NISO Plus Baltimore 2025

Over the past several years, libraries have been increasingly aware of threats posed to patron data privacy by the abundance of collection, storage, and sharing technologies used by vendor e-resource platforms. Compounding the problem is the vague, opaque, often confusing privacy language in vendor contracts, ranging from complex data processing addenda to linked privacy policies and third-party terms of use. Too often, this language serves to limit or nullify the data privacy protections that libraries try to implement.

In response to these concerns, SPARC’s Privacy & Surveillance Contract Language Working Group is developing a range of practical tools to help libraries negotiate agreements that support the needs of users and protect their personal data. These tools include a negotiation guide for librarians focusing on privacy protections; a data privacy addendum with clear expectations for vendors on handling of library patron data (with vendor feedback from the pilot stage); as well as comprehensive reports on the data privacy practices of multinational vendors such as Elsevier and Springer. This session will give an overview of the group’s work in this area, with time for a robust Q&A about data privacy and surveillance in digital libraries.

Collaborative Notes

This two-session event will examine the intersection of cultural heritage, digital preservation, and metadata. Across the globe, archives hold ephemeral treasures—images, recordings, manuscripts, oral histories, and similar—that define our shared humanity and connect us across times and places. UNESCO has advanced standardized metadata and outlined a program on cultural and digital technologies to strengthen action around heritage. From digital mapping of diverse practices to 3D modelling of World Heritage sites, projects embody and harness the potential of technologies for the new chapter of culture for all. Building on this, the panel discussion adds metadata as an important layer for digital safeguarding and preservation processes. Laying the groundwork, the first session will focus on ethical practices in metadata creation, preserving and amplifying underrepresented voices, and addressing the challenges of safeguarding metadata. Building on this, the second session will feature distinct case studies on approaches to metadata from community practitioners. Together the Humanities Roundtable will offer an in-depth exploration of the critical role metadata and digital preservation play in protecting the legacies of cultural heritage, and the transformative potential of digital preservation of cultural heritage with emerging technologies.

Collaborative Notes

Institutions, publishers, and scholars are grappling with the complex challenges of ensuring security while fostering access to knowledge. The drive to make research more easily available brings with it new cybersecurity risks, from safeguarding sensitive information in publisher databases to protecting the integrity of scholarly content. These challenges underscore the need for a coordinated approach that balances ease of access with robust digital security practices.

This session will examine the intersection of cybersecurity and access within academic publishing, exploring how industry stakeholders can collaboratively address these issues. With an increasing reliance on digital platforms to distribute and access research, ensuring security at all levels—while preserving the openness that drives scholarly innovation—has never been more critical.

Key discussion points will include:
• The evolving cybersecurity risks faced by academic publishers and institutions as they implement access models.
• How publishers and libraries can safeguard research content and data against breaches while enabling broader access.
• The potential role of cross-industry standards or recommended practices to address cybersecurity concerns without hindering the access goals.
• Strategies to foster collaboration across academic institutions, publishers, and technology providers to mitigate security risks.
• The emerging technologies that can help balance cybersecurity with the need for accessible knowledge.

Collaborative Notes

Collaborative Notes

This two-session event will examine the intersection of cultural heritage, digital preservation, and metadata. Across the globe, archives hold ephemeral treasures—images, recordings, manuscripts, oral histories, and similar—that define our shared humanity and connect us across times and places. UNESCO has advanced standardized metadata and outlined a program on cultural and digital technologies to strengthen action around heritage. From digital mapping of diverse practices to 3D modelling of World Heritage sites, projects embody and harness the potential of technologies for the new chapter of culture for all. Building on this, the panel discussion adds metadata as an important layer for digital safeguarding and preservation processes. Laying the groundwork, the first session will focus on ethical practices in metadata creation, preserving and amplifying underrepresented voices, and addressing the challenges of safeguarding metadata. Building on this, the second session will feature distinct case studies on approaches to metadata from community practitioners. Together the Humanities Roundtable will offer an in-depth exploration of the critical role metadata and digital preservation play in protecting the legacies of cultural heritage, and the transformative potential of digital preservation of cultural heritage with emerging technologies.

The first half of this discussion can be seen here: https://nisoplusbaltimore25.sched.com/event/1olIW but you can attend this without having attended the first. 

Collaborative Notes

To advance open science, there is increasing need for scientific data to be made publicly available in a way that is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) including through the use of standard, interoperable metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) across the data ecosystem. The evolution of data repository features is key to supporting researchers' evolving needs to share and reuse datasets. Through the development and implementation of common standards for metadata and PIDs in the repository ecosystem, data can more easily be discovered across repositories and search indexes and the impact of open data can also be measured more accurately. This session will present examples of interoperable repository standards that have been implemented at two generalist repositories: Figshare and Open Science Framework. The speakers will highlight specific use cases and features that support them including PIDs for authors, funding, and research organizations, standardized DataCite metadata, and CEDAR discipline-specific metadata templates to enable data reuse. Through collaboration across research infrastructure providers to establish common metadata, PIDs, and best practices, repositories are able to support a more open research data ecosystem that supports data discovery across repositories and facilitates the reuse of data. Audience feedback on achieving these goals will be encouraged during the Q&A.


Collaborative Notes

Join us for updates on:

Accessibility Remediation Metadata Working Group (Bill Kasdorf)
Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (Todd Carpenter)
JAV Revision (Patrick Hargitt)
JATS4R (Melissa Jones)
U.S. PID Strategy Working Group (Todd Carpenter)

Collaborative Notes

Collaborative Notes

Join this fast-paced session in which librarians, publishers, and tech/service providers have 5 minutes to tell you about a new product, idea, or process! Hear about the latest developments in the information community and share your questions and feedback.

As AI continues to redefine digital information practices, libraries face new challenges and opportunities in managing, curating, and enhancing the discoverability of resources. This proposal presents two case studies from Goldey-Beacom College that illustrate how libraries can strategically employ AI to enhance both creative and informational collections through metadata improvements.

In the first case study, "From Canvas to Quartex: The Evolution of Art in the Age of AI and Digital Archives," we examine the inaugural Common Reading Program at Goldey-Beacom College. Using the themes in Kristen Radtke's Seek You, students explored loneliness by creating posters, some AI-generated, which were digitally archived in Quartex. This initiative emphasized the importance of metadata standards to ensure both human- and AI-generated art are accessible, accurately categorized, and preserved.

In the second case study, "Enhancing FAQ Systems with Generative AI: A Case Study on Improving Metadata and User Discoverability," we outline how generative AI transformed Goldey-Beacom College Library’s FAQ system, consolidating overly specific metadata into broader, discoverable categories that enhance the user experience.

Together, these case studies provide practical insights and methodologies for leveraging AI in digital collections, underscoring the necessity of evolving metadata frameworks to accommodate both traditional and AI-driven content. Aside from the listed speakers, the presenters would like to recognize Devon Ellixson, Library Intern, for their work on this project.

Collaborative Notes 

Research communication in the digital age retains many of the disadvantages of the print era. It is slow and incomplete, with much of the data and other components missing or locked in the supplemental files of journal articles. Ideally research communication would be both rapid and complete, with all aspects of the work included, and shared publicly in machine-readable and AI-actionable formats.
 
Research stacks – which we mean to encompass multiple concepts from automated workflows to notebooks and records of versions – are gaining traction as a way to collect all aspects of a scientific research project such as: development, planning, methods, data collection and execution, analysis, and reporting of results. One advantage is facilitation of seamless collaboration and sharing of critical aspects of the research. Another is that contributions to the research such as data sets or statistical analysis can be credited to the researchers most responsible for those products prior to final publication, all of which promotes research integrity and reproducibility. This session will explore how to support adoption of research stacks and appropriately integrate consideration of credit and accountability throughout the development of the research.

Collaborative Notes

In this session we will explore the mechanics of data exchange for library discovery purposes, and the latest approaches to making life easier for publishers, systems vendors and librarians.  Particular attention will be paid to the need for content providers to see what both librarians and systems providers already see during system setup and maintenance.  Adoption of an open approach to more complex content curation problems will be examined, and some history of the situation leading up to the approach and the design considerations for the initiative will be shared.  Current functions around the more open approach to data exchange management will be examined from the perspective of each of the presenters, with attention to reducing the librarian-as-middleman effort between the provider and the vendor.   New workflows will be outlined that ensure data accuracy, reduction of data ingest time, and prevention of missing collection/s issues, thus increasing overall patron and librarian satisfaction  

Collaborative Notes

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Timnit Gebru, Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), will be the recipient of the 2025 Miles Conrad Award, NISO’s lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community.

Prior to founding DAIR, Dr. Timnit Gebru was co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google, where she was fired in December 2020 after raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received a number of accolades, including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME‘s 100 most influential people. She is currently writing The View from Somewhere, a memoir + manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.

Collaborative Notes