Access 2017 Conference Day 1 #accessYXE Notes Sessions 1-3

Dean Melissa L. Just, University of Saskatchewan - Opening Remarks (My Notes)
Hot topics from 19 years ago since last in Saskatchewan: classifying the web for search engine Northern Light; planning for sustainable desktop computing; Z39.50. Here "we come together to discuss current and cutting edge challenges and opportunities."

University library worked in collaboration with others on such projects as Saskatchewan History Online (over 100,000). Indigenous Studies portal, or iPortal, with a number of archival entities (more than 33,000 full text resources focusing on First Nation and indigenous peoples. Also the Our Legacy project, extensive collaboration with various archives, libraries, and historical centers and societies. All made possible from small ideas that were germinated at conferences like this one.

Keynote - Dr. Kimberly Christen "The Trouble with Access"
Director of All the Things (so many my typing fingers couldn't keep up). Cultural heritage and digital technology in support of digital repatriation.

Ethics of displaying Native American peoples information online. Her Access 2011 talk focused on tension between idea that openness is a default, versus the diverse sets of relationships to knowledge and sharing that indigenous communities bring to the understanding of information sharing. She emphasized limits fo ideas of openness not only to digital collections, but as to how researchers, imagine and construct an often uncritical understanding of openness as a spectrum from open to closed, instead of nodes in a vast network of type of circulation. Today's talk runs parallel, connecting indigenous sovereignty, ongoing decolonization, and knowledge and relationships of our materials online and in physical form. Openness collections closes relationships; we claim neutrality, but build within power structures; build structures meant to democratize but that colonize. Blind invocation of universal access and celebration of open access in particular that all too often aligns open access with decolonization.

Colonial dispossession in ongoing colonial states: the removal of indigenous bodies from indigenous lands. Respecting and providing physical access to land should acknowledge that we can't separate access to land and access to knowledge.

What does it mean for libraries archives and museums as institutions and those of un in them to provide a space for indigenous peoples free from fear and with respect. What does it mean to be a part of a chain from the future, into the past, where the land is part of these knowledge systems? We can't separate access from digital technologies from the systems of knowing upon which they are built. Proposal: we should trouble access, and disavow political action. Refuse to ignore the elephant in the room, undo structures that maintain active unseeing/unknowing. Sustain tearing down, building anew. We need to grapple with relationships and histories, engage in respectful exchange of knowledge, acknowledge our work in the erasing of such.

Her work since 2011 in the Plateau People's Web Portal. Relationships, structures, and policies that moved this from a project (one time) to a practice (ongoing commitment to engagement with tribal peoples across the university). Began with MOU between University and the indigenous peoples upon whose land the University is built. Built on recognition of indigenous sovereignty. Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation listened to Native American advisory board when they noted they wanted a multi-tribal portal, had to be online so many could access, important to include many types of Native knowledge in content, not just that deemed 'scholarly.' Individual items are important, not the high level cataloging. Tribal decision-making over content that would be posted, and how it would be accessed. Managed in government to government relationship, access according to native protocols.

Tribal administrators chosen by internal governing principles curate content and decide on sharing knowledges. Lists of cultural protocols for access--the content here is specifically public, purposely made public; members are added to protocols based on their relationships. Collaborative communication: no digitization or display of any materials without approval. "Reliance on takedown notices replays the cultural violences of physical dispossession of materials. Once content is online and circulating, the damage is done." 12 categories of knowledge chosen and updated as needed, individual materials added by each tribe, so no default to subject headings (LoC) because they have been violent. 2015 Cataloging and Classification Quarterly has good articles on this.

This process of collaborative curation, call digital return (not just digitizing and returning so we hold copies, but embedding indigenous protocol for description, use, and access at all levels - MOUs, design decisions, categorization, digitization, etc.).

Museum refusal to return Salmon Chief's knife; offer to send high resolution image. There are very real limits for digital return, there are time that physical materials must be held, touched, used, passed on.

Museum record, institutional metadata standard, versus community curation adding own record with additional metadata in another tab on same page--community record has a new title not 'root gathering basket' but 'duck basket', and defines attribution not to non-native collector but to tribe, and narrations by named individuals and members of community. Because allows any file format, additional layers of knowledge. Each record can have its own protocol for access. Narrations bring photos to life, asked to sit with the unease of colonial practices.

It means we also need to provide tools to allow this work to happen elsewhere. Free and open source, built with idea of ethical ways to record info in face of sensitivity Mukurtu allows for multiple layers of community information and attribution (multiple records for any file, multiple layers of attribution), customizable to size and needs of community, and also to be a viable software for non-indigenous communities. No one profile except common ground of growing from local indigenous needs; Mukurtu focuses on growing relationships, reciprocity, intergenerational knowledge sharing and exchange. Literally means dilly-bag, sacred items kept in bag by elders, youngsters needed to ask permission before accessing. Groundedness in people, place, and ancestors. Based in local cnceptions of access. but it is a tool, a platform.

Mukurtu - 3 Cs: communities (the who of Mukurtu. Who are stakeholders and contributors; nobody goes unnamed). C Cultural protocols: how. jow is content and metadata shared, what protocol are there for sharing/access? Granular. C: Categories: the what of Mukurtu, what are most important to community? These elements are core architecture. Encourages these connections. Much like free trade labels, TK labels allow us to make ethical decisions about use, reuse and circulation of information. (Strike me as similar to CC labels). See Sq'ewlets people, tribe of Sto:lo, website who guide users via defining TK labels, and secret sacred label replaces images of sacred sites and human remains. Provide information about how they understand the viewing of human remains, and understanding of why they choose to circulate or not those images that may re-enact violence or violate sacred strictures.

LoC updates a record with rights and access field, and adding the Passamaquaddy people's own language and description for the Passamaquoddy War Song.

not bad colonial museums vs good postcolonial ones. intent to illustrate the levels through and at which we need ot be vigilant; the history of technological advances in cataloging, collecting, and display cannot be divorced from violence of dispossession, legacy of looking and taking. Not all info is intended to be digitized, accessed, and preserved. Material semiotics: always situated someplace, and not no place. (Quoting feminist archivist Donna Haraway.)

Foreground agreements with indigenous peoples. We can add steps to workflows that account for more voices, to combat not-seeing and seeing-through. We can work with communities. We can work to undo legal fictions of ownership by providing the alternative licenses and strategies, or ignoring the ones that exist.

Questions:

The concern of "rewriting history" if we don't save and provide access to all information.
Notion of transgression, of openness, tries to erase other systems. Acting ethically doesn't mean we act the same in all situations. There is no level playing field (Leanne Simpson (sp?)). Acting ethically in terms of indigenous collections requires different perspective and tools and relationships, versus medical records from non-native Canadian hospital. Ethics is not a blanket we can put over everything. We are so afraid of legal structures because we are programmed to be. We are policing ourselves at the expense of undoing hegemonic practices.

License in perpetuity to maintain these materials. As state institutions it is our responsibility, it's expensive to maintain -- servers, long term work, none of us can predict what it will cost to store this. As universities we must make commitment, we pay tons for football stadiums. Structural level and getting things in writing is important. We need MOUs, workflows, "tip to tail."

Question: In the West, we are conditioned into controlled vocabularies. Answer: controlled vocabularies are intended to provide order. We are obsessed with order and organizing. The myth of organization. LIS schools are a problem! Perpetuate with standing courses that perpetuate standing to side, being objective, not about context and relationships.

To read: Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Session 1: Visualizing Province-Wide Public Library Transaction Data with Elastic Stack - Dale Storie & Scott Murray from SILS

Serves 11 agencies and over 300 branches in the province. Migrated to new ILS (Polaris) in 2015, so reporting important because libraries want to know where materials are going, who is requesting what. Data-driven decision making. Uses SQL reporting as backbone, get reports as excel spreadsheets, boring. Tech news sites were turning boring firewall logs into cool visualizations and dashboards--what about doing it with ILS reporting data?

Elastic Stack: 3 free open source:
ElasticSearch (data storage and search index)
Logstash - gathers data from sources and sends data into destinations
Kibana - web app for searching and visualizing. Licensed under Apache 2.0
(AirBNB, Yelp, NYT, NYPL).

Give permission only to staff who should have access through open directory, same login as use for usual work.

Circ transactions in Polaris

Kibana
1. Discover
- search the dataset
- preview results

options for search (full text, exact value, Lucene query syntax)

2. Visualize
- standard visualization options (charts, heat maps, stacked area graph, awesome mapping facilities, etc)

3. Dashboard
- multiple visualizations brought together in a dashboard
--
Dashboards vs traditional reporting - easier for nontechnical staff to grasp implications of data and trends

Also used as an alerting system, monitors API use
Code at github.com/SILSConsortium/sils_elastic

Session 2: Advocating for Digital Privacy The Centrality of Public Libraries in a Uniquely 21st Century Struggle - Jonathon Hodge 

Important to ask why we are doing something. Why? Why advocate? Why care about privacy?

Thomas Paine's Common Sense is most circulated book in American history Published anonymously because would have been thrown in jail. More recently, Thelma and her personal history outed by AOL searches; AOL generated machine number but assigned same number to same person every time. That information in hands of insurance provider, police officer, hirer... Ed, software and security consultant had a crisis conscience about aggregated data (Snowden). Today, any one of our community members could be one of those people.

Without technological protections to protect privacy, the actions of forebears and contemporaries would not have had the impact on our society. Who will stand up, if not us? ACLU, OpenMedia.ca, other nonprofits. Privacy is complicated, but so is tax system. People can navigate that because of layers of intermediaries (lawyers, accountants). We need infomediaries--libraries and librarians can be those.

Tor browser TPL.ca/privacy - digital privacy initiative - can we put together a plan that is user-focused.

Plans to make available to other libraries and librarians? Yes, working with group out of University of Montreal for Cybersecurity 101, Michael Joyce. Intention was public file drop. Email for pdfs and Word docs, and they'll be building a portal, hope to be live before Halloween. Response of community has been almost universally positive. The rights that we enjoyed in the analog age are things we have to take active steps for in digital age. Confidence and competence in this are core to public library mandate.

Session #3: Don't Be So Sensitive - A Data Security Journey - Hannah Rainey and Emily Lynema

Context: Hannah is a Fellow at NCSU (my old stomping ground!), focus on data literacy at land-grant institution. Effective Stewardship of Library Data proposed as project by Emily Lynema

Data and cybersecurity of primary concern to many institutions - business, governments, institutions of higher ed, individuals, new data breaches every week. Campus prioritized cybersecurity - legal and regulatory landscape. Federal and state statutes--FERPA, HIPAA are American examples. At NCSU regulations are interpreted through Data Sensitivity Framework, assigns sensitivity levels to data. Purple, Red, Yellow, Green. Scaffolding for project. Central office of IT did much initial legwork. Privacy /= security. We used to purge records, now we have room logs, system logs, data collection beyond circulation. Now in face of big data and learning analytics to prove worth to greater institutions.

1. What data do we have, 2. where is that data. Internal data audit, assess practices based on institutional framework. Difficulty finding practical approaches to protecting patron data. Helpful info on the data audit or DAF Data Audit Framework which provides organizations with means to locate, identify, assess, and describe--easily applied to security audit. In hindsight, common sense, but at first road map is very helpful.

Audit plan: assigned self as auditor, scope of interest was sensitive data. Reviewed internal documentation, scheduled interviews with administrators of those departments. Created training, made recommendations for policy updates. Interviews more effective information gathering due to institutional culture, but started hourlong interviews with overview of goals and project, asked to share thoughts and begin conversation where most comfortable. Loosely structured interviews expanded conversation--for instance, photos and video records. Practices for storing, sharing, preserving data varied across departments. Departments with student employees maintain inconsistent lists, for example.

Inventory fields - source, department, OIT category, elements, sensitivity, storage, retention, use, access, notes (not exhaustive, based on scope). Channlenges - definition and scope of data source (source - ILS, individual spreadsheet, difficult to reduce individual data elements, external sources, vendor-hosted data). Describing data sources and elements not as clear as hoped, amount and variety of data overwhelming. initial scope and framework very important. Assigned sensitivity levels base don internal framework. Majority of data decided to be yellow, or mildly sensitive, and identified red data instances institution did not need and removed them. Library data (most sacred) not addressed in Framework - most sacred user-related data. Interesting conversations about what counts as library data, and which of that data should be protected.

Next, training for staff on how to handle sensitive data using relatable examples and Framework. In process of recommending policy updates reflecting commitment to privacy and security. Models for ongoing maintenance of inventory and data governance being developed.

Individuals were insecure about security practices. Important to be compliant with campus guidelines; contacted head of compliance to let them know about the project. Better positioned to make decisions about data collection in the future.

Questions: did you classify working documents moving between staff? Yes, users included staff and outside of library transactions. A: Most of those are classified by internal framework. Questioner Note: we talk about user privacy but apply different rules to our own work. Q: Any pushback on removing information from collection. A: More about knowing what data we're collecting so we can store it properly and cutting sensitive data we don't use for anything.
























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