NISO Plus 2021

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/humanities-in-the-information-ecosystem/72

Unlocking JSTOR & Portico for Text Analysis & Pedagogy 
Text analytics, or the process of deriving new information from pattern and trend analysis of the written word, is making a transformative impact in the social sciences and humanities. Sadly, there is a massive hurdle facing those eager to unleash its power: the coding skills and statistical knowledge that text mining requires can take years to develop; moreover, access rights to high quality datasets for text mining are often cost prohibitive and may include further license negotiations. Over the past several years, JSTOR’s Data for Research (DfR) has addressed some of these issues, providing metadata and full-text datasets for its archival content. In January, ITHAKA – the organizational home of JSTOR and Portico – announced a completely new platform that incorporates DfR’s features, as well as adding visualization tools and an integrated analytics lab for learning and teaching text analysis. At NISO Plus, key members of the ITHAKA team will describe the design of this new multifaceted platform and highlight how its components can intersect with the needs of librarians, publishers, educators, students, and faculty. The presenters will emphasize the platform’s hosted analytics lab, where librarians and faculty can create, adapt, and adopt text mining analysis code that works with publisher content for data science instructional sessions.
Collections as Data: From Digital Library to Open Datasets
Collections as Data “aims to encourage computational use of digitized and born digital collections” (https://collectionsasdata.github.io/statement/), but how do you get started developing a Collections as Data program, especially with existing staff and technology resources? The Digital Library Services department at the University of Utah will share their practical approach to Collections as Data, ranging from releasing oral history data for text mining to developing a metadata transcription project to create a new historical dataset of mining labor employment records. We will also discuss developing partnerships with digital humanists on campus and the potential uses of the collections we’ve released to the public. We will also show how analyzing digital collections with a digital humanities approach can provide new insights into potential new processes for descriptive metadata creation.
Public Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities
Directors of leading humanities associations and initiatives discuss the impact and the challenges of public humanities, as an idea and as a method of study. What is public humanities, and why is it important? What forms of scholarly and creative output does it encompass? How can it be recognized and supported at institutional, national, and international levels? How do humanities scholars engage with a broad, diverse audience? How might these encounters change the nature and course of humanities study?

Join Modern Language Association Executive Director Paula Krebs, University of Virginia President's Commission on Slavery and the University Chair Kirt von Daacke, and University of Illinois Chicago Engaged Humanities Initiative Director Ellen McClure for a roundtable discussion and lively Q&A.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/access-authentication-and-authorization/84

Need help understanding the connections between authentication, authorization, and access to resources in the ever-changing world of scholarly resources? Join us for an overview of emerging services (GetFTR, Seamless Access, and more), learn how they are connected (or not!), and get involved in the discussion on how sorting access can get us closer to meeting the patrons’ expectations for a personalized research experience. The session is an opportunity to expand your appreciation of the role your organization plays in the wider information ecosystem.  

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/fair-data-principles-and-why-they-matter/89

FAIREST of them all
Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. We all think FAIR data is a “good thing” don’t we. Who could be against something that, once stated, is so blindingly obvious? If it’s not findable, and usable then why are we spending time, money and resources keeping it? And it’s a great acronym as well. FAIR. It “does what it says on the tin"". If you’ve got a good acronym you’re half way there when it comes to hearts and minds….

But I think FAIR doesn’t go far enough. There are major impact factors that need to be considered alongside FAIR. What about the costs involved in making information FAIR? Where does trust come in? What about the environmental impact?

Time for a new acronym that goes beyond simply “FAIR”.

What should that be? This talk will propose one possible extension to the concept..."

Leveraging FAIR Data Principles to Construct the CCC COVID Author Graph
A knowledge graph is an innovative and revealing visual exposition of data. Display of such data is a powerful way to explore connections and query relationships among different entities, but only if the underlying data is of high quality.

The global research community’s effort to fight COVID-19 has led to an explosive increase of manuscripts submitted to peer-reviewed journals. With this influx of submissions, publishers have recognized limitations in the existing methods for identifying appropriate peer reviewers to validate the accuracy, impact, and value of these manuscripts.

To address this challenge, CCC developed the COVID Author Graph, a knowledge graph highlighting peer review data focused on authors who have published in areas with special attention to coronaviruses, SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19. This new approach helps publishers leverage data to aid in the accelerated identification of peer reviewers.

During this session, presenters will illustrate how the FAIR data principles –Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets – served as a trusted foundation for building the COVID Author Graph. They will share key learnings with an emphasis on how reliable levels of data quality that FAIR principles make possible enable more sophisticated analysis and help organizations derive actionable business insights.

FAIR (meta)data - low-hanging fruit for scholarly publishers (Brian Cody)
Drawing on experience working with journal publishers to collect/enhance/format metadata, this session section overviews FAIR principles and shares concrete steps for beginning your FAIR journey.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/a-focus-on-accessibility/97

Why are organizations continuing to be blind to accessibility?
When we see a person struggling in a wheelchair to navigate a curb with no ramp, we get frustrated and help the person out. In most cases we don't see people who are struggling to read digital content and therefore the issue is not as obvious to the public. It is not until a lawsuit has been filed that the public hears about the persistent issues around digital content accessibility. Even today, we have organizations that have not addressed accessibility to make digital content available to the sight impaired. Why are businesses and organizations still blind to accessibility and what can they do to become compliant?

The evolution of accessibility: upgrading the experience for all users
From learning disorders to reading disorders to hearing, visual, and physical impairments, how do we ensure that every user is able to use the library to its fullest potential? This session will discuss the needs of ALL users, and answer a range of questions: How should digital services support the different kinds of accessibility requirements? How do we make all aspects of library systems equally available to all users by adhering to accessibility standards and usability best practices? How do we actually comprehend our users’ accessibility needs in the first place? And how do we keep our services continuously up-to-date in order to meet our users’ accessibility needs as we deploy new tools in our libraries?

Looking for an accessible open science: overcoming barriers within SciELO Network 
People with disabilities and / or the elderly, who currently represent 45% of the world population, especially those associated with Higher Education and research institutions, have reported significant difficulties in guaranteeing their rights to accessible information. Therefore, it is important to portray the current situation of accessibility in the interfaces of the SciELO Brazil collection and in their respective digital assets. In light of this objective, an accessibility assessment was carried out on the SciELO Network website pages. The results indicated absences of: alternative text for images; link labels; page language indication; among others. Considering 82,716 (19.5%) scientific articles from 9,045 volumes published between 2017 and 2020, 205,921 figures and 173,976 tables were prospected. Although 95.05% of the tables are encoded in HTML (98.29% with descriptive labels and 98.18% with captions), none of the analyzed articles presented essential elements for the transmission of information to assistive technologies. This scenario highlights the need to adopt standards to promote accessibility in all stages of the flow of production and dissemination of knowledge.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/metadata-and-discovery/102

What You Can Do to Help Promote Transparency in Discovery -- and Why
NISO recently updated the Open Discovery Initiative Recommended Practice (https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-19-2020-odi), which outlines best practices for working with library discovery services. It defines ways for libraries to assess the level of content provider participation; streamlines the process by which libraries, content providers and discovery service providers work together; defines models for “fair” linking; and suggests usage statistics that should be collected for libraries and for content providers. The recommendations in this document, created by members of the Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee, enable libraries, discovery service providers, and content providers to work together to the full extent of their abilities—providing the most effective and rich experience to end users.

In this presentation, you will learn about the Open Discovery Initiative, what changes were included in the 2020 revision of the ODI Recommended Practice, and delve more deeply into several areas: free-to-read content, fair linking, and the key elements included in the newly added library conformance statements.

Better metadata makes a difference
Libraries create, ingest and use metadata for a variety of purposes and activities, including supporting end user discovery of resources and collections. In order to successfully facilitate resource discovery, librarians must ensure that the metadata in their systems and discovery layers is standardised, accurate and as complete as possible; otherwise, their collections can be rendered essentially invisible to the user.
 
In order to improve metadata visibility and quality, librarians need initial and continuing technical training. Dr Diane Pennington will discuss how she provides training in metadata, cataloguing, and library systems in the MSc Information & Library Studies course at the University of Strathclyde’s iSchool. She will also provide an overview of her students’ broad range of applied and theoretical metadata research in order to illustrate the need for critically-informed, evidence-based metadata practice and implementation.
 
You will then hear from Emma Booth about the National Acquisitions Group Quality of Shelf-Ready Metadata Project, which collected data from UK academic libraries about their experiences with vendor-produced metadata for books and e-books. This case study serves to illustrate how poor quality metadata has a genuinely negative impact upon libraries and their users. It also demonstrates that the development and adoption of standards related to metadata quality is in the interests of everyone involved in the supply and use of library content because all stakeholders in the supply chain stand to benefit from ‘better’ richer metadata that can effectively bridge the gaps between information and communities.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/open-access-and-analytics/109

Next generation OA analytics: A case study 
A critical component in the development of sustainable funding models for OA is the ability to communicate impact in ways that are meaningful to a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders, including institutional partners, funders, and authors. While traditional paywall publishers can take advantage of industry standard COUNTER reports to communicate usage to subscribing libraries, no similar standard exists for OA content. Instead, many organizations are stuck with proxy metrics like sessions and page views that struggle to discriminate between robotic access and genuine engagement.

This session presents the results of an innovative project that builds on existing COUNTER metrics to develop more flexible reporting. Reporting goals include surfacing 3rd party engagement with OA content, the use of graphical report formats to improve accessibility, the ability to assemble custom data dashboards, and configurations that support the variant needs of diverse stakeholders. We’ll be sharing our understanding of who the stakeholders are, their differing needs for analytics, feedback on the reports shared, and lessons learned and areas for future research in this evolving area.

OA Book Metadata Standards to Support Usage Data Analytics 
This session will explore how current or new standards could address the challenges facing analytics that rely on the OA book usage data supply chain. Laura Ricci of Clarke & Esposito, co-author of the OA Book Supply Chain report produced with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the global Exploring Open Access eBook Usage (OAeBU) data trust pilot project, will review the gaps and opportunities presented by the diversity of OA book stakeholders, open-access specific metadata elements and metadata standards. Lorraine Estelle, Director of Project COUNTER, and Brian O’Leary, Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group, will then discuss how COUNTER and ONIX are positioned to address such issues in current or future releases. The session will conclude with all panelists reflecting upon where additional standards development may be needed.

NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/data-and-analytics-outcomes-and-budgets/113

Serials crisis: can data help treat this chronic condition?
When it comes to library budgets, there is an ever-widening gap between university budgets and library budgets, with library budgets continuing to shrink even when the university budgets may increase. This gap is neither new nor novel; but now in this era of a global pandemic, moves to online learning, unprecedented changes in higher education budgets, the problem is worse than ever and likely poised to accelerate at a rapid pace.

What may be different, however, is that today’s deep well of data can help stakeholders track down, understand, and respond to the challenge. But what data is most useful and how can we gather it?

In this session, we will take a global view from leading experts in both consortia and institutional libraries about data hunting and innovative ways data can be used to make the most of purchasing spend. Visibility into current pricing trends, including by discipline, business model and publisher helps inform the purchasing context. At-a-glance intelligence about business models and deals, as well as descriptions of emerging model and deal types, help early career professionals and senior staff alike keep current on this rapidly changing landscape.

We ask participants to come prepared to share experiences advocating for funding from institutions, as well as turning those dollars into access to the resources in demand by constituent academics and researchers.

Impact transparency: creating visibility into research outcomes
Impact and outcome measurement are major topics in the research community. Trillions of dollars are spent annually on research programs, yet far too many organizations still struggle to answer the basic questions: What was the overall impact of the funding on research and on the researchers’ careers? How do I link the research I funded or received to publications, patents, clinical trials and other outputs?

Why is it so hard to answer these questions?

While many research-oriented organizations aspire to operationalize their impact and outcome tracking and reporting, many are still reliant upon inadequate or incomplete datasets and management systems.

This talk will explore how advances in metadata, artificial intelligence, and open research infrastructure make it possible to create unprecedented transparency into outcomes from award to publication and beyond. Secondly, this discussion will describe how transparency into outcomes benefits the entire research ecosystem.

Leveraging years of grants management data, we’ll show graphically how funding organizations and research institutions can precisely identify outcomes – years after a grant has concluded as well as trace the arc of their researchers’ work from award to publication and beyond.