School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Spring 2025.
Fridays 3-5. Everyone interested is welcome.
Details are added as they become available.
In person, with also Zoom -- unless indicated otherwise. Campus policy requires
all Zoom participants to sign into a Zoom account prior to joining
meetings hosted by UC Berkeley. Face mask recommended but not required
for in-person attendance. Zoom sessions are not recorded.
Zoom link available only at
the School's Seminar event listing: www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/ias.
Schedule. Weekly
mailing list.
Jan 24: Michael BUCKLAND & Clifford LYNCH: Introductions.
Michael BUCKLAND: Re-Writing our History.
In the 1990’s the Bob Williams created a set of
biographical webpages for a hundred North American pioneers of
Information Science and for fifty organizations. After he died, the
pages were transferred to the ASIST website. They were not updated
and eventually ceased to be accessible. Last year the ASIST SIG
History and Foundations initiated a rescue and page texts were
transferred to a wiki-style server. Those legacy pages needed to
be updated; coverage brought up-to-date; and the scope made fully
international. A start has been made. Join me for a discussion of
the many different policy, editorial, and practical issues that arise.
Jan 31: Clifford LYNCH: Biography in a digital world.
Building on the case study presented by Michael
Buckland in the January 24 seminar, I will make a broad case for
the importance of digital representations of factual biographical
information as a fundamental information object necessary to
support digital humanities (and a wide range of other applications)
and note a number of domains in which this is important. I'll
discuss some of the requirements for interoperability and
reusability of such digital biographical representations and
draw a few connections to developments in identifiers, large scale
biography projects, open linked data and other efforts. While
the need for functional standards and technology in this area
has been clear for at least two decades, progress has been
extremely slow; I hope in the discussion we can explore some
of the reasons for this, and how barriers to progress might be overcome.
Feb 7: Jeffrey HART: The Politics of the Chips Act, or how to think
about the manufacturing of advanced integrated circuits.
A large proportion of advanced chip manufacturing is
concentrated in three firms: TSMC (Taiwan), Samsung (Korea), and
Intel (US). Growing hostility between the US and China makes
dependence on TSMC's foundry more risky. The Chips Act subsidizes
US and Taiwanese companies to locate new state-of-the-art production
facilities in the United States. What are the prospects for success
in this area?
Jeffrey A. Hart is an emeritus professor of
political science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His
main area of specialization is international political economy. Most
of his research has been on the politics of international economic
competitiveness in the advanced industrial nations. Between 1996 and
2001, he collaborated with Stefanie Lenway and Tom Murtha on the global
flat panel display industry, supported by a grant from the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation. In 2001, he completed a project on globalization in
collaboration with Aseem Prakash that resulted in the publication of
three edited volumes. In 2004, he published a book on the politics of
high definition television (HDTV). He co-authored three editions of a
textbook with Joan Edelman Spero (The Politics of International
Economic Relations). His most recent book was Essays
on the History and Politics of the Internet (2023).
Feb 14: Paul DUGUID: Information as Whitewash.
Management of the circulation of information to the
advantage of a particular person or group has been an enduring human
concern. This talk will address that topic through the lens of
"whitewashing." After a brief historical overview of the concept,
the talk will focus on examples of early twentieth century
corporations manipulating information about them (and their critics)
to maintain clean identities after coming under attack. To narrow
this broad focus, it will, in particular, examine the circulation of
images and photographs in influential whitewashing campaigns.
Feb 21: Karen COYLE: OpenWEMI: The Concepts of Work, Expression,
Manifestation and Item.
This talk will cover two recent Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI) projects. The first is OpenWEMI, a version of the library
community's model "work, expression, manifestation, item" that is
abstracted to be free of the semantics of library catalogs. This RDF
vocabulary can be used by any community with metadata that is describing
created resources, and responds to some existing uses of the base
concepts outside of their original context. Karen will illustrate the
differences between the library vocabulary and the OpenWEMI vocabulary,
and will provide some sample uses of OpenWEMI. In keeping with the
"simpler is better" approach by DCMI, Karen will also show the Dublin
Core Tabular Application Profiles (DCTAP) work which is a low-tech but
powerful model for creating a machine actionable metadata profile that
can be converted to SHACL or ShEx validation documents.
Karen Coyle graduated from the UC Berkeley School of
Information (in South Hall) in 1972 whenit was named School of
Librarianship. She returned for an advanced Certificate in
1978. She went on to be one of the founding members of the MELVYL staff,
and since then has written, spoken, and been involved in metadata
standards and development. Much is available at kcoyle.net.
Feb 28: Presentation by Zoom.
Vivien PETRAS: The Identity of Information Science.
In the canon of disciplines, information science is
still a young discipline, which is working to position itself in the
scholarly landscape. This talk will provide a short overview of the
development of the discipline in Germany and - starting with definitions
from the North American scholarly context - will define a core of the
discipline and its main research questions. The definition provides a
unique identity for information science and positions it in the
disciplinary universe. iSchools and their strategic positioning as
interdisciplinary research centers and their relationship to information
science will be discussed. The talk is based on the recently published
article: Petras, V. (2024). The identity of information science.
Journal of Documentation, 80(3): 579-596. Recommended reading:
Open access at: doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2023-0074.
Vivien Petras received her PhD from the UC Berkeley
iSchool in 2006 and is now a professor at the Berlin School of Library and
Information Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. She studies how
to design (e.g. technology), evaluate (e.g. based on standards) and
shape (e.g. with policies) cultural heritage and research information
infrastructures to improve interactions with them.
Mar 7: Howard BESSER: Stewardship of Digital Still and Moving Images.
What do we know about managing digital collections of
still and moving images? How do we make sure that they persist over
time? In this Talk Howard Besser will trace a history of important
projects ranging from the mid-1980s Berkeley Image Database Project
to the early 2020s Music Composers’ Streaming Video Preservation
project. He will discuss image collections found in libraries and
other cultural institutions, as well as the images found on
individuals’ cellphones.
Howard Besser is Emeritus Professor at New York
University, and Founding Director of the MA program in Moving Image
Archiving & Preservation. Previously he had been a Library & Information
Science professor and in charge of information management for
two museums. Besser has been involved with digital stewardship
since the 1980s, and has taught classes and dozens of professional
workshops on digital stewardship. In 2009 he was named to Library of
Congress's select list of "Pioneers of Digital Preservation".
He has also been involved in the creation of several library metadata
standards (PREMIS, Dublin Core, METS), and has published more than fifty
articles dealing with information technology and cultural institutions
(including focus on copyright, privacy, and preservation of cellphone
data and social media). Besser is an alumnus of this School,
MLIS'77 & PhD'88.
Mar 14: David S. H. ROSENTHAL: Archival Storage.
Efforts to preserve our digital heritage for
future generations are
bedeviled by a number of persistent, seductive but impractical ideas
such as format migration. This talk debunks another of them, the idea
that the key to preserving data for archival timespans is to write it
to quasi-immortal media.
David Rosenthal wrote his first program sixty years
ago. His career included the
Andrew project at Carnegis-Mellon University, Distinguished Engineer at
Sun Microsystems,
employee #4 at Nvidia, and co-founder of the LOCKSS Program. He is now
seven years into a second career as an almost full-time grandparent.
David Rosenthal and Vicky Reich are recipients of the
2025 Paul
Evan Peters Award.
Mar 21: Robert SANDERSON, Yale: Identity, Authority and Ontology in
the age of AI.
Identity management is a foundational task for the
preservation and stewardship of cultural and natural heritage, and
the current process relying on controlled vocabularies of authorized
name forms, rather than their underlying identifiers, is already close
to irrelevant. With the deep integration of Large Language Model
powered techniques into both the discovery layer for end users and
the cataloging process for cultural organizations, systems will
necessarily use a consensus network of linked identities to manage
people, groups, places, concepts, events, and beyond rather than a
(changing) string blessed by self-declared authorities. As more and
more interfaces become voice activated, keyword searching will become
increasingly archaic speeding the demise of name authorities. In order
to function in this rapidly changing world, cultural organizations
will have to build on top of shared, foundational ontologies of
relationships and distributed knowledge networks to be able to satisfy
users’ needs. This presentation will walk through the thinking and
the path forward to a relatively near-term solution.
Robert Sanderson is Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage at Yale University, and works with Yale’s museums, libraries and archives to help them to be more connected and consistent in their processes and data. He is the technical architect and visionary for LUX, Yale’s cross-collection discovery platform built using the Linked Open Usable Data paradigm and technologies. He is chair of the Linked Art working group and long-standing editor for IIIF specifications, and has been co-chair and editor of foundational W3C specifications. He has previously worked at the Getty in Los Angeles, Stanford University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Mar 28: Spring Break. No Seminar meeting.
Apr 4: Suzanne WONES, University Librarian: The Great Sea Change:
Understanding and Responding to Changes in Information Seeking Behavior
in the Age of AI.
Academic libraries have evolved to meet the needs of
scholars as they moved online, started citing Wikipedia, and created new
research methods and outputs. Now generative AI is creating a new wave
of changes in how scholars find, use, and create knowledge. How can
libraries evolve to best help them on their journey? By continuing to
focus on user-centered design for our services and systems, libraries
will be well placed to follow our north star and plot a successful course.
Suzanne Wones has 20 years of experience as a
leader in academic libraries. Before her appointment at Berkeley,
Wones served as the associate university librarian for discovery and
access at Harvard University, where she was responsible for access
services, information and technical services, imaging services, user
experience, and discovery. During her many years at Harvard, Wones
advocated for user-focused innovations and developed creative solutions
to advance the mission of the university. The best part of being a
librarian, Wones said, “is being part of the solution” for those
searching for the right resources to gain knowledge and advance their
research. See also UC
Berkeley chooses Suzanne Wones as new University Librarian
Wones holds an M.S. in information, library, and
information services from the University of Michigan, a B.A. in history
from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an M.A. in American
history from the University of New Hampshire.
Apr 11: AnnaLee SAXENIAN: Information Schools in a Time of 'Information
Warfare.'
We'll discuss the shift from Google's 1998 mission "to
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful" to today's highly contested information ecosystem, asking
what it means for policy and politics as well as its implications for
the future of information schools.
Apr 18: Cathy MARSHALL: Adventures in Factual Biography.
Several Friday Seminar talks this term have highlighted
large-scale factual biography efforts. I'll discuss factual biography
from a practitioner's perspective using examples from a decade's
worth of biographical research. The hundreds of factual biographies
I've teased from diverse data sources effectively illustrate social
and technological issues anticipated by the literature. They also
reveal potential tensions, trade-offs, and hazards when factual
biographies are assembled at scale.
Apr 25: Michael BUCKLAND: A Retrospect, 1991-2025.
Clifford and I began this Seminar in the Spring
semester of 1991. I will share some reflections on its origins,
intent, and highlights -- and
how it changed during its 69 consecutive semesters. He and I both
benefited greatly from being able to use the Seminar as a way
to develop our own ideas and I will add a
personal account of how my own
view of information and information studies have changed during the
same period.
May 2: Last Seminar of semester. South Hall room 202.
A Tribute to Clifford Lynch.
Clifford came to Berkeley in April 1979 to be
manager of computing resources in the Division of Library Automation
in the UC systemwide administration. He remained, with steadily
increasing responsibilities, until he left in 1997 to become
Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information in
Washington, DC. In parallel he co-chaired this Friday Afternoon
Seminar from its inception in January 1991, 69 semesters ago.
Sadly, Clifford passed away on April 10.
His many and varied
contributions will be illuminated by Cecilia Preston, Karen Coyle,
Joan Lippincott, Erik Mitchell, Lynne Grigsby, Howard Besser
and Sarah Barrington.
This time, instead of Zoom meeting remote access, it will
be a Webinar.
For more detail and the revised link see www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2025/tribute-clifford-lynch
The Dean will host a reception at 4:30 pm.
For a tribute by CNI see In
Memoriam: Clifford Lynch.
There are plans for research colloquia in the Fall
and beyond, but not to continue the Friday Afternoon Seminar.
Fall
2024 schedule and summaries.