Technology Issues

No, Fair! Evolving Perspectives on Excessive Use in Research

Midterm brings its share of bustle to the library with last minute research questions to ask and copiers and printers to locate. Library staff are also busy negotiating licenses, finalizing renewals, and troubleshooting access to the resources on which faculty and students rely. I’d like to shed some light on a subtler side of the troubleshooting task that, while not a frequent occurrence, is a growing concern for me as a librarian and researcher. The technologies that enable this bustle of research activity can at times inadvertently trigger what publishers call excessive use or excessive downloading. This is considered a breach of contract according to the licenses for these resources. Remedying this breach usually involves working with university IT security to identify, inform, and prevent such use, assuring publishers that the breach is cured, and publishers then unblocking the network IP or IP range necessary to restore access to content.

Recently, I’ve been contemplating researchers’ expectations when working with scholarly content and technology. What technologies are they using? Are they compatible across content provider platforms? How might they trigger excessive use breaches? What exactly is excessive use or excessive downloading in an online research environment?

What publishers think

Sometimes the publisher’s license language specifies the use of bots, link-checker, crawlers, spiders, automated software, and even indexing as excessive or unauthorized. But more often, breaches associated with this activity are not explicitly defined, nor are they put in context of excessive use within the license. This leaves it fairly open to interpretation.

Publishers must consider the perspective of copyright holders, and typically enforce equivalent limitations for online use that they would for physical print materials uses. It sounds reasonable, but because in reality we use print and online resources very differently, such licenses terms may give up fair use and other scholarly exceptions granted by copyright law. Publishers take an even heavier hand when responding to excessive use breaches. Blocking the user’s IP access, or sometimes an entire campus IP range, presumes malicious intent (which it almost never is). This response also exaggerates the stakes involved and misunderstands what is necessary to perform digital research. Strict reinterpretation of print use restrictions in the online environment denies advances in research technology, from basic citation management software to APIs used for text and data mining. It also ignores the very structure of the linked-data world we live in.

What most people think

When users learn that their actions violate library license agreements, their reactions are surprised, apologetic, and most often confused. While some may be aware of the technologies that makes excessive downloading possible, most don’t believe they constitute unethical or unlawful actions. Breach of contract itself is kind of a boogey-man phrase that brings more readily to mind data breaches like Equifax. If people are aware of breaches occurring in academia, attention more often goes to those involving individual student records.

According to one IT security expert I asked, the kinds of scholarly content breaches I’m talking about don’t even register on the scale of data sensitivity or security. Unless credentials were stolen in order to download excessively, it is not security issue; it’s a copyright issue. Publishers who treat copyright infringement as a security issue might be mitigating risk, but they are not serving or educating their customer.

What librarians think

Librarians, naturally, do approach this from the service and education mindset. Increasingly that means a not just serving end-users within the academy, but the general public who pay for the research through their tax dollars. As researchers assert the right to retain copyright of their own content and share it more widely, more diverse collaboration is possible, increasing potential for innovative research discoveries. Libraries assert copyright exceptions and expose inequities in traditional publishing structures in order to make openness for innovation possible as well.

By Fred Benenson - User: Mecredis [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I’ll digress briefly to the story of Aaron Swartz for illustration and comparison. He was an advocate of openness, yet his deliberate action to hack and release scholarly content provides, I suppose, a perfect case for publishers’ insistence to treat copyright as a security issue. In this case, the breach involved 4 million documents. The scope in numbers (less than 3% of the Equifax breach) pales by comparison, especially considering nature of the data and the consequences (or lack of) to those responsible and to those harmed.

Rarely are scholars’ actions as deliberate or the stakes of intellectual property loss as high as this scholarly breach (or breaches of individuals’ personal data). In fact many legitimate uses of scholarly research technologies are being blocked even to those with “rights” to use them. Some examples of technology uses I’ve seen publishers block include citation management software like EndNote that indexes and stores full text where available. As early as 2006, librarians reported browser technologies that link and open an articles’ cited references, triggering such use. What about mining text and data to discover disciplinary concepts across time and from journal publications that span multiple publishers? Innovating digital researchers are developing their own programming for this, but can they use it? Are there alternatives, and are they open or proprietary?

My role as an acquisitions librarian means I must balance the needs of publishers supplying the content we license with needs of users who access that content for their research and study. That balance falls somewhere between stoic realism and OAnarchy for me. But I’m still a teacher at heart, so educating all sides remains my goal. In the traditional, profit-based publishing system, where flat library budgets mean buying power decreases each year, I must follow open access developments carefully, just as I must work to negotiate the best deal within these existing structures. There is always room in this to educate publishers, librarians, and users.

Learning more about the tools researchers use, wish they had, or wish they could use without being blocked from access is my next goal. In my troubleshooting experience so far, tools like EndNote, Papers on Mac, Abstraktr, RedCap, WGET are just a few. So tell me…

What digital research
(or reference citation management)
technologies are your researchers using?

Here We Go Again: Net Neutrality

With so much in the news since the new federal administration took office earlier this year it’s easy to be overwhelmed — I certainly have been, especially in recent weeks. So you might have missed the announcement that the Federal Communications Committee has proposed to repeal regulations on commercial internet providers that guarantee net neutrality. Net neutrality is an admittedly somewhat clunky term that requires companies that sell internet access to treat all content equally. As a concept it’s a bit easier to explain using the negative example: if net neutrality ended, companies like Verizon and Comcast could force consumers to pay different rates for different kinds of content, for example, high-bandwidth content like streaming video (think YouTube or Netflix) could be more expensive than content that doesn’t require as much bandwidth. Rolling back net neutrality could make it much more challenging for many of us to access the internet.

The FCC last proposed changing these regulations in 2014, at which point John Jackson wrote a concise overview — Keeping Up With…Net Neutrality — on ACRL’s website, which is a good place to start to learn more. Margaret Heller’s thorough post on the ACRL TechConnect blog is also a great read; in What Should Academic Librarians Know about Net Neutrality? she offers a clear explanation of how content gets from content providers via internet service providers to us as consumers. And how does this affect us as librarians? Content that our communities need could be made more difficult and expensive to access, costs that neither our communities nor our libraries may be able to bear. Even more troubling to consider are possible effects on information freedom and free speech, since as Jackson notes

The loss of net neutrality would add additional layers of economic influence on the structure of the web.

The FCC’s previous efforts to roll back net neutrality were met with a strong campaign from consumers and content providers that was ultimately successful. Both ALA and ACRL issued a statement late last month opposing the FCC’s plans. The FCC was accepting public comments on the proposal, which is scheduled to be reviewed at its open meeting on May 18th, but as of May 12th has entered a “sunshine agenda period” and is not currently accepting comments. But don’t despair — the good folks at the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) are making it easy for you to register your opinions about net neutrality. Visit their Dear FCC site to add your comment, which will be submitted by the EFF when the comment period reopens.

Privacy and Academic Libraries Right Now

I have a kid in high school whom I’ve often jokingly referred to as my in-house research subject. I’ve been interested to observe and think about the ways that he accesses information for school and non-school reasons, especially as he gets closer to the age of many of the students who use the library where I work. When he started high school I was initially surprised by the number of educational technology products he was required to use. Much of my grumbling around these systems stems from my concern that some of his classmates likely don’t have good access to computers or the internet at home, and that use of these systems puts a strain on some kids to find time to use the school or public libraries to do their homework. But lately I’ve also been concerned about the number of products my kid has to use, which is only growing. Beyond the very real password management considerations, I’m also increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of information these systems collect about him.

That’s one reason I’m looking forward to digging in to the new EFF report Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy. From the executive summary of the report:

Throughout EFF’s investigation over the past two years, we have found that educational technology services often collect far more information on kids than is necessary and store this information indefinitely. This privacy-implicating information goes beyond personally identifying information (PII) like name and date of birth, and can include browsing history, search terms, location data, contact lists, and behavioral information. Some programs upload this student data to the cloud automatically and by default. All of this often happens without the awareness or consent of students and their families.

Yes, this report covers only K-12 schooling, but it’s of relevance to us in college and university libraries, too, and not only because we’ll be seeing many of those students at our institutions soon. The proliferation of learning analytics across campuses has been fueled by their highly-touted potential for using institutional student data to help them stay on track, ultimately increasing student retention and graduation rates. Libraries (and the vendors we do business with) have data about our patrons, too — how can we ensure that students’ privacy is protected when we (or other college offices) use that data?

A recent preprint of an article by Kyle M. L. Jones and Dorothea Salo — Learning Analytics and the Academic Library: Professional Ethics Commitments at a Crossroads — does a fantastic, thorough job of walking us through these issues. From the abstract:

[T]he authors address how learning analytics implicates professional commitments to promote intellectual freedom; protect patron privacy and confidentiality; and balance intellectual property interests between library users, their institution, and content creators and vendors. The authors recommend that librarians should embed their ethical positions in technological designs, practices, and governance mechanisms.

Beyond reading this report and preprint, what can we do to learn more and help protect our patrons’ privacy (and our own)? Keeping up with these issues is a good first step. For starters, I recommend the terrific work of education technology journalist Audrey Watters published on her Hack Education blog. Her longer pieces and transripts of her presentations go in depth on many privacy-related topics, and her Hack Education Weekly News tracks edtech across a huge range of publications and outlets.

We can also work to audit our own internal library systems and practices, and to push the vendors we work with to protect patron privacy. Further, we can increase digital privacy awareness among ourselves, our coworkers, and our patrons. At the library where I work we hosted a data privacy training for all library faculty and staff a few months ago, run by some of the smart folks from the Data Privacy Project. They covered digital privacy protection for us as technology users as well as ways that we can shore up privacy protections in the library. Their presentation materials are all available on their website, too, for any library to use to offer digital privacy workshops for their community; my college’s library is running one next week during Choose Privacy Week.

Make it Work!: Starting a Makerspace in an Academic Library Phase 2

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Hannah Pope, Emerging Technologies Librarian at Appalachian State University.

As anyone who has gone through the steps of creating a new library space knows, it can be a long process. Once the space is identified and the equipment has been purchased, then comes the hard part – actually pulling it all together.

The makerspace at my library opened on January 31st after a frantic couple of weeks in which my team and I worked practically non-stop. I’m going to take a second to brag about my colleagues, both librarians and staff, who were amazing through the whole process. The space never would have looked anywhere close to ready without them! We held a soft opening for the library a little before the official opening, which served as both a thank you as well as an introduction to the new services. One of the most important aspects of opening a makerspace, or really any library space, is getting the support of the people who will work there every day. Publicity is always a factor in opening a new space, and having the library staff on board will translate to a higher degree of support around the campus as a whole. Here are a couple of ways that our library worked to promote the space:

Host an Event!

Creating a grand opening is one of the best ways to not only publicize the makerspace, but also provide an educational opportunity for patrons. When opening your makerspace, giving an opportunity for the machines to be explored by students, faculty, and staff is invaluable. Patrons become more familiar with the space, and it can spark ideas for how they can incorporate certain machines into their projects. Our makerspace is on the lower level of the library, and not immediately visible to people regularly flowing in and out. By hosting a grand opening, we worked to get students down to the new space and tried to alleviate some of the library anxiety that can occur when trying to find a new area.

Incentivizing the Masses

Our opening was over the course of three days, and we created a variety of incentives to check out the space. Besides providing food, there were also a couple of activities that patrons could do, including learning about basic circuits by creating LED Throwies, and making school specific stickers on the vinyl cutter. We also held a prize drawing in exchange for the patrons filling out a makerspace survey. This was a great way for us to collect some initial data while bringing in more visitors, and we gave away a 3Doodler 3D printing pen. In addition, we are also running a month long name/logo contest, with the winner’s design being used for our advertising, and they will win a small 3D printer! The opening was a success, and it drummed up a lot of interest in makerspaces on campus. If creating your own makerspace, definitely consider using the grand opening as a way to do campus outreach in a fun and engaging way!

Initial Educational Opportunities

While the opening was a success, there was a lot more than just putting up physical machines that went into creating the makerspace. In order to make the library into a place of knowledge creation, the makerspace needed to have a very distinct educational element. I attempted to create this by making use of both LibGuides and signage. The makerspace was divided into sections which had complimentary technology. Signs were then created with information that would both jump start projects as well as highlight safety concerns. These colorful signs made the space both educational and aesthetically pleasing. Because the makerspace in my library was created using an already available space and limited budget, it was important to pick and choose exactly what that money could be spent on. For our initial opening, we focused more on machines as opposed to furniture and aesthetics, so including the signage brightened the space. The signs also directed users to the LibGuides if they wanted more information about a piece of equipment, or how to get started. This combination of signs and online material makes it easy for users to begin creating and learning quickly.

Although the makerspace has only been open for a few weeks at this point, and has limited hours due to staffing constraints, it has been a success. We have had many students, faculty and staff come to the space to explore and learn a new machine. The University has already added the space to tours for potential new faculty hires. The positive response has been both exciting and daunting – now we just have to deal with keeping up with demand!

Growing a peer digital learning program

I’ve been working with colleagues at my institution over the course of the past year to launch a peer digital learning initiative. The program kicked off this past August with our “Learning in the Digital Age” pre-orientation program. Each year, my institution offers a few four-day pre-orientation programs to incoming undergraduate students. These programs give interested students the chance to arrive on campus early before orientation, meet other first-year students with similar interests, and connect with upperclass students, faculty, and staff who serve as program leaders. In our “Learning in the Digital Age” pre-orientation, our program-specific goals were to give students hands-on experience with various digital technologies being used for teaching and learning on campus, generate conversation around what it means to a learner and citizen in the digital age, foster awareness of and reflection on personal agency in learning, and invite students to help build our growing digital learning program in the year ahead. In addition to general community building and fun (LED frisbee was a particular hit), and helping students feel comfortable on campus before the semester started. Hats off especially to our student leaders without whom this program would have floundered.

Once the fall semester began, approximately half of the students who participated in the pre-orientation program plus the upperclass student leaders continued on into our Digital Learning Assistant (DLA) training program. A few other upperclass students excited about digital learning joined training, as well. Our primary goal was to prepare students to serve as tutors to other students in need of assistance with digital learning projects assigned in courses. During the fall semester, students in the training program participated in online and face-to-face activities to help advance their knowledge of core digital tools that faculty use most often in their courses for blogging, digital archives and data visualizations, digital mapping and GIS, digital storytelling, and e-portfolios. Each student selected one of these tracks for their first area of focus. We collected relevant readings and training resources and developed “challenges” to help the students develop proficiency in the area. Students gave short presentations as a culmination of their first semester training.

An important part of the DLA training program is to help students not only develop technical skills, but also think about ways they’ll be able to mentor other students trying to learn these tools as well as consider the tools/skills in the context of digital identity and digital literacy. We used a selection of readings (like Watters’ “The Web We Need to Give Students,” Rikard’s “Do I Own My Domain If You Grade It,” and Vygotsky’s “Interaction between Learning and Development”) to jumpstart reflection and conversation in these areas. The challenges students worked on during training, in addition to other activities, asked students to consider these aspects, as well. This semester, the DLAs began offering drop-in hours to assist students, while also continuing their training on both the technology and peer teaching fronts.

As we begin to gear up for year two, we’re thinking about how we’ll refine and revise both our pre-orientation program and our DLA training program. Our program has so far been inspired by our institution’s rich peer learning culture, as well as similar projects at other institutions like University of Mary Washington’s Digital Knowledge Center. We’re also guided by our shared interests in fostering student agency, developing communities for peer learning, and growing critical digital literacy skills and perspectives. I imagine these goals and values are also near and dear to many ACRLog readers, so I’m eager to hear your thoughts. What do you think are the most important questions, concepts, and models for building a peer digital learning program? What activities, readings, and resources do you think are valuable to help develop a peer learning community around technology, digital literacy and identity, and student agency? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.