Yumma Darruwa Ngunnawal

SIS begins by acknowledging that our services are delivered from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.

We acknowledge and celebrate the First Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respect to the elders past and present.

Thanks to Dr Olivia Evans, Indigenous Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Research School of Psychology, for her talk and to everyone who contributed to the presentation to academics on works that will support the graduate attribute on Indigenous knowledge in our collection and how to find the resources. Olivia’s presentation has been recorded and will be made available soon.

Delephene is having a great time talking to all in the Division – planning sessions for the presentations to academics have been very successful:

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 to staff and students via the ANU On Campus email newsletter. You can find previous staff On Campus and student On Campus editions online.

WHS

The SIS draft plan for WHS will shortly be out for comment.  Please let us know what you think and provide feedback. Thank you to those who have already provided input, particularly Tom and Kathryn.

Symonston is currently a construction zone, WHS and risk assessment to be carried out by Tom F.

SIS Staff meeting

The next regular meeting is:

#2 Tuesday 4 June, 9.30-11 am

Location: China in the World Auditorium

The remaining meetings are:

#3 Tuesday 3 September, China in the World Auditorium

9.30-11 am

#4 Tuesday 3 December, China in the World Auditorium

9.30-11 am

Buildings

Hume

Notice has been provided and the ANU lease will cease 30 April 2024. All material has been relocated to Symonston and organisational works are taking place.

Symonston

Lessor’s engineers are on site for fire measurements to ensure fire separation breaks.

The lighting will be set up only after all shelving goes up to ease Balfrans works. 

Within the next two weeks, IT staff will come to set up the internet.

ANU engaged architect will be on site on Wednesday to measure and document revisions made.

As at 08/04/24 739 pallets [out of a total of 2,250 packed in total] remain at National Mail & Marketing. 30 are being removed each day.

730 odd pallets to go out of the total of 2,250!

Works are on track.

University Research Committee

The committee met this week – matters discussed include:

·       University Research Committee Role and Responsibilities

·       Research and Innovation Strategy 2024+

·       Research Value Stream – Digital Uplift Update

·       External Project Agreements and Funding - Policy and Procedure

·       HDR Candidature Progression Procedure and Confirmation Guideline

·       HDR Scholarships Policy and Procedure

·       ANU Defence Institute proposal

Library Staff Consultative Committee

The Committee met this week – we talked about many matters including WHS and suggestions about improving our operations. Gabrielė Gaižutytė has volunteered to be on the committee while Sarah Skye is on parental leave.

CAUL & CONZUL

ICOLC Statement on AI in Licensing. ICOLC endorses and upholds the following principles with regard to AI clauses in licenses negotiated and signed by library consortia:

·       AI clauses will permit the use of AI for any and all legal purposes that support consortia members’ core missions of non-commercial research, teaching, learning, and equitable access to information.

·       Multi-year licenses that include AI clauses will formally establish opportunities for the revision and/or updating of language related to AI during the term of the agreement to reflect legal or technological developments.

·       AI clauses will not restrict user actions in ways that are fundamentally unenforceable.

·       AI clauses will in no way prevent authorised users from making licensed content fully accessible to other authorized users in any legal manner. 

·       AI clauses will not be introduced into a negotiation in a way that limits a consortium’s opportunity to fully review the clauses in accordance with the consortium’s regular review procedure.

·       AI clauses will not introduce new liability clauses beyond the scope of what has previously been agreed upon, especially for actions of authorised users.

Copyright

·       The Memorial’s Research Centre Digitised Collections team digitises archival collections at risk of deterioration. This process preserves the original items and enables the selected collections to be accessed online in the future. The Memorial is seeking permission from the copyright holders to publish the collections listed on the Memorial’s website

·       The 2024 Universities Music Licence has been signed by the Vice Chancellor.

·       The AI Act: Calling for global compliance with EU copyright? Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer provides a Recap: What is text and data mining and why is it relevant for AI development? They blog post analyses The AI Act: A call for global compliance with EU copyright law? and what it means for businesses.

Privacy Week

Privacy Awareness Week (PAW) runs from Monday 6 May to Sunday 12 May. This year’s theme is Privacy and technology: improving transparency, accountability, and security with a lot of activities. Find out more in the news article. Thanks to Alex and SIS Comms for their work on PAW.

ANU FoI and music!

The FOI team were greatly amused to find this link to “ANU the Musical - Sorry Dear Fenner”.

Last year we had an FOI request related to 'wake up fenner' that had us scurrying around trying to work what it was about. Turned out it was tipsy students shouting at buildings on their way home from the pub.

If only every FOI ended with a song 😊

Megan Easton

Feedback

“The ANU library now has copies of all nine editions of my Purification of Laboratory Chemicals; the first edition of which was published in 1966. The fifth edition was translated into the Chinese language.  Incidentally, the ANU libraries had also gracefully accepted three of my other books:  Fused Pyrimidines,  Part I — Quinazolines (1967), Stereochemistry of Heterocyclic Compounds, Part I — Nitrogen Heterocycles (1977), and Stereochemistry of Heterocyclic Compounds, Part 2 — Mixed O, N, and S, and Phosphorus Heterocycles (1977).

I cannot thank enough all the ANU librarians in the JCSMR, RSC, Hancock Library as well as in the Print Repository in Hume for the untiring and continued help that they afforded to me over the years of writing of all these monographs. They have been acknowledged in several of these monographs)”

-        Dr Wilfred Armarego

----

Roxanne Missingham

Director, Scholarly Information Services

Coming events

ALIA national conference

When? 6-9 May 2024

Where?  Adelaide

More details. Conference Theme: Truth and Dare. With this theme, we extend an invitation for First Nations Truth Telling, we showcase the battle against disinformation, and we dare ourselves to push our work forward to continue to bring vibrant, relevant services to library users and communities. Click here for more information.

IFLA Presidents meeting

When? 9 September and 2 October 2024.

Where?  Brisbane

More details. Early notice is here.

Australian Society of Archivists (ASA, Archives & Records Association of NZ Te Huinga Mahara (ARANZ) and the Pacific Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives (PARBICA) conference

When? 22-25 October 2024.

Where? Christchurch, NZ

More details. The theme is: Opening the Archives. Early notice is here.

International Conference on AI for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (AI4LAM) (Fantastic futures)

When? 15–18 October 2024.

Where? Canberra

More details. Furth information is available here.

From HR

VC Award for Reconciliation

Nominations for the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Reconciliation are currently open, with closing date Monday 29 April 2024. Please encourage nominations from your area.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Reconciliation aims to encourage and recognise ANU staff members for initiatives and activities that support the pursuit of reconciliation, within the University or beyond.

For further information and how to apply visit the website. Please direct any queries about this award to awards@anu.edu.au.

ARDC

ARDC Programs and projects

ARDC partners with the research community to establish enduring digital infrastructure to support Australia’s future research needs.

Explore their 3 Thematic Research Data Commons, along with the programs and projects building data assets, platforms, tools and skills that enable Australian researchers to transform our lives. Find out more here.

ANU Press and open access

U.S. Releases Updates to Fifth Open Government National Action Plan (NAP5)

The U.S. Government made updates to its tracker for NAP5 which includes its commitment to “Broaden Public Access to Federally-Funded Research Findings and Data.” The updates to the tracker provide an overview of federal agency activities to implement the Nelson Memorandum as well as the January 2024 HELIOS Open workshop funded by NASA. The U.S. created NAP5 as part of its participation in the Open Government Partnership, a multi-national initiative aimed at making government more accessible, responsive, and accountable to citizens.

New report on the sustainability of Diamond OA in Europe

A new report from the DIAMAS work package that SPARC Europe leads looks at understanding how institutional publishing is sustained today. Institutional publishers and service providers are diverse due to their missions, size and service provision. In addition, there is no definitive set of tasks that all institutional publishers share. These characteristics influence the sustainability options available to them and the choices they make. Institutional Diamond OA publishers have a clear view of their challenges: a lack of financial resources and stability and permanence in personnel, and a dependence on parent organisations. They also share a vision of a Diamond OA funding landscape that rejects author-pays solutions, reinforces the need for continued financial support from public bodies and institutions, and research funding organisations that have largely been absent to date.

U.S. Congress Provides $7 Million for Open Textbook Pilot in FY24

The U.S. Congress passed its second and final FY24 appropriations package, which includes $7 million in new funding for the Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot grant program. While this represents a decrease in funding over the previous year’s $12 million, it is a strong show of support for the program in the current political environment. There is no news yet whether the Department will hold a new competition this year. We will share updated information with SPARC members as it becomes available.

Thoth becomes an OAPEN intermediary

Thoth Open Metadata is a community-led non-profit platform and service facilitating open metadata management and dissemination workflows for Open Access (OA) books and book chapters. Thoth also supports an integration of the data, which is released with a CC0 licence, with third-party applications through its open APIs. In a recent agreement, Thoth becomes an OAPEN intermediary facilitating direct submission of OA books and corresponding metadata to OAPEN. Those books submitted through Thoth will also be listed on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

From theory to practice: Case studies and commentary from libraries, publishers, funders and industry

A new report, From theory to practice: Case studies and commentary from libraries, publishers, funders and industry has been released to accompany the State of Open Data 2023 report. It presents views from different stakeholder groups:

• Funding bodies: The NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative: meeting community needs for FAIR data sharing and discovery
• Scholarly Publishers: Operationalise data policies through collaborative approaches - the momentum is now
• University Libraries: One size does not fit all: an investigation into how institutional libraries are tailoring support to their researchers’ needs
• Industry: How Open Pharma supports responsible data sharing for pharma research publications.

New titles

Quaternary Palaeontology and Archaeology of Sumatra

Edited by: Julien Louys, Paul C.H. Albers, Alexandra A.E. van der Geer

Open repository

Open Access Week 2024

The theme is “Community over Commercialization”. It is October 21 - 27, 2024.

Exciting update to the Open Research Repository

Get a sneak peak of the new repository website here.

The Cost and Price of Public Access to Research Data: A Synthesis

Invest in Open have published The Cost and Price of Public Access to Research Data: A Synthesis, reporting on their investigations of "reasonable costs" for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data. The paper sets out working definitions of four key terms: cost, price, reasonable, and allowable. Using these terms, some of the pathways research data take to final publication are outlined, and summarises some of the extensive body of research on the costs of research data curation and sharing. Cost modelling experimentation approaches in the fields of research data management and digital preservation are also considered.

Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information

The Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information—or metadata—was released with signatures from more than 40 organisations including the Gates Foundation and the Coimbra Group, representing 40 universities in Europe this week. 

The Declaration sets out four commitments from signatories:

• We will make openness the default for the research information we use and produce
• We will work with services and systems that support and enable open research information
• We will support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information
• We will support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information

SPARC has posted a news story about the Declaration.

The status of open access repositories in the field of technology: insights from OpenDOAR

Javaid Ahmad Wani, Taseef Ayub Sofi, Ishrat Ayub Sofi, Shabir Ahmad Ganaie’s article in Information Discovery and Delivery found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

New research resources

·       Crime and risk

·       Skeletons on the Stairs: Are They Deceptive?

·       Machine Learning Improves Upon Clinicians' Prediction of End Stage Kidney Disease

·       CEGAR-Tableaux: Improved Modal Satisfiability via Modal Clause-Learning and SAT

·       The Radioactive Dr Mawson: Douglas Mawson and the Quest for Australia's Radium Riches, 1904-58

Keeping up to date

NY court rejects authors' bid to block OpenAI cases from NYT, others

A group of authors suing OpenAI for copyright infringement in California failed to convince a New York federal court on Monday to halt related cases brought in Manhattan by the New York Times, the Authors Guild and others. Read more here.

Navigating the AI wave

This new post looks at the fears around the role of AI in education and considers the importance of thoughtful policies to embrace its benefits.

How students are using generative AI

Read what more than 200 students had to say about generative AI in our latest work focused on understanding student perception.

International Statement On the Freedom of Expression, and the Freedoms to Publish and Read

On March 14, 2024, five global organisations that represent authors, publishers, booksellers, and libraries issued a joint statement highlighting the importance of the freedoms of expression, reading, and publishing and urging governments and citizens to ensure these freedoms are respected in law and in practice. The statement will be presented at a number of international book sector events throughout the year. Through FAIFE, we encourage libraries and library associations to sign and promote this statement, including discussions around this important topic. Feel free to reach out to FAIFE if your library or library associations will organise an event on this. You can read the IFLA news story here.

Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens

This post sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG is an interview with Jesper Boserup Thestrup, Information Specialist at the Royal Danish Library in Aarhus. He works with the publishing platforms Tidsskrift.dk and Ebooks.au.dk

Data Curation and Information Systems Design from Australasia: Implications for Cataloguing of Vernacular Knowledge in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums Vol: 54

Edited by: Julie Nichols & Bharat Mehra – “The need for decolonizing cultural institutions and their mismanagement practices in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, of First Nations peoples’ materials and knowledge has been widely recognised. However, this has not translated into an information systems design, nor a complementary solution representing an alternative world view”. Read the issue here.

The green library revolution: a catalyst for climate change action

Yusuf Ayodeji, Ajani, Adeyinka Tella and  Rexwhite Tega Enakrire‘s study finds that libraries in developed countries worldwide have demonstrated noteworthy success through initiatives such as green building projects, community engagement programs, collaborative partnerships, expansion of digital resources, innovative climate literacy initiatives and a commitment to ethical stewardship.

OAIC releases summary of key discussions of ANZ commissioners and ombudsmen

The OAIC has published details of key discussions held by information commissioners and ombudsmen across Australia and New Zealand as part of the Association of Information Access Commissioners. Key topics of discussion related to the adoption of artificial intelligence and the need to implement laws to regulate the fast-emerging technology.

State of America’s Libraries 2024 report

ALA has released its highly anticipated list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023 and the State of America’s Libraries 2024 report. The report highlights the ways libraries and library workers have addressed community needs with innovative and critical services, as well as the challenges brought on by censorship attempts.

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