Field notes from the commons.
34 posts across 4 categories. Reading ahead of the conference — research, whitepapers, case studies, editorials, and long-form interviews.
Metadata in Digital Libraries and Why It Matters
Metadata is data about data — the descriptive information that tells you what something is, who made it, when, and what it's about, so that it can be found, or…
Open Access Research and Why Free Academic Knowledge Matters
Open access means making research — especially scholarly articles and academic knowledge — freely available online for anyone to read, without paywalls or subs…
Retrieval-Augmented Generation and What It Means for Libraries
The single most discussed weakness of large language models is that they invent things — stating falsehoods with the same confidence as facts, fabricating cita…
Digital Preservation and the Long Fight Against Bit Rot
There is a comforting assumption buried in how we treat digital information: that once something is saved, it is safe. A file copied to a drive, a document upl…
The Persistent Identifiers Holding Digital Scholarship Together
The modern scholarly record has a problem it rarely advertises: the web it is built on will not stay still. Pages move, servers are decommissioned, journals ch…
How Live Dealer Casino Technology Works
Live dealer games sit at a fascinating intersection between a real casino and a digital one. A human dealer at a real table is streamed live to players' screen…
Quantum Computing Explained Without the Usual Hype
Few technologies attract as much breathless coverage, and as much genuine confusion, as quantum computing. It is variously described as the machine that will b…
The Data Centers Quietly Straining the World's Power Grids
Every time someone asks an AI a question, streams a film, or stores a photo in the cloud, the work happens somewhere physical: in a data center, a warehouse-si…
How Passkeys Are Replacing Passwords
The password has had a remarkably long run. For more than sixty years, the basic idea — prove who you are by knowing a secret — has underpinned nearly every lo…
How On-Device AI Is Quietly Reinventing Your Gadgets in 2026
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has lived mostly in the cloud. You typed a question, it traveled to a distant data center, and an answer came b…
How On-Device AI Is Quietly Reinventing Your Gadgets in 2026
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has lived mostly in the cloud. You typed a question, it traveled to a distant data center, and an answer came b…
When the House Goes Dark: Online Gambling and the Preservation Problem No One Is Funding
Online casinos and betting platforms are among the most data-rich environments on the internet — and among the most fragile. A look at the born-digital records…
Model Collapse and What Happens When AI Starts Learning From Itself
The large language models that have reshaped how we write, search, and learn were built on a single irreplaceable resource: the vast accumulation of text that…
Bit Rot: The Quiet Catastrophe Threatening Everything We've Digitised
There is a comforting assumption underneath the whole project of digitisation: that once we convert something into bits, we have saved it for good. Paper burns…
The Experiment That Cannot Be Repeated — Biomedicine's Reproducibility Crisis and the Data We Fail to Keep
Science is supposed to be self-correcting, and the mechanism of that correction is repetition. A finding earns its place in the body of knowledge not because i…