Field notes from the commons.
14 posts across 4 categories. Reading ahead of the conference — research, whitepapers, case studies, editorials, and long-form interviews.
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…
When Behaviour Replaces Identity in Online Gambling Systems
KYC was never meant to define the full architecture of player experience. It entered the system as a regulatory necessity — a checkpoint designed to confirm id…
Algorithmic Entertainment in Online Gambling and the Engineering of Player Engagement
The global online gambling industry has evolved into a highly sophisticated digital entertainment ecosystem driven by data science, behavioral psychology, and…
Global Reach, Diverse Impact: Rereading the 2004 Manifesto
What the original JCDL theme understood about cross-regional collaboration — and what the digital edition inherits twenty-two years later.