Field notes from the commons.
18 posts across 4 categories. Reading ahead of the conference — research, whitepapers, case studies, editorials, and long-form interviews.
AlphaFold Filled the Shelves — and Left the Protein Database With a Curation Problem
For half a century, structural biology had a supply problem so severe it shaped the entire discipline. Determining the three-dimensional shape of a single prot…
The Oldest Dice Ever Found and What They Reveal About Human Civilization
The oldest objects archaeologists are willing to call dice were excavated in the 1970s from a Bronze Age burial at Shahr-i Sokhta, in what is now southeastern…
Vector Embeddings Are Not Meaning — What Semantic Search Actually Does to a Digital Library
For most of the field's history, a library catalog was honest about its limitations. You typed words, and it found records containing those words. When it fail…
The Cataloguer's Problem Is Not Going Away — It Is Going Deeper
There is a conversation happening in digital library circles that frequently gets framed as a question about tools: should we use large language models to auto…
Shadow Libraries, AI Training Data, and the Copyright Problem Digital Libraries Cannot Avoid
The problem the field was handed without being asked In 2023 and 2024, a sequence of disclosures, lawsuits, and investigative reports established what many in…
What Digital Libraries Have Stopped Learning From Industry Recommender Systems
There was a period, roughly between 2008 and 2015, when the digital library community and the recommender systems community were genuinely talking to each othe…
Agentic AI in Digital Libraries — What Autonomy Promises and What It Actually Requires
Something shifted in AI deployment in 2025 that has not yet been fully absorbed by the digital library field. The shift is not in model capability — though mod…
The Persistent Identifier Problem Is Not Solved and COMET Is Trying to Explain Why
A persistent identifier is, at its most basic, a promise. It is a string of characters assigned to a digital object with the institutional commitment that the…
FHIR Solves the Syntax Problem and Leaves the Hard One Untouched
The 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, contains a requirement that reads simply but carries significant consequences: certified health informatio…
RAG Is Not a Cure — What Retrieval-Augmented Generation Actually Fixes in Biomedical Libraries
Retrieval-Augmented Generation has become the consensus answer to the question that biomedical information professionals and clinical AI developers have been a…
Genomic Data Portals and the FAIR Gap the Field Has Stopped Talking About
There is a version of the genomic data management story that the field tells about itself, and it is broadly accurate in outline. The National Center for Biote…
The Library Catalog Was Never Neutral
The catalog has always made an argument. It argues that certain concepts are the correct way to organise knowledge. That certain vocabulary terms are the appro…
FAIR Was Never Built for Machine Learning
The FAIR Guiding Principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — emerged from a 2014 workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, were formalised by…
What Born-Digital Archives Are Losing Before Anyone Notices
There is a category of loss that archivists have spent two decades naming and still have not solved: the loss that accumulates not through flood, fire, or inst…
When Catalogs Hallucinate: Provenance and Trust in Retrieval-Augmented Library Search
A discovery layer that confidently surfaces a citation that does not exist is not a bug. It is the predictable consequence of stacking a generative layer on to…