Systemic and institutional racism is an enormous problem in academic publishing, and this thoroughly infects libraries as well. Charlotte Roh’s 2018 CARL presentation and accompanying slides should be mandatory reading in this regard, and her citations lead out to lots of other important and relevant scholarly articles and reports. So if you haven’t read Roh’s work, please stop and do so now.
Read More »Author: Mark Bilby
A Second Call to Solidarity with the National Emergency Library: Time for a Boycott
The suit brought by the American Association of Publishers in SDNY against the Internet Archive shows a level of dishonesty and callousness that is wholly out of step with copyright law, the special place and protections of libraries under that law, and the plight of library users during our current pandemic. Why?
Read More »Wayback Machine Compare: An Ideal Digital-Professional Portfolio Tool
Don’t know how I missed this, but Internet Archive back in October of 2019 released a new feature on its Wayback Machine to enable users easily to compare different versions of an archived web page. I’ve been hoping for such a feature for a while as a crucial tool for Digital History / Digital Humanities and even made inquires to private software companies about developing it. I’m elated that the adept and agile team at Wayback Machine built it directly into their UI.
Read More »unsub Featured in Scholarly Kitchen
Thanks to the thorough research and sympathetic writing of Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, unsub (formerly Unpaywall Journals) has now received the positive publicity its team (Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem) so richly deserve.
Read More »Preserving Japanese-American Digital History
During a pandemic when library print materials are inaccessible, one of the best ways librarians can serve the public is by ensuring that digital history is preserved. And one of the most important tools to preserve digital history is Archive-It, developed by the Internet Archive to preserve whole websites through their various iterations and transformations.
Read More »Crowd-Sourced Unlatching of Curricular Books: A Joint Pilot by the California State University, Knowledge Unlatched, and the Internet Archive
Updated May 13, 2020
My CNI presentation felt like it went really well, despite a couple wireless freezes during the session. A video recording is now available on Vimeo or embedded in the session event page, linked from the Coalition for Networked Information Spring 2020 Virtual Membership Meeting website.
Read More »Academic Senate of the California State University Passes ORCID Resolution (AS-3412-20/FA)
The Academic Senate of the California State University (ASCSU) today passed resolution AS-3412-20/FA in robust support of ORCID. The vote was without dissent: 47 ayes, 0 nays, and 2 abstentions.
Read More »In Defense of the National Emergency Library: A Call to Library Solidarity and Partnership with the Internet Archive
Public and university libraries have paid hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to own, catalog, and preserve print books, only now to be rendered utterly incapable of providing access to them. That is a massive waste of public funds and decades of work by librarians.
Read More »CSU Explores the Possibility of a Google Books Partnership
Just heard yesterday that our CSU Council of Library Deans (COLD) approved a request I’d made to begin exploring a possible system-wide partnership with Google Books.
Read More »ORCID-ShareYourPaper.org Integration in the Works
My schedule yesterday (April 21st) included hosting a really excellent meeting with Joe McArthur (lead developer of OpenAccessButton and ShareYourPaper.org), Sheila Rabun (ORCID rep. for Lyrasis) and Shawna Sadler (ORCID Engagement Manager for the Americas).
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