CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Academic Libraries Join the Fight Against Climate Change

Lisa Spiro
Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Fondren Library
Rice University

Ashley Fitzpatrick
Fondren Library Eco-Rep
Rice University

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped over 50 inches of rain on Houston, causing approximately 100 deaths and $125 billion in damage. Research indicates that Harvey’s impact was worsened by climate change. More recently wildfires, floods, and droughts–as well as concerted action by climate activists–have demonstrated the urgency of fighting climate change. The library community is beginning to take action; for example, the American Library Association (ALA) recently adopted sustainability as a core value and launched the “Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change” grant program. Rice University’s Fondren Library is one of five academic libraries to have won this grant. Fondren’s core grant-funded activities include organizing a panel discussion featuring four Houston women at the forefront of climate justice work, screening a documentary on queer responses to climate change, becoming a climate resilience hub, and developing a workshop for middle school students focused on understanding air quality data in their neighborhood, a frontline community. The grant is part of a broader series of sustainability initiatives at Fondren, including the development of a sustainability plan, the formation of a staff “Green Team,” and the appointment of a student “eco-rep.” This interactive presentation will examine how and why academic libraries should prioritize sustainability initiatives, using Fondren’s experiences as a model for community and student engagement around climate change. Participants will then engage in discussion about how the library community can come together to fight climate change.

https://library.rice.edu/sustainability

Adapting Library GIS Services in the Age of COVID-19: Challenges, Changes, and Planning for the Future

Michael Shensky
GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator
University of Texas at Austin

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted regular campus operations at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) in March 2020, the UT Libraries had to quickly adapt to providing geographic information system (GIS) services to meet the needs of students, faculty, and staff who were suddenly working from off campus. Core GIS services like research support consultations, guest lectures, and workshops which had traditionally been provided via live, in-person interactions required particularly significant transformations. While there was initial concern that changes to established procedures might negatively impact GIS services, in many cases the opposite actually proved true–when forced to explore new ways of doing things, the UT Libraries ended up discovering previously hidden efficiencies and opportunities. Among these discoveries were newfound avenues of virtual collaboration via Zoom meetings, new sources of data about our services which could be used for assessment purposes, and attendance numbers for virtual events that surpassed expectations. While there have been unexpected benefits of adjusting to a virtual model of providing GIS services there are still challenges to overcome and questions about the future format of GIS services that need to be resolved. This project brief will provide an overview of the ways in which the UT Libraries adapted GIS services to meet the needs of the university community, the positive outcomes that have resulted from these changes, the difficulties that are still being dealt with, and the work that is underway to further improve services and prepare for a post-pandemic future.

Advancing Computational Reproducibility in the Social Sciences: Creating and Using Digital Reproduction Records as a Pedagogical Tool

Katie Hoeberling
Program Manager, Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS)
University of California, Berkeley

Fernando Hoces de la Guardia
Project Scientist (BITSS)
University of California, Berkeley

Rigorous replication, robustness checks, and extensions of research are possible only to the extent that published findings are first computationally reproducible—i.e., that tables and figures can be reproduced within a reasonable margin of error using available data, code, and materials. In the social sciences, reproductions are routinely conducted by students as part of graduate curriculum. Their work however, as well as that of non-student researchers, is seldom published in journals or shared outside of their classrooms, presenting lost opportunities for reproducers to receive credit, or for the wider community to learn from their valuable work. In collaboration with the Data Editor of the American Economic Association, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) is developing the Accelerating Computational Reproducibility in Economics (ACRE)* platform to enable researchers to systematically and transparently assess and improve the computational reproducibility of published social science research. This platform will house these reproductions; assign DOIs and attribute appropriate credit; display distributions of reproducibility by claim, paper, journal, and field; and provide a forum for discussing them. Importantly, an accompanying guide, which serves as a teaching resource for instructors who include reproductions in their courses, also provides guidance on how to have constructive conversations with original authors. We hope to source reproductions from several courses in 2021, refining the platform and guide accordingly, with the goal of making this type of publication normative across social science disciplines. *While ACRE began with a focus on Economics, its platform and principles can be applied to computational work in other social science disciplines, such as Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.

ACRE Project information: https://www.bitss.org/ecosystem/acre/
ACRE Guide: https://bitss.github.io/ACRE/intro.html
Beta platform: URL forthcoming in November

Building Data Literacy – the Northeast Student Data Corps

Florence Hudson
Executive Director, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub
Columbia University

Yousef Danisman
Queensborough College

Jennifer Oxenford
Kinber

The Northeast Student Data Corps (NSDC) is a community-developed initiative of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub that will teach data science fundamentals to students across the northeastern United States, with a special focus on underserved institutions and students. The NSDC community will include leaders from academia, industry, libraries and non-profits to enable the pedagogical approach and materials, and students who will form a community of support, working together to learn and teach data science online with their peers from universities, 2- and 4-year colleges, minority-serving institutions, and to communities through libraries. The interactions between data scientists, students, academic leaders, researchers, librarians, and communities will be mutually beneficial, supporting transfer of data science concepts and methods to local communities, while providing insights and practical experience to participating data scientists and data science students. This partnership between communities and data scientists can help produce a better workforce-ready cohort of data scientists, by providing Northeast Student Data Corps participants practical experience with data science in “real-world” settings. This program will improve data literacy and teach data science to people across our communities, while creating public-private partnerships for teaching and real-world application of translational data science.

http://nebigdatahub.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Northeast-Student-Data-Corps-Founding-Committee-v5.pdf
https://nebigdatahub.org/nsdc-seedfund/

Presentation

Building Hyku for Cross-Consortia Partnerships

Kirsten Leonard
Executive Director
PALNI

Jill Morris
Executive Director
PALCI

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) is partnering with the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) (representing 94 academic libraries in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, and New York), to pilot a collaboratively run open source, multi-tenant, consortial institutional repository (IR). The goal is to deliver ultra low-cost hosting, discovery, and access to digital material for member libraries both with the tool and by partnering across consortia and with commercial partners working on a community-owned product. Delivering materials digitally and reducing costs are even more critical due to economic pressures and staff reductions in this current crisis period. Project collaborators aim to create a consortial IR service individual libraries may use, customize, and brand as their own, while building the capacity and functionality required to share underlying infrastructure, hosting, and administration/staffing costs across institutions. The project is in the second year of an IMLS-funded grant building on the work done by Hyku founders.

https://www.hykuforconsortia.org/about-the-project/ https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-36-19-0108-19 https://hykucommons.org/

Presentation

Contact Us

21 Dupont Circle
Suite 800
Washington, DC, 20036
202.296.5098

Contact us
Copyright © 2021 CNI

Keeping up with CNI

CNI-ANNOUNCE is a low-volume electronic forum used for information about the activities and programs of CNI, and events and documents of interest to the CNI community.
Sign up

Follow CNI

A joint project