Battling Fake News and Developing Digital Literacy Skills in the Legal Profession

Alternative facts? Truthiness? Post Truth? Hardly a day passes without someone making a reference to fake news. But why should lawyers care and what can information technology professionals and the legal academy do about it?In order to fulfil a lawyer\u27s duty of technology competency, digital information literacy is essential. Legal professionals must be able to locate, evaluate and use online information effectively. Evaluation of the reliability of digital information is a complex skill that must be mastered for the successful practice of law.This program will discuss digital information literacy in the context of fake news. The session will provide an overview of fake news including tracing the history of its origin. We\u27ll discuss why it matters and the consequences of failing to detect fake news. Tips and tools for evaluating the credibility of news sources will be provided as well as strategies for creating successful information literacy programming

Working Together: A Literature Review of Campus Information Technology Partnerships

This article reviews the recent literature about the essential but often uneasy alliances made between content experts (archivists and librarians) and technology experts. Differing professional cultures, misunderstandings of one another, limited abilities to envision change, and lack of support from top-level administrators are the most often cited reasons for the persistent difficulty in working together. Failure to collaborate may result in the marginalization or exclusion of content experts from projects where their professional skills are most needed. In spite of these problems, successful models for working together do exist. True collaborations are mutually beneficial, open opportunities for continuing relationships, and involve complex interpersonal connections. They are based on trust, mutual understanding, and respect for one another’s skill

Worldwide Access to Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication

This paper was originally presented at the World Library & Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012, as part of a panel on Promoting Global Access to Law: Developing an Open Access Index for Official Authenticated Legal Information, Part II. Europe. http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-day/2012-08-14. It focuses on worldwide access to the official word of the law, specifically to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements in different foreign countries. The importance of improving global access to foreign law was highlighted at a 2012 joint European Commission/Hague Conference on Private International Law, with the hope for a global instrument to facilitate access to foreign law in civil and commercial matters. The paper discusses the challenges of digital law and the importance of authentication of official legal information worldwide. It retraces the history of what happened in the USA at the federal and state levels, in particular the successful information policy advocacy by law librarians that led to the enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) in 2012. It highlights the role of law librarians in the digital age and their concern for the sustainability of the digital format. Much effort has been expended on moving legal information from a preserved state (print) to an accessible state (digital). It is important to ensure as well that accessible legal information has a preserved (official, authentic -- hence reliable) venue. The Conclusion mentions a few prospects for the future, and a possible role for IFLA to develop a set of standards to encourage governments worldwide to authenticate their official legal information. This might fit well with IFLA’s stature as the major forum to influence information policy at the international level

Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data

To make digital resources on the web verifiable, immutable, and permanent, we propose a technique to include cryptographic hash values in URIs. We call them trusty URIs and we show how they can be used for approaches like nanopublications to make not only specific resources but their entire reference trees verifiable. Digital artifacts can be identified not only on the byte level but on more abstract levels such as RDF graphs, which means that resources keep their hash values even when presented in a different format. Our approach sticks to the core principles of the web, namely openness and decentralized architecture, is fully compatible with existing standards and protocols, and can therefore be used right away. Evaluation of our reference implementations shows that these desired properties are indeed accomplished by our approach, and that it remains practical even for very large files.Comment: Small error corrected in the text (table data was correct) on page 13: "All average values are below 0.8s (0.03s for batch mode). Using Java in batch mode even requires only 1ms per file.

Worldwide Access to Foreign Law: International & National Developments Toward Digital Authentication

This paper was originally presented at the World Library & Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012, as part of a panel on Promoting Global Access to Law: Developing an Open Access Index for Official Authenticated Legal Information, Part II. Europe. http://conference.ifla.org/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-day/2012-08-14. It focuses on worldwide access to the official word of the law, specifically to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements in different foreign countries. The importance of improving global access to foreign law was highlighted at a 2012 joint European Commission/Hague Conference on Private International Law, with the hope for a global instrument to facilitate access to foreign law in civil and commercial matters. The paper discusses the challenges of digital law and the importance of authentication of official legal information worldwide. It retraces the history of what happened in the USA at the federal and state levels, in particular the successful information policy advocacy by law librarians that led to the enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) in 2012. It highlights the role of law librarians in the digital age and their concern for the sustainability of the digital format. Much effort has been expended on moving legal information from a preserved state (print) to an accessible state (digital). It is important to ensure as well that accessible legal information has a preserved (official, authentic -- hence reliable) venue. The Conclusion mentions a few prospects for the future, and a possible role for IFLA to develop a set of standards to encourage governments worldwide to authenticate their official legal information. This might fit well with IFLA’s stature as the major forum to influence information policy at the international level

Building the Glasgow Digital Library and its components

Describes the co-operative project to build a digital library by for and about the city of Glasgow. The library is built round a number of smaller projects which allowed participants to gain experience in building and managing digital collection

SPEC Kit 356 Diversity and Inclusion

Today, diversity is defined beyond racial and ethnic groups and includes gender, sexual orientation, ability, language, religious belief, national origin, age, and ideas. The increase of published literature about cultural competencies, microaggressions, and assessment of diversity issues, as well as the inclusion of social justice movements in libraries, suggests diversity-related activities have increased and evolved over the last seven years. Over this time span, several libraries have obtained funding to support strategies to increase the number of minority librarians on their staff and support their advancement within the organization. There also appears to be an increase in the number of diversity or multicultural groups at the local, state, and national levels. However, these changes have not been consistently documented. Therefore, it is important to re-examine this topic to evaluate the impact of evolving endeavors, to see if more ARL libraries are involved, to see how diversity plans have changed over the years, and to document the current practices of research libraries. The main purpose of this survey was to identify diversity trends and changes in managing diversity issues in ARL libraries through exploring the components of diversity plans and initiatives since 2010, acknowledge library efforts since the 1990s, provide evidence of best practices and future trends, and identify current strategies that increase the number of minority librarians in research libraries and the types of programs that foster a diverse workplace and climate. The survey was conducted between May 1 and June 5, 2017. Sixty-eight of the 124 ARL member institutions responded to the survey for a 55% response rate. Interestingly, only 22 of the respondents to the 2010 SPEC survey participated in this survey, but this provides an opportunity to explore the diversity and inclusion efforts of a new set of institutions in addition to seeing what changes those 22 institutions have made since 2010. The SPEC Survey on Diversity and Inclusion was designed by Toni Anaya, Instruction Coordinator, and Charlene Maxey-Harris, Research and Instructional Services Chair, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. These results are based on responses from 68 of the 124 ARL member libraries (55%) by the deadline of June 12, 2017. The survey’s introductory text and questions are reproduced below, followed by the response data and selected comments from the respondents. The purpose of this survey is to explore the components of diversity plans created since 2010, identify current recruitment and retention strategies that aim to increase the number of minority librarians in research libraries, identify staff development programs that foster an inclusive workplace and climate, identify how diversity programs have changed, and gather information on how libraries assess these efforts

Video game preservation in the UK: a survey of records management practices

Video games are a cultural phenomenon; a medium like no other that has become one of the largest entertainment sectors in the world. While the UK boasts an enviable games development heritage, it risks losing a major part of its cultural output through an inability to preserve the games that are created by the country’s independent games developers. The issues go deeper than bit rot and other problems that affect all digital media; loss of context, copyright and legal issues, and the throwaway culture of the ‘next’ game all hinder the ability of fans and academics to preserve video games and make them accessible in the future. This study looked at the current attitudes towards preservation in the UK’s independent (‘indie’) video games industry by examining current record-keeping practices and analysing the views of games developers. The results show that there is an interest in preserving games, and possibly a desire to do so, but issues of piracy and cost prevent the industry from undertaking preservation work internally, and from allowing others to assume such responsibility. The recommendation made by this paper is not simply for preservation professionals and enthusiasts to collaborate with the industry, but to do so by advocating the commercial benefits that preservation may offer to the industry