied decisions* on how we go about our work. Generally speaking, we
aim to provide equitable and safe access to information for everyone.

In fact, librarians have professional codes of ethics. For example, the
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
[Code of Ethics for Librarians and other Information
Workers](https://www.ifla.org/faife/professional-codes-of-ethics-for-librarians)
explicitly guides against the sort of scheme being proposed by the
SNSI's oligopolistic publishers. Within the code, a section titled
"Privacy, secrecy, and transparency" states:

> "The relationship between the library and the user is one of
> confidentiality and librarians and other information workers will take
> appropriate measures to ensure that user data is not shared beyond the
> original transaction."

The guidance here closes the door on permitting a third party to collect
additional biometric data about people using the library's tools or
services. In fact, it asks that we **take measures against that
possibility**. And we do. Discussions about ensuring user privacy are
not uncommon when we consider how we implement services.

Librarians take very seriously the implications of what might happen if
data about a person's research interests were to be obtained by third
parties that might sell or use it in unexpected, detrimental ways to
that person's academic freedom, well-being, or personal security.
Although I'm not arguing that libraries are perfect in this regard,
librarians have a history of advocating for privacy and security rights
alongside rights to access information.

We also have a professional responsibility to ensure that people respect
the rights of authors, publishers, or other creators (see the section in
the IFLA code on "Open access and intellectual property"). We fulfill
that responsibility in various ways, including educating people on legal
access.

Respecting intellectual property rights does not conflict with the
responsibility to protect privacy or confidentiality nor should the two
be deceptively pitted against each other as the SNSI appears to be
attempting. One avenue that can help alleviate misconstrued tensions in
these two objectives is to advocate for open access publishing and
reasonable copyright terms, which we put considerable effort into, but
that is another story.

Keep in mind those ethical guidelines that professional librarians
consider while implementing technology in libraries. How then, can these
SNSI publishers imagine that we would possibly entertain implementing
such a privacy-leaking, invavise technology as they have described? One
possibility that was mentioned is that they would dangle discounts to
their databases in front of us. That sort of mafia-protection style
scheme is a non-starter from this librarian's perspective. I suspect the
answer is that they know we would not support any of this and that is
why their stategy instead appears to be targetting overall university
security.

Mehta's article notes that the SNSI has made a "...mandate of protecting
higher education from cybercriminals..." Furthermore, the FAQ on the
SNSI website asks "Why should I be worried about security within
university networks?" and provides this response:

> "The higher education sector is particularly vulnerable to
> cyber-attack due to the large amount of personal and research data
> that universities, including library systems, routinely store...."

All of this strikes me as a strategy to position sales of their
invasive, surveillance technology as a means to protect the university's
data and IT systems against potential attacks. In other words, to go
around libraries by engaging other segments of their institutions.

That approach misleads, as was linked elsewhere in Mehta's article.
University security is unlikely to be under much of a threat due to the
sort of activity the SNSI's tech would supposedly operate on.

I hope that knowing about librarians' professional codes of ethics and
our overarching aims suggests something useful about the proposed
surveillance technologies from the SNSI. Specifically, we would
challenge such technologies, reducing the likelihood of them leaving the
realm of the hypothetical or succeeding in production environments.
