Yumma Darruwa Ngunnawal

Welcome from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.

Dhawra nguna dhawra Ngunawal to our graduates who are celebrating their success at graduation ceremonies this week.

Dhuniai yurwaŋ in your future.

ANU COVID-19

COVID inspections are no longer required. If you see supplies are running low of hand sanitiser or masks do let the relevant people know in your building.

Please read all the messages from the University about COVID 19.

All COVID updates will be communicated via the weekly OnCampus email newsletter. You can find previous staff OnCampus and student OnCampus editions online.

Library Staff Consultative Committee

Reminder there is a vacancy in the membership for a staff member in the levels ANU1-4.

SIS Symposium

DRAFT THEME: Knowing ourselves in a world of inspiriting academic work

DRAFT CONTENT:

SIS area talks (SIS Comms, Digital Scholarship, ANU Press, Archives/Records/Information governance, Library – students training, CAD, reference and spaces, ARDC)

Academics suggestions so far:

·       Associate Professor Keturah Whitford, CBE

·       Cameron Roles, ANU College of Law

·       Dr Rosalie Aroni, Medical School,

·       Professor Rosalind Smith, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

The program of talks to assist us all to know more about how the University operates and about strategic initiatives underway. The draft program is below. If you have any suggestions do contact me.

SIS Staff meetings

Knowing the University

2023

·       Q1- WHS and Dean Academic Quality

·       Q2 – Student experiences/James Brann, Education initiatives and plan Prof Maryanne Dever

·       Q3 How does ANU make decisions and govern itself? CGRO, ANU policies (Megan)

·       Q4 Digital Master Plan & ITS, Wellness and HR

2024

·       Q1 – Finance and F&S

·       Q2 – career development support HRD, ANU Research Plan

The next SIS Staff meeting is Thursday 21 September.

SIS Business plan

A reminder that our purpose is:

From: focus on systems and innovation to support the online university

To: strategic holistic planning for future scholarly knowledge services

The SIS 2023 business plan remains available here. The mid-year report against the plan will occur in mid-June – don’t forget to get your statistics in next week.

SIS Plan on a page 2023

WHS

As the frosts and wet weather are upon us do be careful on the pathways around the campus and report any slip hazards.

CAUL & CONZUL

·       Simon Huggard has announced he is retiring from Swinburne as Deputy Director Library Services and University Librarian and will be finishing up on 30 June.

·       Dr Leanne Trembath will be Deputy Director, Library Services (Acting) until December 2023 at Swinburne University

Copyright

·       U.S. Copyright Office’s Guidance for Works Containing AI-Generated Content webinar on 28 June, 2023. This session was recorded. This webinar is a part of the Office’s initiative to examine copyright law and policy issues raised by AI technology, including the scope of copyright in works generated using AI tools and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training.

·       US Copyright Act can address AI without Amendment. A blog post from ARL analyses the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA)’s principles to guide policymakers in their conversations around copyright law and AI. LCA is the voice of the library community on copyright policy; its members—the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

Visitor to Menzies Library

Lovely to have Mr Lloyd Monsbourgh visit. Thanks to Rachel in Advancement for organising the visit and to all the SIS staff who welcomed Lloyd and provided great information on our activities and collections.

GIS training

CartoGIS Services is a team of cartographic and geographic information system specialists working at ANU. They offer a range of training sessions on the creation, analysis, management and promotion of maps and spatial data!

·       Introduction to ArcGIS Pro (Self-paced online course)

·       Introduction to Story Maps (August 10, 17, 24 and 31)

·       Introduction to GIS Analysis for Research (September 28, and October 5, 12 and 19)

Training is free for ANU staff, HDR, and Postgraduate students.

For more information, visit the CartoGIS training webpage

Archives on ABC

ANU Archives materials are used in the ABC feature story on Stephen Wurm and Helen Groger Wurm by Craig Allen released on 9 July on ABC news online and TV this Sunday. It’s a great story!

Library news

·       New Read and Publish Agreement with Company of Biologists: We are very pleased to announce that the ANU Library has signed a new Read and Publish Agreement with Company of Biologists for the period 2023-2025.

·       Lawyerly is now available through ANU Library. Lawyerly provides a unique service as an independent news source devoted exclusively to legal news.

--

Roxanne Missingham

Director, Scholarly Information Services

Coming events

Winter Tales presents Liz Cosson

When? Sunday, 23 July 2023, 2-4pm

Where?  National Library of Australia

More details. Liz was the highest-ranking woman in the Australian Defence Force and later served as Secretary of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. She came from a family with a long tradition of military service and joined the Army at the beginning of equality for women in the ADF. Liz has held many ‘first woman’ roles, working and succeeding in predominantly male environments. Liz has faced and overcome adversity, career challenges and obstacles to success. Liz is a passionate advocate for service above self, diversity and transformational change. It is presented by the Australian Women’s Archives Program (AWAP). Click here for more information.

ALIA New Librarians symposium

When? Saturday, 29 July 2023

Where?  Online

More details. The ALIA NLSX theme is “eXchange, eXplore, eXpand'. Click here for more information.

Australian Society of Archivists' 2023 National Conference

When? 5 & 6 September 2023

Where?  Melbourne

More details. Rising to our challenges: archives at the ‘G is the theme, drawing inspiration from the ‘G (MCG) as an iconic Melbourne sporting venue and landmark on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Click here for more information.

From HR

ANU values diversity and inclusion and is committed to ensuring equality of opportunity for all staff. This section provides information including employment of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, gender equity initiatives, disability support and LGBTIQ inclusion.

A great set of resources are available here.

ARDC

Unlocking Australia’s Restricted Access Species Data

In a first-of-its-kind collaborative project supported by the ARDC, a nationally consistent approach to restricted access species data has been developed to increase the discoverability, access and sharing of restricted access species data.

Read more here

Global Knowledge Inequality Threatens Ecosystems Across the Global South

An ARDC-supported database more than doubled the completeness of plant trait data for Australia.

Read more here

Building Trusted and Reliable Environmental Data and Information Supply Chains in Australia

Read the wrap up on a workshop we ran to discuss building a trusted and reliable supply chain for environmental data and information in Australia.

Read more here

Keeping up to date

What should metadata managers be learning?

The OCLC Metadata Managers Focus Group met for informal round-robin sessions to discuss the question: “What should metadata managers be learning?” In order to find out the answer, you will have to read this blog post by Richard Urban! Jennifer Baxmeyer, Princeton University, and Daniel Lovins, Yale University, for co-facilitating these sessions.

ALIA - Freedom to read

“We are currently experiencing a sharp uptick in attacks against library programs and challenges to library collections. To date, these incidents have predominantly targeted LGBTQIA+ events, programs and library materials in public libraries. These incidents have had a significant negative impact on library users and staff, especially to staff and community who identify as LGBTQIA+. The incidents go beyond peaceful protests and have involved threatening behaviour and abusive language. Libraries need to be prepared to respond to these incidents which threaten the wellbeing and safety of staff and community members as well as the core library values of access to information and respect for diversity.

Collated on this page are resources to support libraries in preparing for, responding to and recovering from these incidents. Resources will continue to be updated and added over the coming months. ALIA staff thank the Book Challenges working group for their work in the creation of these resources, as well as overseas library associations and other Australian groups who have generously shared information.”

Study finds English libraries generate at least £3.4bn in yearly value

Thanks to Colin Steele for this article. “Libraries in England generate at least £3.4bn in value a year through services supporting children’s literacy, digital inclusion and health, a study has found. Researchers at the University of East Anglia discovered that the services that a typical branch provides in a year are worth £1m”.

The Ethics of Disclosing the Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Writing Scholarly Manuscripts

Mohammad Hossein, Northwestern University, David B Resnik, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Kristi Holmes, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in an article in Research ethics conclude “We recommend that researchers who use LLMs: (1) disclose their use in the introduction or methods section to transparently describe details such as used prompts and note which parts of the text are affected, (2) use in-text citations and references (to recognize their used applications and improve findability and indexing), and (3) record and submit their relevant interactions with LLMs as supplementary material or appendices.”

Is AI for me? Perspectives from the humanities

Explore artificial intelligence within the context of the humanities with this six-part podcast miniseries. Hear from researchers and informational professionals as they discuss research practice, complex data sets, skills, libraries and data providers, major AI projects and the future.

ANU Press and open access

Report from Equity in Open Access workshop #3: Making waves in APC & waiver practice

OASPA notes: Discussions at the first two Equity in OA workshops led OASPA (and our workshop partners at Information Power) to create a dedicated session on reducing barriers to participation within models relying on per-article payments. This meant putting aside thoughts about all other models and approaches, just for this workshop, and focussing on whether anything can be done to help in the short-term with APCs and waivers.

In Workshop #3, held on 6th June 2023, participants discussed draft principles intended to improve inclusion, maintain author dignity, and minimise author burdens in per-article payment systems in OA publishing. Read more online here.

Peer Review Terminology Standardization

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of the new American National Standard, Standard Terminology for Peer Review, ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023.

Open access initiatives by research active institutions in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: a snapshot of the landscape in 2022

This report by Janet Catterall and Virginia Barbour is interesting and very frustrating. It is based on a survey of government organisations and non-profit institutions and some assessment of websites. The premise is that policies are more important than actions. There is not evaluation of what difference OA has made, of the huge impact of read & publish agreements in terms of the number of articles made available via OA nor of impact and engagement. It is about production rather than value or consumption/use.

Funding Open Access Book Publishing: A Different Approach

David Parker’s blogpost is on the theme that Book Processing Charges are not a good solution (noting the recent report from the Association of University Presses identifies the average cost at just under $20,000). His proposal is that five percent of the total revenue generated across all these sales was directed to funding open access.

Transformative Journals: analysis from the 2022 reports

This report provides clear and useful data. It finds:

·       26 titles (1%) flipped to full OA from 1st January 2023

·       695 titles (30%) met or exceeded their OA growth targets and remain in the TJ programme

·       1589 titles (68%) failed to meet their OA growth targets and will be removed from the TJ programme.

·       16 other titles (1%) were removed from the programme for other reasons.

New titles

Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 7, 2023

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores the lives of convicts transported to Australia and asks how they can be investigated through various forms of biography.

Ebenezer Mission Station, 1863–1873

Annotated diary of Adolf and Polly Hartmann, missionaries of the Moravian Church who worked at the Ebenezer mission station on Wotjobaluk country, in the north-west of the Colony of Victoria.

Aboriginal History: Volume 46

Open repository

Open Access Week 2023

“Community over Commercialization” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 23-29): The website is up now.

ORCID Advocacy Toolkit

The ORCID Advocacy Toolkit was developed by the UK ORCID Consortium during the Advocacy Toolkit Sprint in November 2022. It has now been launched as a wikibook.

New research resources

·       Distinguishing schizophrenia spectrum from non-spectrum disorders among young patients with first episode psychosis and at high clinical risk: The role of basic self-disturbance and neurocognition

·       Public Theology and Global Governance: Weak Actors in Lawmaking for the World Economy

·       An efficient hybrid method for 3D to 2D medical image registration

·       Atypical B cells are part of an alternative lineage of B cells that participates in responses to vaccination and infection in humans

·       A First Class Measure: Evidence for a Comprehensive Social Class Scale in Higher Education Populations

Keeping up to date

Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)

The Internet Archive have announced the public availability of ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new research and education service that helps users easily build, access, and analyze digital collections computationally at scale. ARCH represents a combination of the Internet Archive’s experience supporting computational research for more than a decade by providing large-scale data to researchers and dataset-oriented service integrations like ARS (Archive-it Research Services) and a collaboration with the Archives Unleashed project of the University of Waterloo and York University. Development of ARCH was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

ARCH Dashboard

Referencing Toolkit: Indigenous Referencing Guidance for Indigenous Knowledges

This resource was created by the Indigenous Archives Collective (IAC), through funding by CAVAL and support by CACIK, as referencing guidance for undergraduate students, and liaison librarians supporting these students when citing Indigenous knowledge in academic writing in a Victorian context.

Can the archives be decolonised?

Hannah Ishmael, Collections and Research Manager, Black Cultural Archives speaks on this topic at an RLUK event.

Data science skills in the UK workforce

This report from the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) makes the following key points:

·       Collecting and analysing data offers potential economic and social benefits. Analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that, by 2030, UK GDP could increase by up to 22% as a result of AI.

·       Potential societal benefits could range from climate change mitigation, to improving early detection and diagnosis of cancers by using AI to identify patterns from imaging (MRI) scans that are not readily detected by humans.

·       Evidence suggests that the availability of people with specialist data skills in the UK is not sufficient to meet demand.

·       A 2021 study estimated that the supply of data scientists from UK universities was unlikely to exceed 10,000 per year, yet there were potentially at least 178,000 data specialist roles vacant in the UK.

·       Research finds that certain groups (such as women, those from minority ethnic backgrounds and people with disabilities) are underrepresented in the data workforce. A lack of workforce diversity has the potential to amplify existing inequalities and prejudices.

·       Initiatives to increase the number of people with data skills include degree conversion courses, doctoral training centres for PhD students, online up-skilling platforms, apprenticeships, and visas to attract international talent.

·       Efforts to reduce the skills gap can be hindered by the inconsistent definition of data skills, organisational culture, the availability of specialist primary and secondary school teachers, and barriers to people moving between sectors.

·       A 2022 inquiry by the Lords Science and Technology Committee concluded that a mismatch exists between the scale of the UK’s STEM skills gap and the solutions proposed by the UK Government, “especially given the UK’s ambition to be a science and technology superpower”. It described the Government’s policies as “inadequate and piecemeal”.

UXLibs7 – 2023

Presentations and Photographs from UX in Libraries 7 are now online. Interesting presentations include:

• Making it Right: employing creative UX research methods for richer engagement by Andy Priestner, Chair of UX in Libraries, and Director, Andy Priestner Training & Consulting
• DOKK1: public participation as democratic infrastructure by Marie Østergård, Director of Aarhus Public Libraries, Denmark
• Be your most disruptive self: collective action in experience and design by Dr Arun Verma, Head of Inclusion, University of London, UK
• Inclusion through Participation: exploring the barriers to real inclusion for underserved communities in UX research by Dr Victoria Olaniyan, Senior User Researcher, Methods, UK
• More than just working together: reflections on UX work and collaboration by Shelley Gullikson, Web & UX Librarian, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Instruction for Educators

ACRL Education and Behavioral Sciences Section (EBSS) Instruction’s for Education Committee, Companion Document provides guideposts for librarians and informs their information literacy practices.

College & Research Libraries News

The July issue of C&RL news (vol 84 no 7) is now online – see the full issue here. Articles include:

·       Sarah K. Tribelhorn. “Planning for sustainability: Articulating efforts toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

·       Lizzy Borges and Faith Rusk. “Constructing and revising a user-centered curricular toolkit: Supporting faculty with inclusive design.”

·       Miriam Rigby, assisted by ChatGPT. “Artificial imaginings: ChatGPT envisions its future in academic libraries.”

As AI Spreads, Experts Predict the Best and Worst Changes in Digital Life by 2035

A new report from the Pew Research Centre suggested that there are many digital advances for aspects of life by 2035. They anticipate striking improvements in health care and education. They foresee a world in which wonder drugs are conceived and enabled in digital spaces; where personalized medical care gives patients precisely what they need when they need it; where people wear smart eyewear and earbuds that keep them connected to the people, things and information around them; where AI systems can nudge discourse into productive and fact-based conversations; and where progress will be made in environmental sustainability, climate action and pollution prevention.

IFLA newsletter

Vol. 3, No. 6: The Environment and Climate Issue is online now.

AI Fluency and Libraries

The recording of this ALIA event is now available online. Very interesting presentations and questions.

Implementing Australia's AI Ethics Principles report

This report from CISRO is online. The report explores some of the practical steps needed to implement the Australian Government’s eight AI ethics principles, explaining each practice and its organisational context, including the roles that are key to successful implementation. Practices such as impact assessments, data curation, fairness measures, pilot studies and organisational training are some of the simple but effective approaches outlined in this report.

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