Motley Marginalia

A Digital Scratchpad by Gabriel J. Gardner

Society for Scholarly Publishing 2017 Meeting

Posted on 2017-06-12 Edited on 2019-10-25 In Travel Report

Symbols count in article: 30k Reading time ≈ 27 mins.

GABRIEL’S NOTES FROM SSP 2017

General Points

From Wednesday, May 31 to Friday, June 2, I attended the 39th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, MA. My travel there was so that I could present on findings of my co-authored research on the piracy of scholarly materials. I did so as part of a panel that also included the COO of Reprints Desk (a document delivery company) and the CEO of Aytpon (which offers various SAAS platforms to publishers). Below are my session notes, which are of varying length depending upon how informative I found each session.

I found the whole affair fascinating. I was one of about 15 librarians at the whole event which had almost 1000 attendees and exhibitors. Conversations were very business and product-focused; panels mainly consisted of competitors talking about their internal research and how method or technology X might solve problem Y. You might think that would make for a competitive environment, but everyone was very cordial and professional. The entire place was filled with competent and intelligent people trying to deliver good products (so that they can make as much money as possible off us). I spent most of my time eavesdropping. Keep your eyes out for more uses of ‘machine learning’/artificial intelligence in the future; there were lots of people thinking about how these tools can be used in publishing and libraries. The keynotes were very good, and both incredibly pessimistic. Of particular interested to you might be my notes from the plenary New and Noteworthy Products session which made it clear that publishers and their B2B vendors want to collect as much information as they possibly can about users of their services in order to monetize it, a very worrisome development from our perspective. Also of note is the RA21 initiative which is a plot by the major publishers to kill IP authentication and systems like EZproxy. (Elsevier is the initiator of the initiative, that was made absolutely clear in the verbal remarks of the session. It is how they plan to end mass piracy; the large pirate sites all rely on compromised EZproxy servers. Yet the RA21 website shows a diverse group of actors, draw your own conclusions as to how much work those others are doing.)

If you are interested, find my (occasionally cryptic) notes below with links to the detailed session descriptions and let me know if you have any questions. To my knowledge, presenter slides and content will only be available to SSP members, of which I am not one, so my notes may be as good as it gets.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31

PREDATORS, “PIRATES” AND PRIVACY: PUBLISHERS AND LIBRARIANS EXPLORE NEW CHALLENGES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS

8:30 – 10:00AM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/seminar-2/

Intro remarks from Todd Carpenter, NISO

Trust is essential in scholarly publishing

Hillary Corbett

Not all predators are equally bad; there are minor and major infractions
But most blacklisting is binary, is it possible to capture the shades of gray? Should we for our faculty?
Low quality is not necessarily predators
Predators are getting more sophisticated, there are “spoofed” journals
Librarians need to educate their faculty but particularly students about predatory/low quality journals because many of them are discoverable via Google and even Google Scholar

Kathleen Berryman, Cabell’s – they are taking up the work Beall did

Cables is taking the approach of “any misrepresentations” will de-whitelist a journal
How is the whitelist different from Beall’s list?
They are working off all “objective” metrics. Any infraction moves a journal from the whitelist to the blacklist. The blacklist tallies the number of infractions
They don’t think this will solve the problems, awareness needs to be raised, perhaps penalizing methods developed

Rachel Burley, SpringerNature

Some spoofed journals are almost replicating known legitimate journals right down to the same HTML/CSS templates and published version formatting
Springer nature is redesigning some of theirs to highlight all the associations with professional and scholarly association affiliations, to bring out the trust factor
Promoting the “think, check , submit” meme

David, OUP

We think that the authors are the “prey” in the predators metaphor
But maybe the authors are complicit? Then the prey are the readers or the tenure and promotion committees
Recent study showed that 75 percent of authors in predatory journals are from Asia, or India.
Time is researchers’ most precious commodity, if their oversight committees do not care about predatory journals, why wouldn’t they publish there?
Conspiracy theorist love low quality journals
Universities need to get in board. In India, the University Grants Commission put out a Whitelist that everyone will need to use to get ‘credit’.
Q&A Isn’t the price of APCs too high? Can’t blame it all on bad motives, many researchers don’t have funds.

Michael Clark and Jason Price

Looked at random sample of 2015 articles indexed in Scopus
Searched for them in several places, how many of them could you get to the full text in 3 clicks from where you started searching?
(Gold, green, “rogue”, pirated)
Rogue I.e. On Researchgate, academia.edu, otherwise indexed via GS not on publishers website
Pirated, I.e. Sci-Hub
Including rogue methods, 55 percent were available
They walked through various search workflows to see which one gets the most content the fastest: sci-hub best, followed by google scholar, not worth it to start search via one of the rogue OA sites
Next project: looking at availability of OA materials in library discovery systems
Q&A Employee from Annual Reviews talked about how they implemented “subscriber links” in google scholar, in collaboration with Google, to get legal access easier. (Need to look into this.)

Craig, Silverchair

How to be a pirate: mass downloading, data breaches, uploading of C protected content, password sharing
Why did we get sci-hub? Pricing, availability, convenience?
The sci-hub “problem” often falls below the abuse monitoring thresholds, so it is impossible to stop through traditional methods
What else? Takedowns, but they should not be automated too much
Improving security of EZproxy, required https, OCLC software improvements

Daniel Ayala, ProQuest

Some data will always be collected, this doesn’t necessarily mean privacy violations
Lots of researchers are very suspicious about data collection, as are librarians
Security causes access friction, publishers may want to move beyond IP authentication, if they do so, that enables even more individual data collection
Publishers need to be transparent about what they’re doing with the data they have
NISO has a framework for privacy
Single Sign On is increasing, this is good for both convenience and enabling data collection
RA21
Maybe blockchain could be an authentication method

Peter Katz, Elsevier

Elsevier has constant bot monitoring
Now citation managers are allowing people to get bulk downloads for corpus of citations, this gets flagged a lot as malicious. Elsevier wants people to download them individually…. or use their API
Chinese ISPs, via VPNs are the main source of Elsevier content theft now.
Some sites now sell login credentials, phished
Sharing SSO passwords is very dangerous (or getting phished) because it gives access to everything
The universities where Elsevier consistently sees bulk content theft, have lax security. The ones with robust security see very little activity that turns out to be malicious.
Many publishers are developing bots/algorithms that can “hitch a ride on the search URL” and ID sci-hub traffic (which is below the bulk flagging threshold).
Q&A
- Piracy is a symptom of a failing access or customer service or user experience.
- 2 factor authentication, if you can force it on people, will solve almost all these “problems”
- Does Elsevier think they’ll be able to take down Sci-hub? Rep says not within the next 3 years.

KEYNOTE: PAULA STEPHAN

4:00 – 5:00PM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/keynote/

Postdoctoral work is basically a jail, low pay, long hours, often not considered employees for fringe benefits purposes
Publishing is crucial , it is how people escape the postdoctoral jail
There is an arms race here, lots of people competing for 1st or 2nd author in a high impact journal, not many options in each field.
Age of (person) at first grant received has increased over the past 30 years.

Read: Zolas et al, 2015 in Science.

Most new PhDs will not go into tenure track jobs
What are implications for publishing?
Number of R&D firms in the US that are publishing has dropped dramatically, only about 10% now.
Many firms no longer do basic research, working on applied now.
Universities now operate as high end shopping malls, putting up space and branding while a lot of the actual revenue comes from without
For many, it isn’t publish or perish, but funding or perish
Estimated that PIs spend 42 percent of their time in grant administration/writing
The PIs then fill their labs with temporary postdocs or grad students
This started in the US but is expanding to other countries rapidly
Massive risk aversion. Almost all funding is directed toward “sure bets” .
NIH has explicit requirement about continuity of “research direction “. Built in risk and innovation reducer
Read “rescuing us biomedical research from its systemic flaws” PNAS
Bibliometrics reinforce risk aversion. Novel research is more likely to fail. Hardly anyone publishes negative results.

Reviewers are blinkered by bibliometrics in Nature read this.

Highly novel papers are almost always published in low-impact journals.
In short, things are disastrous, particularly as we anticipate federal funding declines. State funding of public universities continues to decline. Private foundation funding is increasing but exclusively focused on narrow applied topics - “cure industry”.

Her book How economics shapes science.
She also recommends an NBER book The changing frontier : rethinking science and innovation policy.

THURSDAY, JUNE 1

KEYNOTE: JEFFREY MERVIS: SCIENCE AND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: WHATS NEXT?

9:00 – 10:00AM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/keynote-2/

The “war on science”, e.g. Chris Mooney, rhetoric is overblown. Many republicans support certain science funding, just not the funding democrats always support.
Every government policy is a result of money, people, and ideas. What will Trump do?
Budget proposal has deep cuts to research funding. This comes not from a thorough analysis of the areas where science funding is wasted, but is an across the board cut.
At present, none of the cabinet appointments have any science training or significant attachment to public higher ed.
With the exception of NSF, all the agencies are being run by interim admins.
Less than 10% of the spots requiring confirmation have been filled. Both Obama and Bush were much farther along at this point. Trump admin seems indifferent to full staffing.
Census bureau is not fully staffed or funded, very worrisome since 2020 census is coming up.
OSTP funding is actually preserved at Obama level, but trump hasn’t filled leading spots. Unlikely that anyone respectable to scientists will actually take the position, even if nominated.
DARPA may get more funding, as may NASA but civilian/domestic science funding will almost certainly fall.
The admin has put research funding in a category of programs that “haven’t proven their value “. We need to lobby to correct this.
Indirect cost recovery: a proposal we should be scared of. Would cap NIH funding on certain projects. Trump proposal implies that universities are basically making a profit off federal NIH grants.
Good news is that the admin is working on a report in “evidence based policy”. We need to watch out for this. Could be good or bad.
Pew did a poll about the science march, find support for it was partisan.
Republicans “aren’t buying what you’ve been selling” re: the value of most science funding.
Q&A
- What can private citizens do at federal or state level? There are dozens of power centers in DC so your efforts need to be targeted. State research funding is minimal. Perhaps get involved in state redistricting, get more pro-science people elected and in the pipeline.
- Climate change…
- What would a recovery look like? We shouldn’t think about science as a unified thing. The funding isn’t unified, the support isn’t. The sky isn’t falling at the same rate for all areas.
- Can private funding make up the difference? Doubtful. It is increasing but only marginally.
- Trump admin hasn’t renewed the contracts of the heads of national academy of science. Will we lose a generation of science leaders? These will get filled eventually.

CONCURRENT 1D: RESEARCH DATA POLICIES: CRAFT EFFECTIVE POLICY AND IMPROVE YOUR IMPACT

10:30 – 11:30AM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-1d-adapting-to-the-changing-expectations-of-peer-review/

Rep from Springer-Nature

There’s now considerable evidence that making the underlying study data available and linking it increases citation rates
Funders are increasingly requiring open data, presently 40 major funders require it
Journals policies on data sharing are very confused. Very little directions on how the mandates should be fulfilled.
Springer nature has looked at the polices of their journals, there are 4 basic categories. Not encouraged, encouraged, required but no directions or clear enforcement, required and compliance monitored
Springer Nature made their polices available CC BY
They’ve estimated it only takes about 10 minutes for editors to get the data availability statements from the authors into the papers.
For long term success, the policies need monitoring .
Implementing this is time consuming, need to engage with each journal individually.

Rep from PLoS

Open data has many benefits, replication, validation, new interpretation, inclusion in meta studies
PLOS has a strong data sharing policy
Less than 1 percent of authors are unwilling to share and abide by the policy
Authors need to get credit for the data they Share, the data need to be citable, other writers need to cite it. This is an evolving area.
Compliance is murky, does the data behind a figure need to be shared? Or all the data that was collected? PLOS wants to err on the later side.

Rep from Harvard Press

This is newish, lots of policies still being developed and adopted. Lots of discipline variation.
Biomedical community has lead the policy front.
Data she’s collected show that authors comply with even the strongest policies.
In biomedical area, trend/preference is for the data to be cited with a persistent identifier in the reference list.
Harvard Dataverse is an open repository for any journal
Publishers and journals need to plug supported repositories, give authors more guidance
Ideally the journals tech systems can work with any APIs that repositories have. (Repositories need APIs…)

Rep from Dryad

All data in there is from something that has been published.
Every item is “light touch” human curated.
It is a non profit governed by a board of customers.
Open data should be thought of as preservation, not just for reproducibility
The best time to get the data into a repository is before the article is actually published.
End result is an article and a dataset that link to and cite each other, API allows embargoes
Curation involves making sure data is not sensitive or violating IP, that it is in appropriate file format and doesn’t have a virus.
Data download is free, the journals pay to have the data in Dryad.

CONCURRENT 2C: PREPRINTAPOOLOZA! WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH PREPRINTS?

2:00 – 3:00PM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-2c-preprintapooloza-whats-happening-with-preprints-2/

Jessica Polka, ASAPbio

Precincts are increasing!!!
Researchers are concerned: about getting scooped (not really a valid concern), about presenting unpeer reviewed results (people do this at conferences all the time), preprint will expose potentially misleading information to the general public
Most preprints in arXive appear in a peer reviewed journal eventually
Transparency about the peer review status of pre prints is essential. No one benefits from conflating preprints with a finalized version.
Should preprints be cited? If not, we may be encouraging plagiarism.

Lisa,

How does preprints usage differ across disciplines?
Broad institute (MIT & Harvard) looked into this
Broad office of communication does not publicize preprints or any preliminary results
Any intellectual property claims need to be filed before a preprints is made publicly available
Big differences among Broad researchers about preprints use, appears to depend on general journal policies for the field (I.e. Whether preprints are allowed in main journals or not)

Rep from Cold Spring Harbor laboratory

biorxiv modeled on arxiv
All the versions are available, when something is published, it gets linked to the publishers version of record
Then water came through the ceiling!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (We moved rooms)
Biorxiv is growing exponentially at the moment
Even though the papers haven’t gone through peer review, everything that gets uploaded to biorxiv gets viewed by a biologist to verify “fit”.
Biorxiv is supported by Chan Zuckerberg foundation
They are looking for ways to automate their human upload review and improve the conversion of documents to XML

Rep from PLoS

Both Wellcome Trust and CZI are requiring OA deposit and accept preprints.
This, along with many preprints servers launching in past 4 years, is big disruptive potential.
Preprints accelerate the discovery process and publishing process.
PLOS will accept preprints from biorxiv, they also comb over the preprint servers and solicit the authors to publish in PLOS. This is huge, it changes the dynamics between author and publishers
Technology interoperability has improved dramatically in past 5 years, this allows rapid conversion of documents. Easy for authors to shift manuscripts around from journal to journal if it is on a preprint server that has an API (and the final publisher can interact with it).
Q&A
- Licensing….. very complicated.
- The folks at arXive still get “anonymous” comments/reviews via email because they don’t want their criticism to be visible to the authors. Very interesting. Open peer review has a long way to go, not proven model.

CONCURRENT 3A: WILL RICHER METADATA RESCUE RESEARCH?

4:00 – 5:00PM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-3a/

Some panelist

Metadata needs to be better, richer, more accurate.
More and more, people are trying to map interconnections.
Lots of publishers “set it and forget it” once they set up a metadata workflow. Metadata2020 is trying to improve this.
The entire scholcomm community needs to be on board with this.
Automation of this process is key, the volume is simply too large to use people.
Finer gained is always better

Lady from ARL

Research libraries are reliant on good metadata. Institutions want to know all their research outputs. This is very hard without reliable quality metadata.
Researcher affiliation is surprisingly hard, requiring human curation since use of standard controlled vocabulary isn’t widespread
Long discussions ensued. One obvious takeaway, everyone needs to use ORCID! Require one for all your PhD students!
What are the tradeoffs in having the researchers/depositors put in the metadata at time of submission? Is there a better way?
Maybe making metadata enrichment more collaborative can help.
What if we used machine learning, AI, to generate the metadata ? What accuracy level would be acceptable in order to accept the richer records? To have a general use AI comb over so much content, the publishers would need to allow it in their licenses.

FRIDAY, JUNE 2

PLENARY: PREVIEWS SESSION – NEW AND NOTEWORTHY PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS

9:00 – 10:30AM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/plenary-previews-session-new-and-noteworthy-products/

Lots of innovation and disruption in the field
Innovation is not a luxury, it is essential to keep customers now
Atypon. Seamless individual authentication . Atypons shared WAYF cloud, login once, the participating publishers share user authentication data, so access is seamless across sites and users can be tracked across sites. Will launch late 2017.
BenchSci. Trope is that scientists only engage with the literature sporadically in order to keep up to date. Actuality is that many consult it in small doses every week. People are often deluged in content though. Benchsci is an AI product that reads through papers to find biomedical information and allow filtering.
Code Ocean. Finding code or algorithms used in research is difficult. Not always available, many languages used, may need debugging. Code ocean hosts code in the cloud, supports all major languages, allows people to run code in the cloud and view in browser. It is a reproducibility platform. Cuts out the GitHub and downloading and other tweaking middlemen processes.
Crossref web events. Lots of places in the web refer to scientific information. Crossref and datacite collaborated to develop a tracking mechanism for these references (tweets, Wikipedia, Facebook, blogs, etc.). Not a metrics, no user interface, all the info goes through the API, interpretation of the data is done by the end user, not crossref.
Hypothes-is. W3C approved an annotation standard this year. So annotation is coming to the web in a big way, fast. Hypothesis is an nonprofit. Annotation allows all documents to become living, version of record preserved but also able to be continually updated if necessary. Journal clubs are forming using the software, they are also trialing using it for peer review.
LibLynx. Identity management, in a world where people use single sign on allows tracking and personalization. Presently, identifying patrons is siloed across many platforms, users can also have access through many IDs. Users have a disconnected access experience, often having to login 2x (library, then platform). By harmonizing ID management, liblynx allows cross site tracking and upselling.
NEJM knowledge +. A learning and assessment tool for physicians to pass their board exams. Uses AI to benchmark where people are and only show them relevant content to get them up to the next benchmark level. Originated after detailed consultations with doctors.
PSI. Firm that “keeps content safe”. They offer subscription fraud detection services, have recovered over 50 million in damages for their clients in past 10 years. They have a validated database of IP addresses (and API) to ensure that no one is getting unintended access as universities change their IP addresses. They also offer bribery detectors, LOL.
RedLink. Had new platform, Remarq. It is their strike back against academia.edu and Researchgate. They embed in existing websites and allow comments and annotation, as well as circulation “sharing”. All of this require only an addition of JavaScript to existing sites. They also offer polling and user interaction detached from an article.
SCOPE. Publishers need better metadata to sell their books, in order to do this for the backlist catalog, they have an AI product that generates abstracts and keywords for each chapter which then can go to human curators to verify. “conCise” product name. Several publishers on JSTOR are already use it for chapter abstracts and subject headings
Digital science. Dimensions for publishers. There aren’t many accurate leading indicators of use. Dimensions is a knowledge platform that allows tracking and aggregation of funding information, useful for soliciting reviews, IDing conflicts of interest, and scouting new topic areas for sales.
UC press, Editoria. Luminos. It is a web based open access workflow management and book development tool. Ingested Word files, then everything else can be done in the platform all the way to the final product. Based on the PubSweet framework. Partnership with Collaborative Knowledge Center.
U Michigan Press. Fulcrum. A platform that allows authors to present multimedia content into their work. Ebook don’t allow this (well). Fulcrum is a scalable platform that can allow this and has the player technology embedded in it so meets preservation requirements. Open source.
Zapnito. They offer white label “knowledge networks “ and “feeds”. Lots of buzzwords about knowledge frameworks, I’m not really sure what this actually does…. but both SpringerNature and Elsevier are customers.

CONCURRENT 4E: BUT WHAT DO THE USERS REALLY THINK? USER EXPERIENCE AND USABILITY FROM ALL SIDES OF THE TABLE

11:00 – 12:00PM

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-4e-but-what-do-the-users-really-think/

Little solid research on information seeking behavior beyond the STM world. Humanities publishers have a long way to go, need to do more usability testing
At EBSCO they moved user research into the product management department out of the quality assurance department. They are working continuously with product owners of ebooks to improve service.
Everyone should read “democratization of UX” on medium. We need to go beyond white papers. They are fine but key points need to break out of the paper container into talking points and query-able databases.
Instead of general user testing, to make the results widely understood, many are using ‘user personas ‘. Then create testing panels of users that come close to the personas.
In order to make research actionable, the research questions need to be actionable. UX testers also need to stay ahead of the user. Henry ford “if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘a faster horse’.”
To make better products, publishers middlemen vendors and libraries must collaborate on user research.

CONCURRENT 5E: WHO’S FASTER, A PIRATE OR A LIBRARIAN? SCI-HUB, #ICANHAZPDF, ALTERNATIVE ACCESS METHODS, AND THE LESSONS FOR PUBLISHERS AND THEIR CUSTOMERS

1:30 – 2:30

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-5e-whos-faster-a-pirate-or-a-librarian/

My panel. Slides not posted online.

CONCURRENT 6F: IMPROVING ACCESS TO SCHOLARLY RESOURCES FROM ANYWHERE ON ANY DEVICE

2:30 – 3:30

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/concurrent-6f-improving-access-to-scholarly-resources/

Ralph, ACS

RA21
Access methods have changed a lot in the past 30 years but not nearly as much as they could have changed.
IP authentication was invented in the mid 90s and we’re still using it. Why? There are other ways.
Detailed walkthrough of how hard it is to get to an article from off campus.
RA21 is joint initiative between NISO and STM to move away from IP authentication
Researchers want seamless access from multiple devices
IP authentication facilitates piracy (scihub leverages IP authentication). Publishers want to be able to shut out individual users they suspect of piracy, but shutting off an IP address affects hundreds or thousands of people.
There is a black market for university login credentials

R. Wenger from MIT

Read Roger Schonfeld post on Scholarly Kitchen 2015/11/13
IP authentication is an anachronism and “not sustainable” in the long term.
Academic libraries and publishers have an opportunity to collaborate on a new system
Libraries care about privacy and walk ins, protection of usage data
RA21 is going to use a SAML based system, of which shibboleth is one.
There is a lot of inertia behind IP authentication in libraries, will need to be overcome
Benefits for libraries are: no need to maintain IP ranges, reduced use of proxy servers, identity management likely outsourced to campus IT, granulated user data.
rwenger@mit.edu

Chris from Elsevier

SAML is a federated identity management technology (shibboleth is one version)
RA21 is doing pilot programs right now, 3. They have a privacy preserving WAYF (where are you from) option.
How it would work: sign in once using a university email, it gets stored in the browser, good to go forever on that device in that browser (unless delete the cookie). Cookie is privacy preserving by only using the email domain address, so no individual data stored.
www.ra21.org
OCLC has been involved in the discussions but is not a formal partner.
This not “a cross publisher login system”. Rather, users always login in to their institutional SSO and are then directed back to the content.

CLOSING PLENARY: DESSERT COURSE: A DISCUSSION WITH THE SCHOLARLY KITCHEN CHEFS

3:30 – 4:30

https://www.sspnet.org/events/annual-meeting-2017/2017-schedule/closing-plenary/

Scholarly Kitchen discussions

David Crotty, OUP

Why hasn’t scholarly publishing been disrupted already?
The number of authors and articles increases every year. But the subscriptions decline almost every year. Thus new growth strategies need to emerge.
Publishers are increasingly inserting themselves in every aspect of the research and dissemination process. (Vendor - publisher mergers)

Todd Carpenter, NISO

Money is the big problem, states, university, students, everyone is tapped out. Forecast is that resources will only stagnate or decline
Have libraries devotions to privacy set them back? How will they deal with the personalization that users “want”?

Bob, American Mathematics Society

For most societies, membership is declining, revenue is stagnant or declining
They need to demonstrate their value better
To outsource or not?
There are big questions of scale, societies have trouble competing with the big major publishers. Can they remain independent and in-house?

Kent, Redlink

Politics is now greatly affecting the scholcomm ecosystem
New UK draft policy would require researchers to show their funded work to government before publication
AI may save us. Or it may destroy things.
Now that the intermediary institutions are Silicon Valley (not neutral) we need to continually build in skepticism about the algorithms that are determining the results we see.

ELUNA 2017

Posted on 2017-05-16 Edited on 2019-10-25 In Travel Report

Symbols count in article: 15k Reading time ≈ 13 mins.

Notes from Ex Libris Users of North America 2017

Schaumberg, IL

Narrative

From Tuesday May 9 through Friday May 12, I attended the 2017 meeting and conference of Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA), which was held at the Renaissance Hotel and Convention Center in Schaumberg, Illinois. I did so at the request of the Dean and Associate Dean in order to ensure that I was armed with the most up-to-date information about the Primo discovery software before our library’s migration to the Alma/Primo system this coming June. Below are my session notes, which are of varying length depending upon how informative I found each session. ELUNA is organized in ‘tracks’ so that sessions pertaining to the same or similar products are spread out over the course of each day and that people interested in only one aspect of Ex Libris’ products, such as Primo, can absorb all the relevant content. The conference was a full service affair with breakfast and lunch provided on premise, quite a welcome change compared to ACRL. I found it to be an education experience and the comradery was quicker to develop compared to other professional events I’ve attended. Not only were all the (non-vendor) attendees working in academic libraries, most of us used (or in our case, will use) the same software on a day-to-day basis; this allowed for conversations to get rather ‘meaty’ in short order.

If you are interested, find my (occasionally cryptic) notes below with links to the detailed (non-plenary) session descriptions and let me know if you have any questions. Presenter slides are supposedly forthcoming but I have not been able to find them yet.

TUESDAY, MAY 9

RECEPTION 6:00PM - 10:00PM

This was a nice opportunity to catch up with old friends from the University of Minnesota.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 10

ELUNA WELCOME AND OPENING KEYNOTE: BETTER TOGETHER: ENRICHING OUR COMMUNITY THOUGH COLLABORATION (PLENARY)

This is the biggest attended ELUNA yet. There is a new ELUNA mailing list domain/website http://exlibrisusers.org

Opening keynote Mary Case, from UI Chicago

Cross-institutions collaboration is crucial, it will allow for efficiency and improvement in access to local holdings and non held resources
In the past collaboration was state or country based. What if we thought of our community as the world? (ARL, SPARC, CfRL leading examples.) IARLA is a new global entry for library collaboration.
How will collection development change as more libraries work together? Distributed print repositories… with responsibility for preservation of their de-duped collections.
Data preservation is another area where there are big scale opportunities for collaboration. (Hathi trust, DataONE, DataRefuge, DPN)

GLOBAL & NORTH AMERICA COMPANY UPDATE (PLENARY)

Eric Hines, President of ExL North America

2017 is ExL 30th anniversary as a company
Nice pictures of ExL old offices in Chicago (1st in USA), Notre Dame was first customer
Rattling off bunch of inspirational quotes.
58% of ExL NA employees have an MLS
They are grateful for all the suggestions that their users have provided over the years and want to continue to leverage these.

Matti Shem-Tov, CEO of ExL

Over 3,000 institutions in NA use either Primo or Summon
They started with 55 developers for Alma, now there are over 100 working on it.
There are customers in Korea and China using Alma/primo recently now.
APIs are big for them, and will continue to be. They want to have a very open customizable system.
There are challenges but they are try to integrate a lot of ExL and Proquest products.
Working on shared Summon/PCI content.
Over 100 customers are using the new Primo UI
They’ve opened new data centers in Canada and China to decrease cloud response times. Committed to exceeding the contractual obligations about speed and responsiveness.
On the horizon is product development/enhancement about research data services management and better course management interoperability

NEXT-GENERATION LIBRARY SERVICES UPDATE (PLENARY)

Strategic plan highlights for 2017

What they hear from customers: they want efficiency, value, and new/improved services
Based on close work with 8 libraries, they’ve developed the new Alma UI. They are committed to continued enhancement of Alma and the UI
They want to do more community based testing, shared test plans, to reduce duplication in testing work across customers.
They pay attention to the idea exchange, it is where they get product enhancement ideas
In December 2016, they crossed a milestone in APIs, with more transactions in Alma coming from APIs then from humans.
The Oracle database is the single most expensive aspect of Alma.
They will soon introduce a benchmark feature in Alma analytics to compare your institution to other Alma institutions
In 2016 Primo searches increased 30% over 2015.
By the end of 2017, the coverage in Summon and PCI should be the same, they’ve been working on this since the Proquest acquisition
They are working on rolling the Primo Back Office into Alma so that they can be managed within the same system.
Leganto looks pretty cool, they have added many features recently.
A Leganto experiment at Vanderbilt resulted in a 52% savings on course materials
CampusM is a new mobile platform that consolidates all campus activity updates.

PRIMO PRODUCT UPDATE, ROADMAP, Q&A

The Primo working group (of users) meets monthly. There was also a hack a thon on the new UI.
Coming features/work in progress:
Linked data, RestfulAPIs in Primo, improved recommendations
They are making promotion of OA materials a priority. More indexing, more linking, maybe an additional OA facet filter
Customers are encouraged to vote on PCI content additions on the Idea Exchange
Trying to get as much multimedia content in PCI as possible, their other main content priority other than OA
They do continuous adjustment of the propriety relevance ranking algorithm
Summer release of new UI will have brief record (snippets) views using PCI enriched metadata
They have started working with an external auditor to make sure that the new UI will meet all governmental accessibility requirements
August release will have a “resource recommender” feature when people sign in and view their patron record.
Later 2017 release will have additional linked record display fields
The unified PBO/Alma release is in beta testing. Production release will be 2018.
They are encouraging group hacks and code sharing. They want all users to be able to use locally developed hacks. This is called the “Primo open discovery framework “
The Cited By data all comes from CrossRef currently. But they may expand to include other data sources.
Q&A about the propriety ranking algorithms and how they test it to make sure it is actually getting better

THE OPAC AND ‘REAL RESEARCH’ AT HARVARD

Harvard has had several OPACs. One was AquaBrowser, which people apparently hated due to too much Web 2.0 gimmicks like automatic word clouds. At one point they had 3 OPACs simultaneously.
Recommended reading: Katie Sherwin 2016, university websites, top 10 guidelines
Harvard is trialing Yewkno , preliminary usability testing is that it is just a gimmick
They did a lot of usability testing and user surveys before picking Primo. Results indicated that people wanted single results page with filters rather than “bento” approaches
Lots of people wanted the old catalogue
Known Primo Gaps: series title linking, Primo just does a keyword search, gets lots of irrelevant results, users are used to being taken to a ‘browse’ feature
Harvard old OPAC also used a sorted list of uniform titles, no analog in Primo.
Big detriment of Primo is that the linked data is accomplished using keyword searches, rather than taking users to a browse list. At present, no known fix for this.
They still have their classic catalog which gets a fair amount of use, steady through the year, unlike Primo which fluctuates with academic calendar. Indications that staff and “real researchers “ still use the old catalog
Read: Karen Markey, 1983. Users expected articles to be in the OPACs even then!

A TALE OF TWO UIS: USABILITY STUDIES OF TWO PRIMO USER INTERFACES

At University of Washington, they did 3 separate usability studies to gauge effectiveness of the new UI. Methods: 12 participants, pre post tests, 60 minute sessions, 7 tasks and talk aloud method. Reward: 15$ bookstore gift cards.

Tasks (on old Primo):

Known title search, one that was on loan
Article subject search, peer reviewed
Course reserved materials
Known DVD, available
Known article from a citation
Print journal
Open ended search

Big problems ( low success):

Print journal volume, book on loan
Points of confusion: e-shelf, no one knows what it is, collection facet, ‘send to’ language
Old UI required too many clicks! (Between tabs, etc.)

Then ran usability test on new UI. Basically the same methodology

Problems (low task success):

Print journal, known DVD,
Points of confusion: tweak my results, save query, hard time finding advanced search
People very upset that the page refreshed each time a facet was selected
Hyperlinks were largely ignored by users, they wanted “buttons”
3rd usability test where they brought in some old participants and new volunteers and had them compare the two UIs
Majority preferred new UI on all the aspects compared
Everyone is annoyed that Book Reviews come up in front of main items (relevancy ranking problems)

Enhancements needed:

Sign in prompt for ‘My Favorites’
Sort option for favorites in the new UI
Enable libraries to add custom actions to the actions menu
Zotero support

OUR EXPERIENCE WITH PRIMO NEW UI

Tennessee tech adopted new Primo in July 2016, never used classic. Previously used Summon. Boston University adopted new Primo in 2017 after using old Primo since 2011.
Config: “new UI enabled” for openurl services page, added call number field to search menu, hid sections on the full display that didn’t make sense to end users. Tennessee tech had some big problems when they went live that required ExL development work. They were an early adopter and guinea pig. These were all resolved eventually. BU had done a bunch of customizing the old UI, which ended up anticipating a lot of the changes in the new UI.
Overall usability testing BU did found people were satisfied with the new UI. A lot of the defects they encountered have been fixed in the May 2017 release or will be in the August 2017 one.
Main complaint, slower page load time. (Found a statistically significant difference in page load time from old to new UI using Google Analytics data.)
BU now collapse a lot of the facets by default, since testing showed lots of people didn’t use them when expanded by default.

THURSDAY, MAY 11

EX LIBRIS STRATEGY UPDATE (PLENARY)

Since 2008, ExL has been focused on development of products that will allow libraries to focus on areas of real value. Their customers are academic and national libraries and will continue to be. Part of that is focus means focusing on researcher behavior.
One area that has changes since 2008 is that funding has increasingly come with strings attached and requirements for data openness and management. Simultaneously people are expected to demonstrate impact: metrics of success.
Institutional goals are thus to improve visibility, impact, and compliance. ExL knows this and is working on these areas.
There is already a very complicated and robust ecosystem for these areas. The current model is not one that they can easily work in or influence. So they want to “disrupt “ it. Not with a new product but with Alma and PCI
Alma is format agnostic so can handle all sorts of metadata. They are continually enriching the PCI/Summon metadata. The disruption comes in the analytical area where they are working on getting good metrics that can intersect with the rich Alma/PCI metadata. (Controlled vocab, Unique ID enrichment, etc.)
They are working with development partners already on Alma/PCI starting in July to get these enhancements started. Timeline is that some of the pilot enrichment will be done by end of 2018. General rollout of whatever features are ready in 2019.

CUSTOMER LIFE CYCLE AT EX LIBRIS (PLENARY)

Lots of clichés, suits making bad puns. Very boring.

PRIMO ANALYTICS USE CASES: BREAKING DOWN THE SILOS BETWEEN DISCOVERY SERVICES, INSTRUCTION AND USER EXPERIENCE

At University of Oregon, they have an Evaluation, Assessment, User Experience team. And a Online User Interface team.
These teams are trying to be informed by the ACRL infolit framework.
These teams are new and there was not a lot of collaboration between these areas historically
How can Primo analytics answer questions about library instruction?
They interviewed 6 instruction librarians about how they might use the Primo dashboard and came up with tasks to test with undergraduate s
Undergrads mainly had questions about search functionality whereas grad students focus more on content
Problem identified by both librarians and the undergraduates is prevalence of book reviews
Students were recruited guerrilla style with bookstore gift cards a reward (5 students)
Tasks: find peer reviewed article about us civil war, how to request a book (paging service), find a sociology related database, get a known title book not held by the library but indexed in PCI, course reserves search.
No one could find the article, everyone was able to find a database (libguides 2.0 database list), other tasks had mixed success results mostly 2/5 or 3/5.
General findings: students didn’t prefilter (advanced search) or post filter - very discouraging. They did Google style long string searching.
They are giving regular Primo analytics dashboard info updates to the reference librarians.
Primo dashboard limitations: can’t publish dashboard results to Alma. Reports can be emailed out. At OU they are exporting raw data and creating a dashboard for the librarians in a 3rd party application.
Supposedly Alma and Primo analytics will merge, it is on the ExL product development roadmap.
Presenters didn’t deliver on the promise of handouts or scripts…

MANAGEMENT Q&A (PLENARY)

Uninteresting. After 15 minutes, I went to the bar.

HACKING THE GENERAL ELECTRONIC SERVICE

Sawyer Library, had a popular reserve request feature that they wanted to keep going as they moved to Alma/Primo
What does it take to make this work? Set up a norm rule to copy the MMSID to an empty field that gets passed through the open URL, (not all fields get passed so need to be careful), then openurl gets processed through Alma API
He also wrote a text a call number feature, uses the same norm rule
Emery-Williams on GitHub

UX DESIGN & OPEN DISCOVERY PLATFORM: NEW WAYS TO CUSTOMIZE AND DESIGN YOUR LIBRARY DISCOVERY EXPERIENCE

People might think that the new UI is just customized CSS and HTML of the old one, but that’s wrong. The entire thing has been rebuilt using AngularJS and separated from Alma and old Primo. All Alma data comes from API calls.
New May release feature is the session history in the menu bar
Right now, cases in sales force will have to be opened for problematic user tags, but this will eventually be able to be controlled via new Alma/Primo BO
Coming feature: resource recommendations (login required) that appear right before search results
August release will have multiple facet selection without page reloads? Unclear, but they’re working on it.
New white paper about Primo Open Discovery Framework. They are trying to make new UI as customizable as possible
Royal Danish Library has released a “search tips “ button and Altmetric API integration.
The main developer of new UI talked about accessibility issues that they’ve received pushback on from the accessibility working group. Infinite scroll was one problem so they introduced pagination.
New UI also loads slower than old UI but they are continually working on this, compressing things, reducing number of API calls, expanding server capacity.
The cited by feature is much more prominent in new UI and shows a trail, which it didn’t previously. They plan to introduce a save citation trail feature in 2018.

JUDGING AN E-BOOK BY ITS COVER: VIRTUAL BROWSE FOR ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

As more collections are books, why can’t we virtually browse them?
We can, in old UI, but it requires some work.
Need to add a PNX norm rule that deals with AVA tag. This AVA tag is an Alma tag, not Marc.
See slides in ELUNA document repository for details.
$$I , our institution code - add
Int means entity type
Mostly this works, but there are problems.
Some vendors don’t include call numbers, others include non-call number data in call number MARC fields
Ebook cutter numbers vary, some are : e, others eb
Duplication if an ebook is available in multiple ebook collections
Can’t hover in virtual browse to learn more. Can only determine if item is physical or electronic by clicking on the items
New UI, will it work? Yes.

SOUTHWEST USER GROUP (ESWUG) REGIONAL USER GROUP MEETING

Everyone is new! Except for a couple California community colleges using Aleph.
UNLV will be coming on Alma/Primo in 2018. They left III’s Link+
Several Arizona institutions will be moving to Alma/Primo in 2017, 2018.

FRIDAY, MAY 12

NEW UI CUSTOMIZATION FOR LIBRARIANS WHO AREN’T DEVELOPERS

Whew… a bit in over my head here. Hopefully someone in the system will learn AngularJS. Or David Walker will save us all? /-:

ACRL 2017 Notes

Posted on 2017-04-04 Edited on 2019-10-26 In Travel Report

Symbols count in article: 12k Reading time ≈ 10 mins.

ACRL Narrative

Baltimore, MD

At the end of March, I attended ACRL 2017 to present some of my scholarship in a contributed paper format and learn about a variety of topics relevant to my professional interests and job responsibilities. ACRL is always a worthwhile learning experience and simultaneously provided me with a chance to reunite with old work colleagues and school friends.

While in Baltimore for ACRL, I attended many sessions/events. They are listed below in order of occurrence as are my sporadic and cryptic notes. Feel free to read them if you are interested.

The session I enjoyed the most was the panel Resilience, Grit, and Other Lies. The panel Re-skilling for a Digital Future got me thinking about how to develop my own abilities and exposed me to some new digital humanities methods; to my knowledge, none of my faculty are working at this level. The two sessions about data gathering on students Closing the “Data Gap” between Libraries and Learning and Data in the Library Is Safe, but That’s Not What Data Is Meant For are on a topic I’ve been following for years with interest and trepidation. They didn’t present any new empirical findings that aren’t in these two articles:

Wednesday, March 22

Exhibits Opening Reception 5:45 - 7:30PM
Dinner with friends, we won the trivia competition at Water Street Tavern!

Thursday, March 23

Changing Tack: A Future-Focused ACRL Research Agenda 8:00 - 9:00AM

ACRL is doing a gap analysis for the areas not covered by the VAL report of a couple years ago. William Harvey from OCLC has developed an info viz tool re: the VAL study and gaps. The goal is to promote impact of academic libs to parent institutions. Looking at all types of institutions, small large, public private, regional.

Did interviews with provosts of all universities in the sample. Provosts were very concerned about educating students for “life long learning”. The data tool they built will provide context for the literature. We know space is important but how about for your type of institutions? We can easily pinpoint studies that apply to specific types of institutions. Developing research question: uni admin is much less concerned about privacy than librarians are.

OCLC research has put together a dashboard that draws on the literature and will allow people to visualize their own institutional data

Nice drag and drop chart builder
Public release may 23 2017
http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/user-studies/acrl-agenda.html
Will need to login using ALA account
there is not a commitment to keep the original database of studies continually up to date. But OCLC people are aware of the desire for that.

Resilience, Grit, and Other Lies: Academic Libraries and the Myth of Resiliency 9:40 - 10:40AM

Big think pair share activity - when have you been asked to do more with less and cope at your job? E.g. Coded into job, do more with less as a point of pride, lots of unpaid labor going on, this is a long trend.

What is resilience? Widespread use in ecology and psychology, now picked up by business. What does it do? It individualizes, shifts responsibility from collective to individuals. Applied to society, it naturalizes what may not be natural. “We needed a revolution. We got resilience.” - Alf Hornborg

Grit: typically applied externally to populations “needing” grit, people needing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. People naturally want to persevere, to a certain extent. Grit, resilience, etc. offer promises and aspirations but never resources. How can we recover if we’re not given tools to do so?

Almost all our marketing is defensive, because of grit/resilience mindset, we take on the shape of our oppression. Absence of power or agency becomes a moral failing under the grit/resilience framework. In libraries, the end game of this logic is Things > People, cutting staff if automation allows or faculty demand certain items.

How do we combat this?

Give people space to fail. If you are a manager, allow people to try and fail without punishment.
Buy books that critique the grit/resilience models.
Take a “melancholy” approach: the system wants you to recover, to adapt. Instead take time to mourn, too complain.
The people who we often ask to be gritty are already doing it. Stop asking them to do it more.

Keynote: Roxane Gay 10:55 - 12:15PM

Very ‘woke’, in the parlance of our times. Didn’t strike me as relevant to much of our day to day work.

Closing the “Data Gap” between Libraries and Learning: The Future of Academic Library Value Creation 2:00 - 3:00PM

Libraries and institutions have cared about assessment for a long time. Since measuring “learning” is actually pretty difficult, most institutions measure proxies variables that are typically grouped under “success”. Since 2010, ACRL has been producing research in this area. Most research has been correlational, hard to ID causation. In polls by Educause, majority of students are resigned/OK with learning data and library data being used to help them.

Problems:

silos of data
granularity
too little data

The audience is your wider university, we need to be able to link library data to institutional priorities. The purpose of this work/ research is to improve instruction and services, it isn’t done just for itself.

Problems:

organizational culture opposed to data driven decisions
data that is incomplete or inaccuracies or proprietary
privacy concerns
need consent

What’s the future of the LMS/CMS? Next generation digital learning environment ‘NGDLE’. It needs to be interoperability use open standards. Lots of unrest in the LMS world, no one wants an uber application but rather one that will talk to many different apps. Cal Berkeley is doing interesting work in this area with their “learning record system”.

Scott Walter gave some thoughts about how the library has been integrated to the LMS at DePaul. They ID struggling students in research intensive courses and get them in contact with a librarian if they don’t perform well in early metrics. All this happens with a lot of automation. Library did setup, then just answer student questions.

Director of product management for IMS Global talked about how to get stakeholders to the table. Make sure there are privacy standards, interoperability standards, ‘chunk’ things into small manageable issues, general specs always need to be agreed upon before deciding specific technologies.

You Say You Want a Revolution? The Ethical Imperative of Open Access 4:00 - 5:00PM

There is a tension between articles in the ala code of ethics between copyright and access.

Amy Buckland, librarian, we need to live OA, LIS literature in particular is mostly not OA by a large margin. Pressure your colleagues. Get OA policies enacted at your institutions at your colleges, at your departments.

Heather Joseph, SPARC, the need for open access hasn’t gone away. People still need access. We have made good progress in the past 15 years which we shouldn’t lose sight of. Part of the OA movement should include moving away from emphasis on the journal article. There are other products of intellectual labor and other scholarship that gets used and influences the conversation.

Brad Fenwick, Elsevier, there is a dichotomy between ethics and morals, ethics is typically imposed from without via professional associations or law or church, morals are typically from within or localized/individualized. Good publishers want the work they produce to be read, they just want to get paid for it. Elsevier supposedly supports sharing, e.g. Their purchase of SSRN and Mendeley, e.g. They also just launched BioRN. He thinks we need to fall back in principle of “do no harm”. We need evolution of the scholcom system, not a revolution.

Moderation, Q&A

How can we bridge the gap between OA publishers and OA advocates?
Elsevier: never draw a line in the sand, mixed models are the future
HJ, the future needs to have scholars in control of the works they produce. The internet provides us with an opportunity to cut out the middlemen, we need to do that.
Elsevier: we need to beware unintended consequences. We need to better think through the implications of the distribution models. Startup costs and ongoing publishing costs are not trivial. They can be disintermediated and spread out but they are not going away.
HJ, some good articles in The Economist recently. Funders need to put in mandates.
E: mandates will be pushed back against. That is overplaying the OA hand.
Mod: how can we convince researchers to publish OA without finder mandates?
- AB: appeal to self interest and how OA work will be more read and influential.
- HJ: OA needs to tie itself to university missions
- E: Elsevier is actually agnostic about OA, they support tenure committees taking a broader approach and moving beyond citation counts.
- E: because it is now easier than ever to publish, we need to shift from quantity to quality.
Mod: what would be the tipping point for OA?
- HJ, if 51% of all articles are OA but they’re using a APC model, that is not success.
- AB: the default should be openness, we’ll have won when people assume that articles are open and that subscription required is a curiosity.
- E: small publishers stand to be greatly harmed by OA

Friday, March 24

ACRL Town Hall: Academic Libraries and New Federal Regulations 10:30 - 11:30AM

No Notes

Using Altmetrics to Transform Collection Development Decisions 1:00 - 2:00PM

What are altmetrics? NISO takes a broad definition, basically any information about use, views, influence. People at Altmetric co. Have a narrower definition. Less about use, more about impact.

They ran a big survey of librarians, STEM librarians had more familiarity and knowledge (self rated) than others. About 1/2 of respondents who do collections development “Never Use” altmetrics in their coll dev decisions. No significant relationship between being on tenure track and knowing about altmetrics. Strongest relationship was that of discipline. Most usage of altmetrics by librarians comes from Scopus and Altmetric.

Why use AM for humanities? Slow obsolescence, so good possibility of rich AM.

Recommend tool is Altmetric Explorer for Librarians.

Case study details about using AM at Mississippi State University. They found it good for IDing books to buy

Data in the Library Is Safe, but That’s Not What Data Is Meant For: Exploring the Longitudinal, Responsible Use of Library and Institutional Data to Understand and Increase Student Success 3:00 - 4:00PM

(UMN and Megan Oakleaf)

The wave of data driven decisions is hitting higher ed, if libraries don’t participate we are going to get washed over. Management wants to see correlational data about the library and how it works for the school. Libraries need to cultivate partnerships with their offices of institutional research. The reality is that most millennials are eager to share if you ask them (obtain informed consent).

At Lewis and Clark they track checkouts, reference questions, and in person instruction. L&C data showed that students who asked ref Qs got better grades and were much less risky to drop out (statistically significant).

Minnesota reports out of their research: They are now using “propensity score matching” now to find effects rather than logistic regression (create pseudo controls). Use of books and databases had biggest effects on academic performance. Ideally all the data is made available ‘real time’ so that interventions can take place and predictive analyzing. Having the library on the learning analytics team/table allows for us to influence conversations on privacy. They are experimenting with a notification in Moodle that shows students how their library usage compares to peers, use peer pressure to drive interactions.

Guy from JISC didn’t say much new. All this should be viewed as a big data problem that will require big data tools, servers, and staff. Don’t try it without these resources

Re-skilling for a Digital Future: Developing Training and Instruction in Digital Scholarship for Academic Librarians 4:15 - 5:15PM

Are libraries ready for new methods being used by our faculty? Can we use them for our own LIS research? An ARL speck kit suggests there’s a lot of work to be done. There is a new ACRL digital scholarship section.

At HathiTrust research center, they are trying to support text mining of the collections. IMLS funded. They are teaching librarians how to text mine and how to teach it themselves and support other faculty working on it. There are preinstalled algorithms in w/ platform they’ve developed. Also, they are teaching people basic Python scripts for more in depth analysis. Libraries need to think about what infrastructure they need to support this type of research as it is growing considerably.

NCSU lady: Lot of the training material went too deep too fast, too much time to learn. So they partner with other faculty to learn it at an in-house short course. Then develop their other training materials. This resulted in DVIL, Data Visualization Institute for Librarians.

IU lady: IU did a cross training program, developed by the librarians, endorsed by management. No plan to do it again.

Saturday, March 25

No notes taken this day. I presented with my co-authors. Dr. Hayden’s speech was very moving.

Addicted to the Brand? Brand Loyalty Theory as a Means of Understanding Academics’ Scholarly Communication Practices 8:30 - 8:50AM

Academic Libraries, Filtering, and the “Tyranny of Choice” 8:50 - 9:10AM

Shadow Libraries and You: Sci-Hub Usage and the Future of ILL 9:45 - 10:05AM

In a World Where… Librarians Can Access Final Research Projects via the LMS 10:25 - 10:45AM

Keynote: Dr. Carla Hayden 11:00 - 12:15PM

ALA Annual Conference 2016

Posted on 2016-06-29 Edited on 2019-10-26 In Travel Report

Symbols count in article: 15k Reading time ≈ 13 mins.

Narrative about ALA

Orlando, FL

From Friday, June 24 through Monday, June 27, 2016, I attended the annual conference of the American Library Association. My primary purpose for traveling to this conference was to participate in a panel to which I was invited. My presentation was on June 25th as part of the RUSA/RUSA-STARS panel: Resource Sharing in Tomorrowland.

I spent my remaining time at the conference attending education programming, discussion groups, and speaking with vendors and other librarians. In the evenings I was fortunate enough to be able to reconnect with past colleagues from the University of Minnesota and alumni from Indiana University. Below are the educational and discussion sessions I attended each day, often accompanied by my brief (hopefully not too cryptic) notes. If anyone has questions about the sessions I attended or what I learned, please contact me directly.

SATURDAY

8:30 – 10:00 AM Expanding Your Assessment Toolbox

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=138560

A lot of us may be doing assessment (formative) but not realizing this:

Observing student behavior
asking for and dealing with questions on the fly

Summative assessment in oneshots is just a difficult problem, a semester provides many more opportunities. At a bare minimum you need to establish some kind of feedback loop.

Libcal as an instruction calendar has some limitations. Reporting functions don’t really get the job done if you add qualitative info to the calendar events.

At a macro level, it is very important that all librarians use the same instruments and metrics. People can go above and beyond but there has to be a baseline level that captures data valid for all librarians. Moving from the Standards to the Framework is a shift away from behavioral indicators to cognitive indicators.

Activity

Question from the audience “do we even need to assess the framework? (i.e. itself as compared with others)”
Panel response, not really? But the theories there might make your info lit program better.

10:30 – 11:30 AM How Local Libraries Can Protect Global internet Freedom

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=138016

Alison, Library Freedom Project founder, not available, at another conference

The Cypherpunk’s Manifesto is similar to the ALA freedom to read and intellectual freedom statements.

Long discussion about web advertising and 3rd party tracking, Tor (The Onion Router) prevents tracking as long as a user doesn’t log into an account. Connections are encrypted though to protect you if you do log in. E.g., Facebook like button can read Facebook cookies so will know whatever you look at with the like button even if you aren’t logged in currently, if you have ever logged into Facebook on that browser (and haven’t deleted the previous cookie).

The Tor network needs relays (donated) to improve speed. In particular, exit relays are needed, there aren’t many of them because individuals can’t run this type of relay from their homes: ISPs often threaten to cut off access. However, larger institutions with free bandwidth, like libraries and universities, can run exit relays.

Kilton Public Library in Lebanon NH is the first to run an exit relay (public library). Got a lot of press coverage for this.
LFP does workshops about privacy, IT staff at Kilton got the library director’s consent to run a Tor relay, as long as trustees consented. The Feds, DHS in particular, got mad and pressed the board of trustees to shut it down pending review. They did and collected public comments. They received hundreds of comments from around the country in support. Only one comment was negative. So they turned their middle relay back on.
The middle relay was a pilot - successful. In November 2015 they moved their relay to exit status. This required a lot of work, getting a separate IP just for the relay so that the normal users of the library wouldn’t be impacted by anything the exit relay did or if it were attacked.

Arguments for libraries to support Tor:

Intellectual freedom
Privacy
Chilling effect of surveillance
A Tor relay lets your library have a global impact
A Pew survey found that majority of respondents wanted their libraries to educate about privacy and help people with privacy {incomplete citation provided}
A lot of bandwidth is wasted when the library isn’t open, can set the relay to take advantage of this.
Running a middle relay is basically free, can run on almost any computer that runs Linux, just requires set up time occasionally software update maintenance.

Very important to have admin support when this is undertaken. A middle relay is the most low-risk option. Should also install Tor Browser on public access computers. Libraries should host privacy classes.

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=139596

Carolyn and I presented very brief highlights from our research. The other panelists were marvelous.

3:00 – 4:00 PM Micro-assessments of Public Services Usability

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=143200

Closing the loop is important.

UMD College Park had a lot of unpicked up holds. Why? Ran a Qualtrics survey of users who had placed a hold but didn’t pick it up. Responses indicated that there was a significant communication issue. People either didn’t read the emails about their holds or if they did, typically didn’t understand them. Need better subject line in the email.

UC Denver: Using student workers in academic library. Looked at their distribution area (where they worked and when) and the library and gate counts and transactions to get the most efficient use of staff. Resulted in more equitable distribution of workload among student workers, improved morale.

Exit surveys: DePaul University. Given upon students exiting the library. Got info about “why they came” and also satisfaction figures. Survey with radio buttons and checkboxes, keeps it quick. Got good responses by giving survey only a couple times per semester, avoid survey fatigue. Sell the survey as short “literally only takes 30 seconds!”, bribe with candy.

SUNDAY

8:30 – 10:00 AM Intellectual Freedom Committee – Privacy Subcommittee meeting

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=143643

Need to get all ALA web presences using HTTPS. Also need to move to responsive web design as many ala websites are not mobile friendly.

Various resolutions were discussed and their progress in drafting and whether IFC will endorse them.

Digital content working group will be shifting focus to user experience for ebooks. Discussion about having model language for publishers about protecting ebook user privacy. Some mock ups have been done by NISO about getting user consent in a friendly clear way.

Note: need to get ahold of the newly approved guidelines. They’ll be up on the web by the end of July, including with press releases.

Discussion about how because privacy impacts many areas of ala, notably LITA, maybe privacy needs its own committee/group instead of this just being handled by the IFC subcommittee.

10:30 – 11:30 AM 22nd Annual Reference Research Forum

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=139602

1st study: Dweck’s theories of intelligence

There are 2 general schools of intelligence, incremental vs. entity theory. Study looked at students working theories of intelligence: did they impact student use of library and interactions with librarians? Mixed results.

NOTE TO SELF: see recent work on Dweck’s theories in info lit and Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. There may be a paper here about g factor/IQ.

2nd study: container collapse

Print container of information have broken - everything looks alike online. Using mixed methods to see how science students (of many ages, grades) pick “credible” results. Presenting students with a bunch of resources, asking the, to pick ones to cite, then explain their reasons for not picking all the other sources. Using articulate storyline. Study not complete yet.

3rd study: interviews with Brandeis students about their research process

Lots of Google and Wikipedia use, but all participants did use the library’s discovery layer. None of them used specific subject databases, such as MLAIB. Saw a lot of classic Dunning-Kruger behavior regarding how students evaluated sources, they think they can critically evaluate sources but they’re actually bad at it.

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=160019

Every policy needs to answer these questions: What is social media? Define the scope, don’t write policy for just 1 platform.

Who has access & oversight? I.e. Who decides what?
Why are you there?
What can/can’t we post about?
What images can/can’t we use? (CC-licensed content, public domain images, etc.)
What happens in a crisis? (e.g. hacking, emergencies, criticism)
Are there legal things we need to document? See rules promulgated by parent organization.

1:00 – 2:30 PM LITA Top Tech Trends panel

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=137999

What is the next top tech trend?

Concepts
Real-time
Virtual reality
Balance
Super easy application development (easy tools for working with APIs)

What is the most useless trend?

Teaching patrons to code. Libraries should provide people access to the learning books/videos and communities. But be real, most people aren’t going to learn to program.
Internet of things
Shodan.io and Internet of things search engine.

What are you sick of hearing about?

3D printers applause
Smart watches
Don’t buy a MakerBot if you aren’t prepared for a lot of maintaining

General comments of interest:

IT security in general is still hard, lots of ransomware attacks recently. Fortunately, Flash is becoming less used so that is one less vulnerability on library computers. Common logins are just a really bad idea. Every staff person needs a unique account and password.
Increasingly libraries are licensing things that are cloud hosted, the contracts for these must be read to ensure that the library is protected and that patron data is protected.

This isn’t a trend, but it should be: equitable distribution of makerspaces. Makerspaces require lots of up-front work by IT staff. Spec-ing these is work, 3D printers can be a lot of work to maintain. In general 3D printing still way oversold.

How much should we cater to the technology needs of patrons? It is a waste to cater to either of the tails at the bell curve ends. Focus on the middle 80%.

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=143587

Discussion Format

Topics:

Meetup
Periscope
Yik yak

General consensus:

Moderate all comments, if possible.
Yik Yak is cancer
Look at the LoC’s comments and posting policies
Acknowledge patron complaints, politely. Important to respond to comments as the institution
Periscope seems like it could be useful for special event programming

4:00 – 4:45 PM How to get beyond the ‘Agree’ button in Privacy Policies

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=160034

NYPL is in the midst of revising the privacy policy, they know form their analytics that hardly anyone ever looks at it.
Brooklyn public library had a 3 paragraph policy. NYPL is working with the Berkman Center at Harvard to create a shorter more readable policy.

Brooklyn public got an IMLS grant to develop training materials and fund the training of staff. Training of frontline staff very important.
This privacy training came out of as a result of a new America foundation study which revealed that staff needed much better training.

Dataprivacyproject.org

MONDAY

8:30 – 10:00 AM Data to Discourse: Subject Liaisons as Leaders in the Data Landscape

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=138564

YODA project, doing great things. (Yale)

Daniel, Biomed Central

The reproducibility problem, can we trust the literature? There is increasing evidence that there are very real significant problems.
We need to go back to the methods - document them well and share the procedures and results. Intervention at the write-up stage, where publishers come in, is TOO LATE. Publishers are becoming friendlier to publishing negative results, which previously they were relatively hostile to. This is part of the reproducibility crisis. Trial registration number are key here, they give a unique identifier that allows the procedures and results to be definitively associated with each other. At Biomed they’re giving each individual document a DOI and then publishing it to Crossref. (Only for clinical trials)

Holly

As more science becomes interdisciplinary, open data is increasingly important in order to just DO the type of science that needs to get done. This data needs to be both human and machine readable. Why should the library be involved? Who else is going to do it? IT? Institutional Research office? You must take the leap to do this. Start where you are, learn.

What can the library do:

Management
hosting
visualizations
GIS analysis
grant writing help

If you have a digital humanities lab - must partner with them, teach or co teach workshops or credit courses on data management. If you take the long view, data services are something that will cement your library’s role on campus.

Q&A
Topics discussed:

ACRL research data management roadshows
Data Cube
Purdue’s data curation profile toolkit

10:30 – 11:30 AM Student Privacy: The Big Picture on Big Data

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=142924

Big data means big money to be made, either by identifying economizing areas, or by selling profiles or insights. We as a society have still not adjusted our legislation and expectations to the impact that digital technology has on privacy.

FRPA, one prime concern was with a “permanent record” and how it could be misused. Goal was to limit access to the info to minimize potential harm. Many exceptions have been added for practical reasons.

In the present age, LMSs, email providers, are vulnerable and increase the scope of potential human error. Big data, LMSs and Khan Academy-like places are able to A/B test many things and make judgments. This has great potential benefits. Colleges can pinpoint the precise times when students give up or mentally check out of their courses (if they’re using the LMS). Student IDs that have RFID enabled allow almost total surveillance. Unfortunately schools are normalizing surveillance. Problem is vendors are not covered by FRPA the way schools are. They can share for “legitimate” business reasons. For profit educational websites (as long as not degree-granting) have NO FRPA regulation obligations.

Context of data sharing is really important, this makes legislation and regulations difficult to craft. People speaking out appears to be the main way to get change with Ed Tech providers. Inform and educate patrons about what is happening. Even if they can’t do anything, this can creates social movements and get them to speak up. When possible, go with privacy protecting alternatives, these may cost more, maybe use FOSS. Something that is free which isn’t a FOSS project is certainly selling the data they collect.

Q&A
California has good legislation in this area, which targets the operators of services, not the schools. This is a much better strategy.

1:00 – 2:30 PM Taking the Cake: A Generational Talkback

http://www.eventscribe.com/2016/ala-annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=142933

James LaRue Intro

Is it censorship if a publisher pulls and pulps a book on their own?
Not so long ago, IF was an absolutist position, at least officially for ALA. Now, we are experiencing a pushback for a variety of reasons.

Judith

The 1st amendment is the father of all others. Free speech is the first right, which allows all others and the only guarantee that coincides social progress.

From the Palmer raids to the patriot act recommended book.

ALA freedom to read was largely inspired by McCarthy and red-baiting. College campuses have recently become hotbeds of discussion about subordinating free speech to racial/religious or other concerns: often under guise of alleviating “micro-aggressions”. “Niceness is the new face of censorship in this country” her quoting someone else.

Katie

Despite the efforts of ALA, book challenges still happen frequently. Growing emphasis on social justice is pressing against traditional notion of freedom of speech. Pulling books out of circulation entirely is not the correct answer to books that make people uncomfortable. Innocuous speech needs no defenders.

Panel was anticlimactic, both panelists agreed that decision to pull book was wrong, thus very little actual debate about the deep issues occurred. Good Q&A about lots of things.

ACRL 2015 Notes

Posted on 2015-04-07 Edited on 2019-10-26 In Travel Report

Symbols count in article: 9.1k Reading time ≈ 8 mins.

ACRL Notes

Portland, OR

My co-presenter and I flew to Portland from Long Beach; I snapped a #PDXcarpet picture as is tradition. See http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/pdx-carpet/ for details.

Wednesday, March 25

4:00 – 5:45 Opening keynote: G. Willow Wilson

http://gwillowwilson.com/

This is the largest ACRL ever by attendance. Anyone involved with media, creators and curates are part of the same conversations about “the new culture wars” - a rethinking of the American narrative. The Ms. Marvel series was only supposed to be 7 issues long. There are many comic book fans who are resistant to change. She did not anticipate the positive response. “History is a series of palimpsests. We all live on the same territory but we do not make and use the same maps.”

Later that evening I attended the opening of the exhibit hall where I saw many of my library school classmates; it was nice to reunite.

Thursday, March 26

8:00 – 9:00

I presented my co-authored paper, Bypassing interlibrary loan via Twitter: An exploration of #icanhazpdf requests, in the 3rd timeslot of this session. The 1st paper was about libraries learning from food trucks in their use of social media. The 2nd was about a crowd-sourced reference platform being used at Purdue University.

10:30 – 11:30 Partners in Design: Consortial Collaboration for Digital Learning Object Creation

The term digital learning objects is not well understood by librarians and students, it is instructional designer jargon. DLO should ideally be interactive. Passive consumption of content is lowest bar. DLOs can be used for blended learning, not a replacement for people but a preparation or follow up for human contact.

This consortium members are geographically dispersed. They were all small liberal arts schools with about 2/k average enrollment. Creating DLOs required a lot of collaboration. Funding to purchase the software was obtained from grants. Different consortium members used different software packages. Articulate Storyline and captivate were used. Collaboration was done over Google drive and hangouts. Working with others held people accountable. Collaborative work can require brining in extra people, losing people, be prepared for this. Having duplicate skills among people is good, helps to bounce ideas off others, skill redundancy if someone leaves. Don’t make a lot of time deadline commitments, these are hard to meet.

Stakeholders are intra- library and extra- library. Everything from catalog design to web site interface affects student learning. All these people need to be involved with DLO creation. If you get good at making DLOs, a lot of people in your university will want your help or your advice.

Assessment: DLOs must be assessed. Does it work is the most obvious - links live, people click where they should. Does it do what you want it to do? That is more difficult to assess, may require pre and post-tests. User testing is (usability or learning outcome) essential.

Having some type of “proof of completion” is important. Self-grading DLOs are easier on the back end, harder on the front creation.

1:00 – 2:00 Assess within your means: Two methods, three outcomes, a world of possibilities

Lots of university goals and library IL goals align, good opportunity for collaborative assessment. Assessment typically takes way longer than you think it will. Assessment is never really over, the findings should just inform your next set of questions.

Research question: Does ‘contact’ with librarians impact students information literacy skills? Method: scoring student work using an IL rubric. 3 population of study: transfers, underclassmen, upperclassmen. Populations were surveyed about their library use and contact with librarians. Papers were graded according to the rubric, scores compared to that they aligned.

4 tips

Start small
Set limits on the time you will invest
Be flexible, make changes as needed
Work with others on campus, many others are doing similar efforts

3:00 – 4:00 UX for the people: Empowering patrons and front-line staff through a user-centered culture

UX (user experience) is holistic, encompasses all the interactions people have with your organization. Everybody is a UX librarian, whether they want to be or not. “Aim for delight.”

UX is not dumbing down. When people have too many choices, they can become paralyzed. Reduce unnecessary complication. Make noticing a habit. Do the things your users do, not the way you know but how your directions tell them to do it. Pay attention to when you have to say “no”. Avoid catastrophic failures - make it easy for people to recover if they’ve made a mistake.

Content really is king. You can have nice images and CSS etc. but if your content is bad, your web presence is bad. Put the most important thing first. Be concise. Have a consistent voice.

4:15 – 5:15 Keynote: Jad Abumrad

http://www.radiolab.org/people/jad-abumrad/

Friday, March 27

8:30 – 9:30 Promoting sustainable research practices through effective data management curricula

Students need to reflect on how the generic data management best practices will apply to their area and research.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: lots of good content from:

New England collaborative data management curriculum
DataOne education modules
NSF provides good guidance too

Teaching a discipline agnostic workshop is a challenge, but allowing students/researchers from different disciplines to converse together in the workshop can have them teach each other a lot. If you have students create and turn in their data management plans at the end of the workshop series, these are a great opportunity for summative assessment. Presenters noted that a lot of students wanted detailed training on specific tools for their discipline.

11:00 – 12:00 Invited paper: Searching for girls: Identity for sale in the age of Google

Safiya Nobel

Search engine bias affects women and girls of color. Women’s labor in IT is racialized and undervalued.

Her work is grounded in 3 frameworks:

Social construction of technology
Black feminism
Critical information studies

Corporate control of information can be dangerous for democracy and collective conversations. Most adults, 66%, in a Pew study said “internet search engines are a fair and unbiased source of information.” Various studies show that manipulating search engine results can have very powerful affects, including determining political voting. The commodification of women on the Internet is wholly normalized. Totally non-sexual keywords bring back sexually charged results. Concepts that people use in everyday language get decoupled from keywords once they go in the algorithm.

Google autocomplete is a terrifying window into humanity.

Note: Most of this depends on the definition of ‘bias’. What is bias? She did not define it well here. Under different definitions, her results would vary.

1:30 – 2:30 Promoting data literacy at the grassroots: Teaching & learning with data in the undergraduate curriculum

Data reference presumes an understanding of what to do with the data once discovered. Data management presumes an understanding of the research process or data analysis. For undergraduates, it is probably best to have them start with an analysis of data as it already exists, have them play with a data set.

3 lesson plans:

discovering data through the literature - modeling parroting the experts
evaluating data sets - exploring data and asking questions based on it
research design - operationalizing a research question

Why bother with this at all? Finding data sets is not as easy as finding journals books, etc. There is a bigger cognitive leap that needs to be made to use data in research than in using published traditional sources. ICPSR don’t forget about this great resource.

4:00 – 5:00 Invited paper: Open expansion: Connecting the open access, open data and OER dots

SPARC has been compelled by various forces to expand into the open data and OER movements. Digital environment is full of opportunities to leverage low cost distribution mechanisms. Despite this, the type of things most scholars and students want operate under restrictive distribution policies. All 3 movements believe “openness” is a solution to many problems in the current system.

$1,207 avg. budget for textbooks in 2013-2014 school year according to College Board. The textbook market and scholarly research markets both have intermediary problems.

The goals and strategies of these 3 movements are aligning around efforts to:

Create infrastructures
Create/adjust legal framework
Create sustainable business models
Create policy frameworks
Create collaborations

Things aren’t perfect though, there are conflicts about:

Business models
Privacy and security and
not wanting to be scooped
Value - potential for monetization

Saturday, March 28

8:30 – 9:30 A tree in the forest: Using tried-and-true assessment methods from other industries

Context is very important, longitudinal data is essential to measure change, one-off assessment can never capture the full picture. Don’t worry about forecasting, just track, this will allow you to answer the question “are we performing better than we have”.

Targeted marketing of resources can affect use if done correctly.

Methods:

NPS net promoter score
- Loyalty is a great predictor of satisfaction “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague? Likert scale response Promoters 8 9 10 Passive 5 6 7 Detractors all below NPS = %promoters - %detractors
- Npsbenchmarks.com
Net Easy Score
- Looks at effort
- “How easy was it to get the help you wanted today?”
- NES = %easy - %difficult
- Would be good for assessing reference
Customer Effort Score
- “How much effort did you need to put forth to (X)?”
- CES = sum of ratings / n
SUS System Usability Scale
- Looks at perceptions of usability

Getting these metrics amongst a consortium is a great opportunity to compare what works at different institutions.

9:45 – 10:45 Learning analytics and privacy: Multi-institutional perspectives on collecting and using library data

Most administration people assume the library works, they need more granular and flashy data and metrics. Getting hooked into the academic advisory services is great, have them be partners in pushing students to the library.

FERPA is important, use the data internally, publishing adds a whole layer of complication. Lots of data is being collected that we may not be aware of. Who on the university can access it? How? What can it be used for? Offices of institutional research are crucial for answering these questions about how library affects students’ performance.

Depending on your state’s legislation, this type of research may be difficult or impossible.

11:00 – 12:00 Closing keynote: Lawrence Lessig

http://www.lessig.org/

Why I am blogging with Hexo

Posted on 2014-09-01 Edited on 2019-10-24 In Meta

Symbols count in article: 2k Reading time ≈ 2 mins.

Why ‘blog’ at all?

Isn’t blogging dead? Relatively speaking, yes. And yet the winner-take-all attention economy that those of us in the internet-connected world occupy has given certain blogs tremendous power. E.g. Wired did a fine profile of Italy’s Five Star movement and the crucial role that the Beppe Grillo blog played in their electoral success. I regularly read blogs and have learned a great deal from some of them. I have no illusions that my blogging will make a substantial impact on the world; my aims are much more modest.

Share works in progress or ones that may never be published formally
Post my mandated travel reports for the professional development events that I attend
Keep my Markdown and JavaScript chops somewhat up-to-date

Site Generation With HexoJS

This site is made using HexoJS, a fast & powerful static site generator framework powered by NodeJS. I’ve made sites by hand in the past as well as used WordPress, when I realized I wanted to get some draft scratchpad content out publicly, neither aforementioned option sounded appealing. Coding by hand was too much maintenance coupled with decision fatigue, something I’m particularly prone to. WordPress is serviceable but I wanted to host it using freely available low overhead web hosting options and also be able to migrate easily if necessary. A quick web search on these criteria turned up HexoJS.

HexoJS Advantages
Hexo blogging is done in Markdown, which is easy to write and super portable in the event that a blog post needs to be repurposed into a webpage elsewhere or other format such as PDF (via simple steps with Pandoc or Python). All Hexo pages are static HTML/CSS/JS which are super fast (particularly once minified) and able to be served via any low overhead cheap/free webserver. My employer offers a bare bones webserver which still delivers the content beautifully and quickly. In the event that I need to migrate to a different server I could do that quickly and should development on HexoJS ever cease, all my content in Markdown is transferable with minimal headache to any other Markdown-based blogging platform, such as Jekyll.

My HexoJS Setup

A note here to myself and anyone interested in HexoJS

RSS feed generator https://github.com/hexojs/hexo-generator-feed
HTML minifier https://github.com/hexojs/hexo-html-minifier
Next Theme https://github.com/theme-next/hexo-theme-next