I was so happy to see that Lauren Pressley is blogging once again. I’ve been getting a lot out of her posts about AI, libraries, and the information ecosystem. Her framing of what libraries provide as “epistemic infrastructure” really hit a chord with me. As an ardent fan of RSS readers for close to twenty years, I have long relied on my hand picked sources to not only present me with new ideas in posts but also to offer me a rich set of links to related sources. Lauren’s posts on AI lately have led me to a number of sources I wouldn’t have found on my own. With this in mind, I want to spotlight four others whose blogs have also been essential to my evolving understanding of AI (in all its forms).

• University of Winds from long-time (longest time?) library blogger Mita Williams has a weekly newsletter with notable links that have led me to all sorts of fascinating projects and ideas.
• Information Flaneur from Hugh Rundle, who provides regular link recommendations on weeklyish(?) basis, also writes thoughtful posts of his own. He also interviewed Mita Williams in 2024 about her decades-long dedication to blogging about libraries.
• Inkdroid from Ed Summers also offers weekly link posts as well as his own.
• Second Breakfast from Audrey Watters builds on her highly regarded work analyzing ed tech (her book Teaching Machines is essential reading) to offer bi-weekly posts that link up higher ed’s current obsession with AI with the longer (and quixotic and misguided) historical effort to automate teaching and learning. Although the full posts require a subscription, it’s been totally worth it to me.

One last quick shout out goes not to a person but a service called Sill that does a decent job on a daily basis of looking at what is getting posted by the folks I follow on Mastodon and Bluesky and sends me an email digest of the most shared links. If you remember a similar but now defunct service called Nuzzel, this one is similar.

My love for Livescribe is gone. After thirteen and a half years of filling notebooks with work-related jottings, to-do lists, etc., I now hate the product. Until this summer, I was using the original Echo pen and the nice bound notebooks. In the photo above, the shiny black Echo pen in the center and the notebooks behind it and on the right were the ones that loved using. The new Echo 2 pen and notebook, which I was forced by circumstance to switch over, are on the left side of the photo; I loathe this new set up. Had I been able to keep buying the original notebooks, I would have stuck with old Echo pen, but that style notebook is no longer available and the newer spiralbound notebooks won’t work with the old Echo pen, just the crappier Echo 2 pen.

If you’re considering buying an Echo 2 pen, here is what you are in for:

• a pencap that refuses to stay on and, according to most users who’ve had theirs for while, is something that is bound to crack and be unusable (I’m also assuming that I’ll lose the pencap someday but will never be able to replace it because they don’t sell them separately as they did with pencaps for the original Echo pen)
• notebook with lower quality paper and an annoying spiral binding that is awkward and makes it hard to write in the margins that are next to the binding
• a new Bluetooth option for syncing your pen with the Livescribe app on your phone that is totally unable to connect a second time unless you delete the Bluetooth connection settings and set it up anew
• a battery that last barely a day (the old one would hold a charge for much longer)

The combination is so much shoddier, unreliable, and unlovable.

I’ve got three more of those damned spiral notebooks to use up before I look for some other way of keeping handwritten notes in an attractive notebook that are digitized as I sync my pen and saved on my devices. It doesn’t seem like there are any other good alternatives, so maybe I’ll give up on the digital backup aspect and go with regular notebooks that are beautifully made and highly functional (I’ve been loving the Leuchtterm1917 notebook I got last year as an experiment for home/personal notes).

As I have been thinking this past week about the bX Recommender service that displays related reading options on journal articles, I have become more deeply convinced that the records in Primo VE present too much information on the screen for most users. In usability tests I’ve conducted over the years, students often comment on these pages as being too busy or confusing and they usually struggle to zero in on the relevant information for the particular task I’ve asked them to demonstrate. It is important to note that some records are longer than others for unavoidable reasons:

• a journal article that has a dozen or more authors, all of whose names are shown
• a book where we have the table of contents displayed and the chapter titles and section titles are all lengthy
• an online resource that we have access to in multiple databases AND have print AND microfilm holdings that need to be detailed

What I’m beginning to wonder is if some of the information in Primo VE records could be hidden behind an accordion element. If the user wishes to, they can click on an icon next to that section to expand it and see the hidden text. I haven’t seen any Primo VE instances that include accordion elements, which leads me to believe that there is no way presently to do that using the Ex Libris Primo interface. If you want to design your own discovery layer and bring the Primo VE results in via an API, that might work. But I would love to see a way to do that within the Primo VE interface as something that could be configured in Alma.

Here is roughly what I’m aiming at. Take this article record as an example. Below, I’ve added plus signs to show where you might have an expandable section in that record:

If you were to first encounter this record normally, you’d see all those sections collapsed like this:

Maybe this is too much information being hidden. But I think it is a direction worth exploring.

I’m still thinking through ways to understand the relative usage of the bX Recommender service in our instance of Primo VE (something I have already written about here and here). I’m not much of an expert in Alma analytics, but I am thinking that perhaps the basic dashboard we’ve set up there that counts clicks on most of the key features of the Primo VE interface might yield an interesting set of statistics that give some context to the usage data for bX Recommender (roughly 2000 clicks a year on recommended items). I am thinking that if I can understand whether the bX Recommender links are getting clicked more or less than all the other things one can click on in an item record for an article, that might be useful.

Probably the most comparable things in a record that a user can click on would be those elements that have a “more like this” or “more of this” functionality, such as clicks on:

• author names in the “Creator” section
• subject headings
• the citation trail features (sources that cite the source I’m looking at and sources that were cited in the source I’m looking at)
• the “next page” link on the search results pages

Then, I think it would also be useful to see how the 2000 bX Recommender clicks stack up against clicks on the links for some of more useful basic functions in an item record:

• facet filtering
• clicks on a database link or the “view online” link that takes you down to where the database links are shown
• show the record permalink
• email the record
• get a citation for the record
• export to various citation management services/file formats
• results sorting options (by relevance, by date-new, by date-old

Not sure how much this will help but it should deepen my understanding of what users are clicking on (and, more usefully, not clicking on).

I took a day off from work yesterday to go to the Museum of Modern Art with my wife. We were eager to see the exhibit “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” which is due to close on July 8. With one exception (Nam June Paik), I hadn’t heard of any of the artists or encountered their work before. What I was familiar with though where common themes that many of these video works addressed: the birth and expansion of the information society, the excitement of early ICTs as harbingers of a new global society, the broken promises of techno-utopians, the use of ICTs by surveillance states around the world, the creative embrace of ICTs by activists looking for ways to evade the gaze of authoritarian regimes, and so much more. These are issues that come up a lot in the courses I teach in my library’s information studies minor. My own understanding of these concerns comes primarily from reading (books, articles, blog posts, etc.), so it was especially exciting for me to encounter these ideas in works of art that used video in some way.

In other parts of the museum, I also ran into other works that, as an information professional, resonated with me:

I don’t know how I got this far as a librarian without realizing until last week that there is a term for those paywalls that you see mostly on magazine and newspaper websites where you are allowed a set number of articles per month for free: a soft paywall. In reference interactions, I had been relying on using a laborious explanation to refer to that thing that the user was asking for assistance with (specifically, how they could get around the paywall to view the article that was so tantalizing close at hand). Now I’ve got a nice piece of jargon to use that may or may not need explaining to the user depending on the context.

Over the years, I’ve seen steady growth in reference questions where the user has found a paywalled article and wants to know if we can help them with it. The most common publications that generate this problem for us are the Atlantic, the Financial Times, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes, I can just get the article for them and send it because we have in a database (even those tricky ones that aren’t in the regular periodical but are web-only articles). Sometimes, though, it’s web-only content that we don’t have access to in a database at all (the Atlantic is the worst for this). If I’m lucky, I haven’t hit the soft paywall yet on my own computer, and can get the article and send it to the user.

I’ve heard of librarians using the 12ft Ladder service to get around the paywall but haven’t used it in actual reference interaction yet. On their website, the folks behind it explain how it works this way:

The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don’t show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

Clever.