—by Charles Henry

CLIR and Coherent Digital LLC (CD) have developed a partnership to greatly expand opportunities for sustained and useful access to endangered resources, both through digitization and through capture of culturally valuable digital-only content. This partnership strives to enhance our capacity to learn about and interpret the world through the lens of social justice, and thus advance the universal human rights to participate in our cultural heritage, to access education, and to think freely.

Coherent Digital was developed as a corporation guided by ideas and principles espoused by CLIR, and represents a rare transposition of a project nurtured within a not-for-profit organization to a commercial for-profit business in service to scientists, policy makers, educators, knowledge organization professionals, students, and the general public across the world.

Ten years ago CLIR, with generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, launched the Committee on Coherence at Scale. The Committee investigated a working environment of higher education that at the time was defined by silos, paywalls, lost data, and inaccessible information that impedes a more coherent, accessible knowledge ecology, and competition continues to be a key obstacle. Institutions vie for faculty, students, money, and prestige. This mindset offers almost no incentive for true collaboration and interdependence. A correlate aspect of the problem is the incessant counting by schools and other cultural organizations, an arithmetic of prestige that can be so inhibiting. Books, journals, grants, class size, test scores, works of art, endowments, admission rates, and other instances of reductive tallying foster more intensive contesting.

Conservatism also pervades, as do the idiosyncrasies of disciplines that structure higher education, reinforcing conservatism and similarly impeding a more coherent model of knowledge access and reuse. Disciplines, and the professions that provide stewardship for their discoveries, have distinct customs, expectations, systems of advancement, lexicons, and methodologies that are quite difficult to export to other fields of study, ensuring compartmentalization within. The Committee determined that the inherited norms, customs, traditions, and organizational models that have structured research and teaching needed to be constructively challenged, redefined, and subsequently reassembled, affording new ways to expand capacity for future discovery that transcends our current costly and redundant archipelago of knowledge production.

Stephen Rhind-Tutt, a former Board member of CLIR and founder of Alexander Street Press, served on the Committee on Coherence at Scale. Eventually selling his press, Stephen embarked to apply the principles of coherence and the added value it promised, eventually realized as Coherent Digital. CD uses unique, cost-effective, extensible, and easily augmented cataloging schema to make coherent content that is uncataloged, undiscoverable, uncitable, prone to link rot, and likely to disappear, creating collections of critical research and learning materials. CD is a platform of deep context, providing tools and supporting materials in service to research and learning, working with leading authors, publishers, nonprofits, libraries, and archives to amplify their voices and help them remain sustainable.

Our initial joint project is Hidden Collections Africa, an initiative designed to identify, digitize, catalog, and make accessible rare, important, and endangered resources of African cultural heritage in response to climate change, political disruption, and legacies of colonialism’s biased neglect. Led by African-based professionals, the proposed program would directly support institutions and staff across the African continent to meet urgent preservation needs, close gaps in the historical record, and make records more accessible. Our inaugural focus will assay core aspirations of our partnership, and we can think of no more fitting opportunity than this dynamic, vital effort that can only succeed at scale.

The post CLIR and Coherent Digital: An Idea Applied appeared first on CLIR.

I have always had a fascination with libraries as a space, the books, the documents, the archived texts, and the systems that have been used to organize all of these mediums. While my curiosity for libraries has always existed, my journey into the library world has come full circle through the CLIR fellowship opportunity. Prior to my doctoral studies, I entertained the thought of becoming a librarian, but there were a multitude of factors that swayed me toward the Ph.D. path. Little did I know that the path I decided to take for the Ph.D. would still allow me to build and develop practices that I would then use toward my CLIR fellowship at New York University (NYU) Libraries. During my doctoral studies, I learned about research as the process of “(re)seeing,” which  means developing research questions, collecting, and creating archives from original research and primary sources. Furthermore, I engaged in data collection and archiving of my data guided by a particular lens and ethical decision making. Each of these practices mirror or align with how librarians engage in their field. Indeed, besides managing large databases and published works by academics, librarians in academic settings work with the community of students and faculty to provide them with the resources needed for their success. This requires an understanding of each group and its needs to create appropriate and responsive programs or materials.

Though as a CLIR fellow my working title is engineering educational designer, my experiences as a fellow for almost two years has entailed so much more.  I joined New York University’s Division of Libraries at an exciting and transformational time. I have been able to work on innovative projects such as the Student2Scholar (S2S) Program, a co-curricular program that has been in partnership with the Dibner Library and Tandon School of Engineering. This program aims to prepare undergraduate students with professional literacy skills (e.g., what is research, ethics in science, leadership, science communication, and beyond), in engineering.  We are developing information literacy practices as well as professional literacy skills umbrella. I have been able to draw on my expertise in curriculum and instruction, in collaboration with our engineering librarian, to develop online instruction around professional skills. As a trained ethnographer I draw on a logic of inquiry to create a student-informed approach.  Developing this approach, at this position and within the field of engineering, has led me back to my ethnographic roots, to my approach to research questions, and to how I implement change.

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The post Coming Full Circle: Education Ethnography in Librarianship appeared first on CLIR.

Note: this blog is reposted from the CLIR Grants & Programs Fall 2020 newsletter, released November 18.

The second season of CLIR’s podcast Material Memory delves into the impact of the climate crisis on communities and their cultural heritage. We asked host Nicole Kang Ferraiolo, Director of Global Strategic Initiatives at CLIR, about the inspiration behind the imagery for this season.

How did your own experiences inform your interest in hosting this season and shaping it around the intersection of climate and memory?

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity and many of us at CLIR have been thinking about the role of the library and cultural heritage field in responding to the crisis. Initially, I thought of the podcast season as a sort of literature review of what the field is doing to address the climate crisis and what work remains. There’s certainly a lot of that, but as the interviews unfolded, we found that the season was also about the bigger questions of what is culture, why it matters, and how cultural memory relates to issues of equity, power, and social justice. 

Hosting this season has been particularly rewarding for me, since it plays to many of my personal interests and pursuits over the past decade. When I was in graduate school, I wrote my dissertation on a hurricane relief effort in 1899 Puerto Rico and have maintained an interest in the social and political context of disasters. Around that time, I was also doing some work in radio on the side and listening to an obscene amount of podcasts. I seriously considered pursuing it as a career, but the fate of radio and podcasting was less certain back in the early 2010s and I was worried about my student loan debt. Instead, I took a job managing an interdisciplinary research program focused on climate change and global governance. I don’t think my twenty-something-year-old self would have believed you if you’d told me that in my next job I’d get to work on a podcast about climate change and archives! And honestly, it’s been so much more rewarding than I even imagined.

as the interviews unfolded, we found that the season was also about the bigger questions of what is culture, why it matters, and how cultural memory relates to issues of equity, power, and social justice.

The people I interviewed were so thoughtful and forthcoming on a difficult topic, and working with them has helped me process my own climate anxiety and channel it toward meaningful action. We have some incredible guests and I can’t wait to share these conversations with listeners. 

Why did you feel redwoods captured your vision for this series? What inspired you to select them as the cover image and visual metaphor for the season?  

I grew up in Northern California and over the summer I watched from across the country as my home state burned. One of the places the fires consumed was Big Basin, a state park known for its giant redwoods and sequoias, and the place I used to go camping with my family as a kid. Although the park was devastated, the ancient trees appear to have survived, as they have for thousands of years. To me there is a metaphor here about memory and resilience, which is a recurring theme in the season.

The redwoods were also fitting for the podcast because they form communities that support each other. New trees grow out of the roots of old trees, and they grow in “fairy rings” that put the trees in conversation with each other across the generations. 

The trees are also storytellers: I have vivid memories of seeing the deep fire scars in the redwoods as a young child, their histories written into their trunks. It’s the first time I was moved to empathy for a plant. Finally, these old trees are climate superstars and take ridiculous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. I love that these living monuments that are older than the Roman Empire and the Qin Dynasty are fighting the climate crisis by simply continuing to exist.

When should we look out for the podcast, and where can we find it?

You can subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform or listen to it directly on the Material Memory website. The trailer and the first two episodes of the season were released during the DLF Forum and affiliated events (November 9-13, 2020).

Thank you, Nikki! We’re looking forward to hearing the rest of the series. 

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“Artificial Intelligence and Archives” was the inaugural webinar of the series on Emerging Technologies, Big Data & Archives, organized by CLIR postdocs Rebecca Y. Bayeck of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Azure Stewart of New York University. With the emergence of new technologies and big data, the processing and preservation of data has changed and will continue to change. As in other domains (e.g., health, video games), artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly reshaping the way we process, interact with, and think about archives. Consequently, in the age of big data, archives are not just “a collection of historical records relating to a place, organization, or family” (Cambridge Dictionary Online). Today, archives also include all types of digital data—including social media data—and algorithms. Archivists are therefore called on to preserve and process data as they are being created, which requires understanding AI languages, processes, and practices for the creation and protection of data/records now for the future.

In this webinar, our speaker Dr. Anthea Seles, from the International Council on Archives (ICA), discussed AI in archival spaces: its uses, application, and the role archivists should play to become critical voices in AI discussions. Two hours were not enough to address all the questions raised by the 280 attendees. As a follow up to the webinar, we have thematically organized and addressed the unanswered questions and present them here.

Artificial Intelligence in Archives

How much has AI penetrated archives in the developing world?

I would say [this has been] limited, if at all. I think the main issue is that these technologies are being applied in the assessment of development initiatives like Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Increasingly there are many projects focusing on artificial intelligence and human rights, for example the University of Essex Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, and it is becoming a concern for organisations like Amnesty International.

Who already has the best AI for archives today, according to ICA regulation, that we can adopt?

There is no commercial provider that works specifically on archival questions. I think you can use off-the-shelf eDiscovery software, but you need to have a basic understanding of what the technology is doing in order to measure your precision and recall. 

Artificial Intelligence Tools

Will governments and big corporations use artificial intelligence as a tool to centralize information in future?

Potentially. I think there is some thinking about this coming out of the records management community, but I still believe it is about balancing the strengths of the tool with the continuing need for human intervention. The question is, when will the human be needed? And what can the tool be trusted to do with minimum supervision? How do we ensure a continuous feedback loop to identify records of long-term value as information creation changes? 

What tools were you using for the file analysis and visualization in this presentation?

The screen shots are only example photos, they are not from any of the tools we used. We looked at several eDiscovery tools with different algorithms (e.g., Latent Semantic Indexing, Latent Dirichlet Allocation). These are bog standard machine learning applications that have been around for a while, and we chose to go down that road to see what we could get in off-the-shelf commercial software packages.

So, is there a way to write a script to avoid metadata corruption and alteration?

There are tools now you can use that will preserve the integrity of the metadata when you move material from one system or file to another. I think for historical metadata alteration/corruption it is a question of how we explain this to users and how this might affect different access methods like visualisation. 

Will the International Council on Archives provide training on artificial intelligence and machine learning?

Not yet, but I’m open to suggestions. [We are] currently speaking with different stakeholders and maybe we can hold a hackathon at the Abu Dhabi Congress. 

Access to Archives

Will the course Managing Digital Archives be accessible online?

The managing digital archives course is organized by the ICA and will be accessible online in fall 2020. Please check the ICA website or social media channels (Twitter and Facebook) for more information.

What are some of the practices in the UK National Archives and government on managing structured data as records? How does the UK identify, capture, manage, and apply retention and disposition to data (both transactional applications and analytical ones)?

There are no published policies on identification of datasets that I can see and would suggest you contact either the record copying or the UK government web archive records unit to see if anything more substantive has been developed.

What is your suggestion for keeping physical records for posterity and authentication?

Records should always be maintained in the format in which they are created. The belief in scanning paper records and destroying them in order to save space and save on storage costs is a false economy. The level at which you should be scanning that material and the amount of metadata that should be captured to maintain it over time is very high. Also, you need to take into account computer storage costs, and whether you can afford the costs of digital preservation software, which all begins to add up. One must also take into account the active management of these authentic digital surrogates by digital preservation specialists. Furthermore, if you have a paper management problem and you don’t take that into account when you move into the digital environment you are then transferring an analog integrity issue into a digital integrity/authenticity issue. Digital will not solve integrity issues; in my opinion it will magnify them.

Artificial Intelligence and Society

In Brazil, we are concerned with the problem of the spread and political use of misinformation (fake news). How can archivists with algorithm training provide reliable research insights to fight against this historical problem?

At this point, I couldn’t honestly provide you with an answer but this is something we could explore in the near future with different partners and collaborators.

Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American and African Studies at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She holds a dual PhD in Learning Design and Technology and Comparative International Education from Pennsylvania State University.

Azure Stewart is a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University Libraries, where she works at the intersection of engineering education, librarianship, and research. She holds a PhD in Education with a specialization in Teaching and Learning from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The post Artificial Intelligence and Archives appeared first on CLIR.

Hadassah St. Hubert, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at Digital Library of the Caribbean at Florida International University

Jennifer Isasi, Assistant Director of the Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship Office and Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative at Penn State University

Nicté Fuller Medina, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles Libraries in Data Curation in Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Margie Montañez, Humanities Librarian at the University of New Mexico and a previous CLIR fellow for Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UNM

Can you provide a brief overview of the Latin American and Caribbean partners symposium?

Hadassah St. Hubert: The full title was Capacity Assessment of Latin American and Caribbean Partners: A Symposium about Open Access, Technological Needs and Institutional Sustainability. The symposium was a microgrant project through CLIR’s Data Curation Fellowships in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The conference took place April 16th and 17th; it was initially intended to be an in-person event but was held via Zoom and live stream on Facebook because of COVID-19. The intended audience for the symposium was people who do post custodial archival work, our partners in Latin America and the Caribbean, and then funding institutions that support digitization projects in these areas. In total we had 126 people participating via Zoom and over 1,700 views on Facebook.

Nicté Fuller Medina: It was for the cultural heritage institutions, libraries, and archives in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was about connecting them with resources and creating a space for a conversation with institutions in the US and Canada.

Margie Montañez: At the end of the day, we had partners from six different countries: Mexico, Colombia, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, and the US.

Jennifer Isasi: Also the keynote was in Argentina and the audience was also from several other countries. 

What were the symposium’s goals?

Margie Montañez: One of the major goals was to find out what the institutions in Latin America and in the Caribbean needed from their US partner institutions. A second goal was to talk with our partner institutions about technical capabilities. Third, we wanted to talk about who they see using their materials and how can we help them get these digitized materials to their intended audiences.

Hadassah St. Hubert: We also wanted to create a set of guidelines and recommendations for libraries and archives in the US and Canada, and for those who fund these projects, based on the conversations at the symposium.

Nicté Fuller Medina: The idea was to get insights from the institutions in the Caribbean and Latin America, so that these partnerships are more transparent, and so there was a platform for those voices. Because of the power dynamic between the so-called global North and global South, a lot of what happens relies on individual institutions. We wanted to be able to provide a broader picture.

Jennifer Isasi: Another thing that we did is bring institutions together from the region. We found that they often don’t know each other, and by creating this group, they can now share information.

What were some of the considerations you had in mind when designing it?

Nicté Fuller Medina: One of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure that the invited institutions from the Caribbean and Latin America had a space to showcase the work that they were doing for an international audience. And then we wanted to put them in the same room with funders to demystify that whole process and put a face to funding programs. The microgrant we received was so important because it takes funding to be able to facilitate participation from the global South because of how the North-South divide operates.

Hadassah St. Hubert: I just wanted to add a brief note about how we selected our keynotes. We did a survey of the Latin American and Caribbean partners before the symposium, and they were chosen as a result of the topics. Open access was one of their topics that they wanted to learn about and that’s why we chose Gimena del Rio Riande.

Margie Montañez: We were very intentional about centering the voices from our partner institutions, so that it wasn’t about the needs of a US researcher or the needs of a US institution.

What are the next steps for this project?

Jennifer Isasi: We are developing guidelines and recommendations with different audiences in mind. We have a section for institutions in the global North that have an interest in digitizing and curating materials from Latin America and the Caribbean; we have a set of recommendations for institutions that are funding these projects, and one for the institutions in the Caribbean and Latin America. I will say that overall, the recommendation is that there be more communication and community creation among them. For instance, US and Canada-based institutions could reduce the burdens on Latin American and Caribbean partners by making paperwork easier or taking on the cost of translation work, particularly in the case of grant applications.

Nicté Fuller Medina: We’ll be making these recommendations public along with the recordings of the sessions. We’re planning to translate them into Spanish, French, and possibly Portuguese. Jennifer has also started working on captioning for the videos. It’s important to us to translate what we are producing so that it’s accessible to institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The second part of this interview, focused on the impact of COVID-19 on the symposium, will be published tomorrow. Recordings of the symposium sessions can be found here. The forthcoming recommendations and guidelines are expected to be available in fall 2020 on the symposium website.

The post A Symposium to Center Latin American and Caribbean Partners appeared first on CLIR.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

The quote above is from the essay “My Dungeon Shook—Letter to My Nephew on the 100^th Anniversary of Emancipation,” in James Baldwin’s 1963 collection, The Fire Next Time. Baldwin’s letter to his namesake nephew has a painfully familiar relevance today in light of the demonstrations across America in response to decades of racial oppression, the loss of black lives at the hands of police—most recently the murder of George Floyd, but our graveyards tragically attest to so many Black Americans similarly cut down by an almost casual injustice—fanned and abetted by the bigotry of prominent leaders in government.

Like most of Baldwin’s writing, the letter to his nephew is unadorned, searing, and unequivocal. The world he grew up in is essentially the world his nephew inherited, so the elder uncle can attest to the pain, sorrow, and insult of pervasive racism that dehumanizes without respect to any generational divide. He continues:

They [the racists] are in effect still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…But these are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means: that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend.

The term innocent is salient in this essay and in Baldwin’s writing in general. It does not, I believe, define a guiltless or naïve character. Quite the contrary: it is a soul-burning adjective that conveys an unwillingness of the nation and the majority of the people living in it to take responsibility for their actions, an inability to enter into a new, more equitable social contract, and by so refusing causes the devastation of others’ lives. It is, as depicted earlier in the letter, living without seeing or understanding one’s true history. An aspect of forcing these lost brothers to see themselves as they are is to help them realize the true narrative of their destructive root causes. The past, when seen through this kind of innocence, is devoid of truth and consequence that can in turn foster misprision and wrenching suffering. Ahistorical time recurs irresponsibly, indifferently.

But today there is promise alongside the pain in our streets, in the United States and around the world. The fire this time is both a reckoning and an awakening, a global voice united in protesting the crippling ignorance and culpable innocence that James Baldwin decried. Because engagement with history is essential to our freedom, it is a propitious time to reflect upon the fundamental work of our communities: libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, the composite of memory institutions in service to the public good. We are conversant and critical with the past as a professional mandate, and insist on its preservation, documentation, contextualization, discovery, and reuse both to inform the present and help envision a more charitable future.

While the spotlight will always focus on the broader strokes and dramatic unfolding of current events, it is vital to acknowledge the work of tens of thousands of our colleagues—in particular the vital work of Black and other POC memory workers—who continue to augment this cultural discourse, who strive to assure that this knowledge is made available in an agnostic, unbiased way. This work has been ongoing for centuries, and is not new, but must be foregrounded now as the assault on truth, literacy, science, and accuracy has metastasized to the point of engendering worldwide protest against such lethal innocence.

From our communities, contributions small and large, fleeting and longer term, help us see ourselves and our world through the complexity, nuance, and shadings that exemplify our nature.  These contributions might include a well-reasoned answer to a reference question; an accurate metadata scheme; an open repository of well-curated data; a challenging museum exhibit on an overlooked or often misunderstood aspect of history; or persistent diligence to preserve and make accessible marginalized voices.

Collectively, we work on a shared canvas. This work is predicated on the necessity of confronting and rigorously exploring our legacy, not fleeing from it, to build and rebuild a welcoming habitation that is equitable and just. We will persist, for this is our home.

Charles Henry is president of CLIR.

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What sparked the idea to create the Informatics, Cultural Networks, and Knowledge Systems division?

In many respects the formal creation of this division serves to clarify an already-existing structure. Our organizational mission calls for us to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments; to transform the information landscape to support the advancement of knowledge; and to promote forward-looking collaborative solutions in service of the public good. CLIR has always sought to create strong communities that collectively work on practical solutions to common problems, so the formation of a division dedicated to networks and knowledge systems followed almost naturally.

Some background: we’ve expanded our reach dramatically over the past decade or so. One might look to the creation of the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Building a New Research Environment program we designed in collaboration with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2008 as the beginning of a new phase for CLIR. The program, which has since evolved to encompass digitization, was deliberately designed on a massive scale, with millions of dollars invested in projects led by a range of grantees, from small historical societies all the way up to national collaborations. In 2009 the Digital Library Federation (DLF), which had been incubated in CLIR before becoming a standalone nonprofit, elected to return as a CLIR program.  As part of this re-incorporation, the DLF implemented a new, open membership model, which led to its rapid growth. In 2012, CLIR and Vanderbilt University partnered to create the Committee on Coherence at Scale to foster strategic thinking across higher education. Conversations evolving from that initiative have since resulted in development of projects on a global level, such as the Digital Library of the Middle East and the nascent Pangia. We’ve affiliated with several community-based networks, including the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA), the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). In 2019 we created a new position, Director of Global Strategic Initiatives; in this role, incumbent Nicole Ferraiolo leads our efforts to identify new, and strengthen existing, opportunities for strategic international collaboration with a particular focus on climate change and human rights. 

All this has been accomplished with a small, nimble, and immensely talented staff. And we are small; when I joined CLIR in 2003 we numbered only a dozen, and even today with our much-expanded portfolio there are only 20 of us. But then, to grow from 12 to 20 is not insignificant, and as we approached some important milestones– DLF’s 25th anniversary and the associated program review, the Leading Change Institute’s 20th cohort—the time seemed right to analyze our internal organizational structure vis-à-vis our wide range of existing and planned initiatives in service of CLIR’s mission over the next decade or more. It was as part of this deliberative process that we envisioned the creation of the new division with the specific directive to support networks, knowledge systems, and informatics.

How will the new structure facilitate CLIR’s growth? 

In his recent Rebuilding blog post, our president Charles Henry writes, “For over 60 years CLIR’s programs have received wide support because they bring coherence, predictability, and stability to the working environment of higher education and cultural institutions. CLIR has accomplished this by building communities of practice and encouraging interdependence, by funding practical strategies and systemic thinking for new challenges, and by promoting the development of thoughtful, ethical policies that encourage the respectful acknowledgement of many voices.” The new division is an innate fit for CLIR, embodying all these guiding principles. The DLF program and other initiatives situated within the division collectively represent networks that address grand challenges by developing systems that enable humanity to preserve and make heard all of our voices, knowledge, and memory. 

CLIR is itself part of many networks comprising institutions, communities, and, at heart, individuals. The new division acknowledges this reality and our appreciation of its importance to everything we do. For some of these networks we can serve the community by acting as a core, providing the foundation that enables a network to grow, thrive, and make additional connections, and that role is at the crux of this division’s creation. We have been inspired particularly by the DLF program and community; its grassroots working groups, inclusive and vibrant annual Forum, and support for numerous important collaborative efforts such as the D-CRAFT project provide the best model one could ask for. 

We expect the creation of this division, under the leadership of Chief Information Officer and Director of Informatics, Cultural Networks and Knowledge Systems Wayne Graham, will help us understand how we can better encourage and support collaboration and goodwill in and among our communities, and to design and implement new initiatives accordingly. That knowledge will then inform the development of CLIR’s short- and long-term strategic plans. 

The Digital Library Federation is now situated in this division. What other programs fall within it, and how do you see them working together?

In addition to the DLF program, our Digital Library of the Middle East and Pangia initiatives are in this division, as is our CIOs of Liberal Arts Colleges network and the HBCU Library Alliance Partnership. By aligning these programs in a single organizational unit, we are better able to provide a holistic view of the various projects that are undertaken by each. The new division will leverage this expertise to develop a common language across its programs that allow consistent, honest feedback on approaches and lessons learned, as well ensuring the right people in the room to work on problems that transcend a single institution. Our affiliates, while they don’t fall “under” the division since they have their own individual governance structures entirely separate from CLIR’s, are natural partners for the division’s work. 

One final comment: the term “division,” and the two-dimensional outline shown on our organizational chart, can be somewhat misleading. Our programs, projects, and initiatives are intertwined in ways that aren’t readily converted to a chart, and our staff work closely together on initiatives across the organization. Program officers on our grants team are in regular communication with those working on the DLF program, for instance, and our communications, outreach, and engagement staff are embedded in all our activities. The battle against silos is a constant for us as it is for everyone else, but we keep at it!

The post CLIR’s New Informatics, Cultural Networks, and Knowledge Systems Division: Three Questions appeared first on CLIR.

Of late we have been understandably immersed in the current moment. The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in our lifetime, a disruptive force that is unnerving in that it is both inexorable and unpredictable, a silent threat that becomes visible only through the consequence of its often-lethal abrading, physically and psychologically, of our human fabric. It will influence our society, our politics, and our culture for many years to come; it is already demanding profound alterations in the way we see ourselves in the world and how we see the world itself.

A natural pathogen, the virus will be contained in time. As the air clears in a figurative and literal sense, we will begin to understand what has transpired and collectively explore methods and means to address the disruption and to work together to mitigate future calamity and loss. For over 60 years CLIR’s programs have received wide support because they bring coherence, predictability, and stability to the working environment of higher education and cultural institutions. CLIR has accomplished this by building communities of practice and encouraging interdependence, by funding practical strategies and systemic thinking for new challenges, and by promoting the development of thoughtful, ethical policies that encourage the respectful acknowledgement of many voices. This is illustrated by examples of recent and emerging work.

Building communities

Many of CLIR’s projects are managed to construct and maintain communities of practice and promote interdependencies.

1. Building cultural networks. We reach across GLAM communities to encourage wider accessibility to and more sophisticated use of our cultural heritage, broadly defined. Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives is a salient example, which we hope to enlarge upon post-crisis.
2. Providing safe spaces for storytelling. This nascent project will provide the cultural heritage, academic, and professional communities with a safe space for sharing experiences, obstacles, and ideas through personal narratives and group discussion to create transformative solutions for the empowerment of all, and will serve as an anonymized archive for ideas and proposals to strengthen professional culture post-crisis.
3. Working with marginalized communities that are often more decisively threatened. We will continue our partnership with the HBCU Library Alliance and seek funds that will support cataloging and digitizing content critical to a more sophisticated understanding of our national history. Outreach is also underway to several indigenous peoples organizations across North America.
4. Engaging interdisciplinary communities to work on wickedly complex challenges. The global digital library Pangia is an example of community-building at scale. The Digital Library Federation and its Forum will remain a major national platform for the exchange of ideas and innovative technologies in support of accessible, well curated, and reusable data pertinent to climate change, epidemiology, and other topics.

Developing practical strategies and systemic thinking for new challenges

Programs in this category inculcate the importance of system thinking and whole-greater-than-the-parts envisioning.

5. Building knowledge systems. Developing technical platforms that explicitly allow the federation and cost effective and efficient aggregation of open content. The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) epitomizes system thinking at a global scale.
6. Advocating and constructing sustainable models for essential digital resources. This includes the large digital library projects, and a new effort we are working on with ACLS, NEH, and the Mellon Foundation to explore new infrastructures and funding models to maintain information content over time, as much of essential academic knowledge today is fragile and susceptible to loss.
7. Advocating for and implementing projects that are international and global in scope and participation. CLIR Global is leading the development of new partnerships and projects across the planet. Our affiliates exemplify these priorities: IIIF, IIPC, Open Repositories, JISC.
8. Working to mitigate threats to our cultural heritage, whether natural threats or anthropogenic ones. The DLME and Pangia are exemplary of this, as is Recordings at Risk.
9. Developing online descriptive and educational resources to more broadly communicate with our constituency and the world, as we become a teaching resource. The DLF Digital Library Pedagogy Working Group is an example. CLIR is also working with selected Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation, a unique cohort of expertise, to envision a new curriculum focused on data access and sustainability.

Promoting the implementation of thoughtful, ethical policies and procedures at institutions

11. The Leading Change Institute trains professional librarians and information technologists for advanced leadership within their institutions and professional circles, promoting policies that enhance the workplace through thoughtful, ethical application, encouraging innovative solutions, and a more encompassing understanding of higher education.
12. The DLF Working Groups, which include Records Transparency, Privacy and Ethics in Technology, and the Committee for Equity and Inclusion, continually assess the educational workplace, articulating policies and procedures in service to a just and equitable society.

On these foundations we will continue and enhance our programs in service to rebuilding communication, infrastructure, policies, and practices for our constituencies as the crisis resolves, as it now falls to us to compose a different future. While we will retain some recognizable aspects of our traditional ways of doing business, we will also identify new models of service provision, funding, and functional dependencies. Later this year, CLIR, with selected partner institutions, will convene an interdisciplinary national task force with diverse institutional representation that will register the changes and challenges experienced during the pandemic, explore means and methods of addressing these challenges, and recommend specific responses to a world undreamed of a short time ago. From this, fresh affordances will be identified to help us interact with a much-altered environment, though an environment that, by working together, we can imbue with inclusive accommodation and promise.

All of CLIR’s projects and programs exemplify the belief that open, accessible, and well-organized knowledge is a human right. This is a core principle that animates our resolve and confers the proposition that we are joined as a common humanity.

Charles Henry is president of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

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Around the world, libraries and archives are spaces for the collection and preservation of as well as access to important cultural heritage materials. It is this final point—access—that has long captured my attention as a library-based science and technology studies (STS) practitioner scholar. Finding methods and mediums to make collections and information more readily available to, widely understandable by, and useful for diverse audiences has shaped my work in academic libraries and continues to play a role in my STS research.

In early February, I attended the “Unlocking Buddhist Written Heritage” conference at the British Library. The conference focused on ways in which collections and the items that create collections provide context to understanding Buddhism and its practices. Two aspects of the conference particularly resonated with me. I was heartened by the articulate understanding of the complex and powerful interconnectedness of libraries, archives, and cultures that ran through presentations and discussions. Similarly, I was encouraged by the widespread emphasis on accessibility, but wholly motivated by one discussion of accessibility in terms of ontology, interoperability, and collaboration.

Birgit Kellner’s opening keynote addressed how the circulation of heterogeneous monastic Buddhist manuscripts established networks of knowledge diffusion between India and Tibet. While explaining the movement of texts and teachings Kellner not only identified historical events and geographic routes, she also raised questions about who imbues manuscripts with value and meaning, how they do so, and why. Kellner provided a conceptual starting point for the remainder of the conference to explore how manuscripts and collections have played and continue to play important sociocultural, religious, and geopolitical roles.

While there is need for widespread and ongoing international collaboration in identifying, cataloging, preserving, and digitizing rare, endangered, and otherwise significant Buddhist manuscripts, it is crucial to acknowledge that any such efforts are laden with sociopolitical values. Acts of collecting manuscripts imbue value and ascribe meaning that carry profound, long-lasting implications. Identification and selection of items. Arrangement and description. Negotiation and stabilization of translation. These and other processes of ascribing meaning must be unpacked to properly acknowledge the sociocultural, political, economic, and other values that inform collection building and subsequently shape the history of peoples and places by privileging some information or materials over others. It is incumbent upon those involved in building collections to ask how collections are developed, by whom, and under what conditions. Moreover, it is essential to ask how various publics will access and interact with materials and collections.

In tandem with the conference, the British Library curated a multi-sensory special exhibition that used artifacts, manuscripts, video, ambient audio, and interactive features to historicize Siddhartha Gautama, explicate Buddhist philosophy, summarize the preservation and dissemination of Buddhist dharma, and contextualize monastic and lay practices. Various courses, talks, and publications complemented the conference and longer-running exhibition. The collective heft of these initiatives provided an example of the enriching power that can result from the interconnectedness of library, archive, and culture. Curation and presentation demonstrated self-awareness and facilitated physical and digital access for various publics.

The final panel grappled with technological, ethical, material, and ritualistic complexities of conserving, preserving, and disseminating content for global audiences. Jann Ronis detailed the story of Gene Smith, as well as the creation of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center and its growth into the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). This emphasized fascinating work occurring at the intersection of (inter)disciplinary domain expertise and informatics. Individuals who are able to fluently operate these liminal spaces are becoming increasingly relevant (and presumably in-demand) assets. These are ideal spaces for present, former, and future CLIR postdocs who are uniquely prepared to identify, understand, and implement (inter)disciplinary and technical considerations to ensure discoverability, accessibility, and usability of digital content by various audiences and enable highly specialized researchers to engage in digital scholarship research.

The organization has sought to identify, collect, preserve, and (somewhat more recently) digitize Buddhist texts. To realize the next iteration of digital Buddhist resources and better facilitate information accessibility, research collaboration, and knowledge discovery, BDRC is taking a proactive approach to the development and standardization of a unified yet flexible ontology and ensuring interoperability of content via Linked Open Data. The scope of this project is substantial and its purposeful attention to structured data and interoperability is at the forefront of Buddhist studies. Such efforts can create robust connections among manuscripts, researchers, practitioners, and knowledge seekers.

Nearly all of the conference presentations highlighted digitized materials or mentioned online components associated with research activities. Only Ronis focused on the need to optimize digital collections for computational analysis and provide infrastructure to support digital scholarship. Given my research interests (digital technology, contemplation/mindfulness), previous library-based work with Linked Open Data and Semantic Web, and CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship (digital scholarship, public engagement), Ronis’s talk and the work occurring at BDRC is tremendously inspiring.

In broad terms, my interdisciplinary STS research focuses on sociocultural roles of personal digital technologies and practices of mindfulness. As a CLIR postdoc at Montana State University Library, my research seeks to understand how processes of information exchange have changed as modes, infrastructure, and tools have changed during and after the digital transition. One outcome is a digital project that combines survey data, ethnographic interviews, and materials from MSU Library’s Ivan Doig Archive to communicate research in a compelling visual manner that is informative and engaging for non-specialist audiences. From a translational perspective, research findings will be used to develop a framework that individuals, communities, and institutions can access to make more mindful decisions regarding the consumption and (re)creation of information.

Inspired by the presentations and discussions during the conference, I now more clearly see the interconnectedness of my research expertise, previous library-based work, and postdoctoral activities and how such streams converge to create the next phase of my research program. Similarly, the multi-sensory exhibition at the British Library provides further inspiration as my MSU Library colleagues and I continue to explore new methods for disseminating research to diverse audiences and connecting various publics with our unique archival materials.

Justin D. Shanks received his PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech. He is currently the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at Montana State University where he studies sociocultural roles of digital technology, practices of mindfulness, and processes of information exchange. Email: justin.shanks@montana.edu. ORCID: 0000-0002-0587-8256

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CLIR’s Material Memory podcast series explores ways in which collective memory and the organizations entrusted with its stewardship are experiencing the disruptions of rapid technical innovation, accelerating climate change, armed conflict, mass movements of population, political and legal regimes that hamper access to culture, and the unintended ravages of simple neglect. The series will highlight efforts that memory institutions are taking to safeguard our heritage despite these odds. Season One focuses on people who are countering these effects by reformatting and sharing the threatened musical and oral traditions of indigenous cultures, as subjects tell their own stories of loss, recovery, and hope.

Material Memory begs the question: Why should we care? What good is the past in the present age of unprecedented challenges? What, if anything does the past have to tell us about mass dislocations, racial and economic inequality, human trafficking, political censorship, or climate change? Why devote precious resources to securing the persistence of collective memory? These are reasonable questions, and they demand an answer.

As a historian, my response is that these challenges are not unprecedented. On the contrary, coping with unpredictable and unwelcome catastrophic change to our physical and cultural well-being is how humankind has come to dominate the lands, the seas, and the skies. Furthermore, these disruptions have always been both natural and human made. That we have survived them and prevailed is due to the steady accumulation and sharing of hard-won knowledge. Collective memory tells us how to build a home out of snow; how to distinguish poisonous plants from medicinal ones; how to perform an appendectomy safely; and how to inoculate against deadly infections. Stewardship of that knowledge is a matter of life and death.

Memory that accretes knowledge over time is the key to our personal survival. Each of us has an immune system that commits to memory every encounter with a pathogen, so that we may mount a timely defense against the next assault. By the same token, individuals accumulate knowledge of themselves and their environment at every stage of their lives. This knowledge allows us to anticipate threats, recognize rewards, and engage in problem-solving through imagining various future scenarios and predicting probable results. Through autobiographical memory, we know who we are, where we come from, and what the future may hold for us. If for some reason we should lose our memory, through physical injury, psychological trauma, or dementia, it is not just the past that we lose. Given that imagination is memory transposed into the future tense, amnesiacs lose their ability to imagine. Without imagination they cannot solve the problems they face today or anticipate and prepare for those to come. When communities lose their history, they, too, lose their sense of identity and find it difficult to summon up hope for their future.

Like a good pair of glasses, knowledge of the past corrects our myopic sense that we face challenges that are unprecedented and therefore unsolvable. Problem-solving requires access to trustworthy facts and vast reservoirs of imagination and patience. It is our imagination, seated deeply within the repertoire of knowledge that cultures carry, that generates possible futures.

This season’s podcasts will share stories of people who are reaching deep into their community’s past to find, secure, and share the knowledge that has sustained them. The future of that knowledge—knowledge that is necessary to solve tomorrow’s challenges—depends upon each generation providing stewardship. Those who lament the scale of today’s challenges and insist that they are unique will discover that it is not the scale of the problems that matters, but the scale of the response to them. The richness of our cultural memory is itself testimony to how successful humankind has been in managing this precious knowledge. It is proof that our future is born of what the past knows.

Abby Smith Rumsey is a historian of ideas focusing on the creation and use of cultural memory.

The post What the Past Knows appeared first on CLIR.

I recently returned from a two-week expedition to the Arctic as part of the ClimateForce 2019 Team. This team consisted of 87 people from 25 countries who are all united in their commitment to combat climate change. The expedition was led by Sir Robert Swan, the first person to walk to both poles, and his son Barney Swan, the first person to walk to the South Pole using only renewable energy. ClimateForce is a seven-year initiative, founded by Barney Swan, to reduce 360 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere by 2025.

The expedition brought our group together amidst the backdrop of the stunning Arctic to explore solutions to climate change and help create a global coalition of climate and sustainability leaders. The Arctic is one of the places most impacted by climate change: this region has seen a 3.5° F temperature increase in the last 40 years, compared to 1.4° F globally. Having discussions and attending presentations about climate change with a view of melting glaciers in the background imposes a sense of urgency to finding solutions that is not attained in any other space.

Many of the places we visited would not have been accessible at this time of year as recently as 30 years ago. A 30-year veteran of National Geographic Expeditions to this region told us how unusual it was to not have pack ice as far north as we traveled—we made it to 79.5°N, about 600 miles from the North Pole. Sitting in a kayak amongst melting icebergs, the vulnerability of the Arctic to even slight increases in temperature becomes tangible. The surreal beauty and fragility of this place is something I will never forget.

The ClimateForce team had people from varying professions, including industry, banking, non-profits, government, and academia. Though there were many students in the expedition team, the University of Texas at Austin was the only official university cohort on board. My colleague Joshua Rhodes and I were selected as part of the UT group because of our research on ways to decarbonize the energy system to fight climate change. We both gave presentations as part of the expedition program to teach the other participants about some of the challenges to reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy and how our research helps to develop solutions.

A recurring theme of many of the presentations and discussions on the ship—and something that I am constantly thinking about in my own research—is the crucial role of carbon dioxide removal technologies to combat climate change. Carbon dioxide is a cumulative problem. This means that the total amount that has been emitted and not the rate at which it is being emitted is what determines the extent of temperature rise and other climate change impacts. Even if we were to completely stop releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere ten years from now—or tomorrow—we are still going to see climate impacts because of the amount of carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere. That is why carbon dioxide removal technologies are a crucial part of decarbonization strategies.

The easiest carbon dioxide removal technology is forestation, aka planting trees. Trees are really good at pulling CO₂ out of the air and storing it. A recent article published in the journal Science estimates the huge potential that planting trees could have in solving climate change. Other carbon removal technologies include carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air capture (DAC).

In CCS, carbon dioxide is captured from the exhaust of large power plants and is then piped and injected into geological formations underground where it can be permanently stored. Other researchers are experimenting with carbon utilization technologies (CCUS), where instead of storing the captured exhaust CO₂ it would be transformed into useful products. In BECCS, CCS technology is paired with a bioenergy plant—one that uses trees or crop wastes instead of fossil fuels—to result in an overall negative emissions process. Because growing plants sequester CO₂, bioenergy is typically considered to be carbon neutral. When the carbon dioxide released at bioenergy plants is subsequently captured, the overall process becomes carbon negative. In DAC, CO₂ is removed directly from the air and can then be stored or used through the same technologies of CCS and CCUS. Some DAC test facilities are already in place around the world. But these technologies will struggle to be implemented on the level that is necessary without some kind of price on carbon.

Other solutions involve ways of pairing energy use with energy production from clean sources, like wind and solar. These types of solutions are called Demand Response Programs. One example of an implementation of this type of program would be the use of a programmable thermostat that the utility can adjust when demand is very high. Another example is a conscious consumer who chooses to only run their dishwasher when they know that fleet emissions are low. Some neat tools exist to enable consumers to actively participate in these solutions. And as the Internet-of-Things continues to expand, opportunities for these types of programs grows with it.

However, this type of direct management by the utility of consumer appliances, or even automatic response of connected appliances to signals from the grid, requires extensive amounts of data and data sharing. There are significant and legitimate concerns related to privacy as well as data management, formatting, and networking. In my CLIR work in data curation for energy economics, I am constantly struck by not only the volume of energy data that is currently available but also the possibility of potential energy data for these uses as well as the related challenges of access and privacy. How to balance these concerns with the necessity of these solutions will be an important consideration going forward.

Emily Beagle is a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin.

This is the third in a series of posts examining climate disruption and its implications for the work of professionals in the information and cultural heritage community.

Read the previous posts:

To Be Part of the Climate Solution, We Must Center Communities, by Nicole Kang Ferraiolo and Jodi Reeves Eyre, August 14, 2019

CLIR’s Mission in the Era of Climate Disruption, by Charles Henry, August 9, 2019

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Humans are at the heart of the climate crisis. We are by no means the only species or entities that will face its dire effects, but our current geological age is called the Anthropocene for a reason. We caused this crisis, we will suffer its consequences, and it’s contingent on us to find and implement solutions.

Even when the effects of the climate crisis are narrowed to their threat to cultural heritage and information resources, the stakes are staggering. One study found that in the Gulf and Atlantic states, a one-meter rise in sea levels could cause the loss of over 13,000 recorded archaeological sites, as well as 1,000 sites eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. An analysis of select UNESCO heritage sites in the Mediterranean found that over 95% of them would be at risk by 2100, with many already vulnerable. A recent piece by CLIR’s President Charles Henry references another article by Tara Mazurczyk, Nathan Piekelek, Eira Tansey, and Ben Goldman, which found that 98.8% of US archives were likely to face at least one climate risk factor by the end of the century. Digital resources are similarly threatened: a study found that over 1,000 internet nodes (e.g., data centers and other hardware facilities) and 4,000 miles of land-based fiber optic cable may be underwater in as little as 15 years.

As individuals who value history, knowledge, and the preservation of human memory, we will grieve these losses, already well underway. As professionals in this field, we also have a responsibility to critically evaluate our grief and how we choose to respond. What does it mean to mourn the loss of monuments, artifacts, documents, or data when people are losing their homes, communities, food sources, and lives? Are there approaches that also support other mitigation and adaptation needs, rather than competing with them for limited resources? Climate activists seek to infuse conversations about the climate crisis into all elements of life, with the understanding that meaningful action is impossible if the climate is relegated to a separate domain. Similarly, it helps no one to segregate the cultural heritage and information fields’ responses to the crisis from those of other communities. We have an opportunity to approach the work ahead in a way that centers people, in which the very act of preserving the past makes communities more resilient to the present and future.

Information Spaces as Resilience

In an episode of 99% invisible, the podcast described social infrastructure researcher Eric Klinenberg’s experience working with a team of designers tasked with thinking about responses to Hurricane Sandy:

“One day Klinenberg was taking one team around a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and they had an idea for something called a “resilience center.” This resilience center was going to be a nice building staffed by welcoming personnel and was going to have all kinds of special programming for kids, and access to Wi-Fi and computers. What they didn’t realize was that they were basically just describing a library, which offers all of those same resources.”

Shared information spaces—including libraries, museums, and archives—are essential in holding communities together, fortifying them against disasters, and in some cases, even keeping people alive.

Even absent physical building space, memory institutions and repositories play an important role in community resilience. Writing from her perspective as a descendant of holocaust survivors, Victoria Herrmann has described memory and preservation work as essential to long-term recovery from trauma for displaced peoples. She fears that “severing social ties, dislocating local knowledge on how to absorb shocks, and weakening cultural practices like food, faith, and music—practices that could be vital in building friendships in new hometowns if they were preserved—all erode the adaptability of individuals and social safety net of communities. ” As many as 143 million people may be displaced by the year 2050 as a result of the climate crisis. As more people find themselves uprooted, immigrant, refugee, minority,  indigenous, and community-based archiving initiatives will provide important models for preserving community connections, culture, and scientific information. (Some examples include: Murkurtu, Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, SAADA, Documenting the Now, Shoah Foundation, BMRC, and Densho, among many others.) The climate will not affect all people equally, and the poorest and most vulnerable communities are likely to face its most devastating consequences. As we wade deeper into the crisis, it will only become more important for our field to strengthen its commitments to social and environmental justice and prioritize equitable, respect-based partnerships between information institutions and communities.

Information and cultural heritage institutions must consider our role in mitigating the crisis. Establishing models for conducting our work sustainably will be paramount. We must also recognize that we are facing the greatest collective action problem the world has ever seen and have a responsibility to remove barriers that could impede the flow of information necessary to solve it. This is intimately connected to the conversations our professional community has been having for years about open access, open knowledge, breaking down silos, bridging connections, and federating data. Now more than ever, openness and connectedness are moral imperatives.

CLIR’s Commitment

In “CLIR’s Mission in the Era of Climate Disruption,” President Charles Henry describes CLIR’s decades-long dedication to preservation and access and makes a long-term commitment to responding to what may be the most pervasive and pernicious challenge in human history. Central to CLIR’s current response is an evolving initiative, Pangia: an open, interoperable, advanced quantitative environment that will preserve and make reusable digitized cultural and scientific knowledge, essential to addressing the climate crisis. Pangia will be guided by the principles of indigenous data sovereignty and prioritize ethical preservation of the most vulnerable cultures while providing a unique environment that promotes urgent interdisciplinary research and discovery.

CLIR is committed to bolstering communities through its existing programs. We’ll continue to reflect on meaningful approaches to the crisis and how our actions can have the greatest impact. Meanwhile, we will use our platform to support and amplify the work of our professional community; if you are engaged in efforts to mitigate, adapt, or shed light on climate disruption, we want to hear from you (email nferraiolo@clir.org).

We hope you will join us in centering communities as we work toward solutions, so we can collectively weather the climate crisis with greater resiliency.

Nicole Kang Ferraiolo is CLIR’s director of global strategic initiatives. Jodi Reeves Eyre is CLIR’s program officer for postdoctoral fellowships.

This is the second in a series of posts examining climate disruption and its implications for the work of professionals in the information and cultural heritage community. Read the previous post:

CLIR’s Mission in the Era of Climate Disruption, by Charles Henry

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