Technology

Ninety-one percent of academic librarians believe that analytics improve their understanding of how students, faculty, and researchers engage with their library, and 85 percent believe analytics can help show the library’s value to administrators and help libraries justify budget decisions, according to a recent national survey of 196 academic librarians conducted by LJ in conjunction with EBSCO.

The press freedom nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF, after its French title, Reporters Sans Frontières) has created a way for readers everywhere to access and read documents that have been banned or censored in the countries where they were published—through The Uncensored Library, a collection of articles and books housed in the virtual world of Minecraft.

E-access was a hot topic at the Public Library Association (PLA) 2022 conference, held in Portland, OR, from March 23–25. Programs examining points along the pipeline from licensing to broadband to innovative infrastructure were well attended.

In February, collection development librarians from U.S. public libraries pointed out on listservs and social media that several fascist ebooks—including ebooks that deny the Holocaust, a sympathetic biography of Hitler, and a new English translation of a title written by Nazi officer—were available for patrons to download on hoopla and were surfacing in searches alongside other nonfiction content. One of the titles was also available for libraries to license via OverDrive Marketplace.

There are many ways to showcase special collections: social media, newsletters, and blog posts; online and in-person exhibits; and both physical and digital catalogues and books. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries’ Distinctive Collections has upped the creativity factor with an immersive video game, “A Lab of One’s Own,” that allows players to discover archival materials telling the stories of women from MIT’s history.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), recently sponsored the development and publication of a series of seven Privacy Field Guides designed to offer practical information and hands-on exercises for public, academic, and K–12 librarians.

Machine learning (ML) tools can potentially help patrons discover relevant content and services as they search a library’s catalog. However, ML tools need to be trained with a lot of good data to generate good recommendations, and initially, contextual recommendations generated with high-quality library metadata may be more effective at achieving the same goal.

The LC Labs department of the Library of Congress recently published a comprehensive report on its Humans-in-the-Loop initiative, which crowdsourced volunteers to train a machine learning (ML) tool to extract structured data from one of the library’s digital collections. It also explored the intersection of crowdsourcing and ML algorithms more broadly. The project resulted in a framework that will inform future crowdsourcing and data enrichment projects at LC, and the report offers other libraries and cultural heritage institutions insights and advice for developing engaging, ethical, and useful crowdsourcing projects of their own.

UPDATE: On December 9, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), filed suit against the Maryland Attorney General seeking to overturn House Bill 518/(SB432). The law requires publishers to offer "electronic literary product" licenses to Maryland libraries “on reasonable terms,” and prohibits publishers from instituting embargo periods during which ebook and electronic audiobook licenses are available for sale to the public but not to libraries.