This is the conclusion I’ve come to after witnessing the growing popularity of AI tools. AI is everywhere, despite its propensity to produce misleading or incorrect information, and the moral objections of workers who fear losing their livelihoods. Why do patrons choose AI tools while more reliable (and less controversial) options sit on the shelf?
Read More
The paper, “Theorising Notions of Searching, (Re)Sources, and Evaluation in the Light of Generative AI” (Sundin, 2025) won the Best Long Paper Award at the 2025 Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) conference in Glasgow, Scotland. For me, reading it sparked a eureka! moment. The author, Olof Sundin, argues that generative AI has a precedent in the European Documentation movement of the early 20th century. In addition to historical insights, the paper analyzes how today’s search systems increasingly provide answers or facts, whereas conventional retrieval tools point information seekers to sources.
Read More
In my practice, I use Critical Information Literacy as a teaching method to help students understand the power structures that exist behind their sources, in an effort to deconstruct barriers of information. There is considerable value in teaching the complexities of information privilege, especially to undergraduates who are the next generation of researchers and information consumers.
Read More
The start of this year’s Open Access Week coincided with No Kings demonstrations that took place around the nation on Oct. 18. I found myself that day, as so many of us did, shoulder to shoulder with friends, family and strangers speaking up for democracy. I was at the Seattle Center, at the foot of the Space Needle in downtown Seattle, in a vast crowd, my attention divided between fired-up speakers, inflatable unicorns, posters with wry comments and a rank of flags for veterans for peace. Amid the crowd was a group of intellectual-looking types, most wearing glasses and lab coats, waving SOS banners: Save Our Science. When I saw the SOS signs, I thought about how difficult it is to protect something we can’t see, how difficult it is to convince people of the value of something that they can’t use.
Read More
People can experience the same public policy very differently. Some feel their lives are improving; others feel left behind. This is not simply disagreement, it reflects a core part of policy impact that is hard to capture with objective indicators alone: public perception. Traditional social surveys are designed for this purpose, but they are often slow, expensive, and hard to adapt quickly. They also face challenges such as fixed question formats, limited flexibility, and cross-cultural comparability.
Read More
Many Canadian post-secondary institutions currently describe themselves as supporting community-based research, where the work of marginalized community members is valued and integrated into community-based research projects. Our experiences working on sister projects the Sex Work Activist Histories Project (SWAHP) and Eco-systems of Community Research and Recordkeeping (ECRR) have led us to conclude that these institutions in fact often undermine or ignore non-academic knowledges and expertise. University reform is needed to support community-driven research, especially for extremely marginalized communities such as sex workers.
Read More
In modern societies, many of the hardest problems are not “single-point” problems. They are system problems. A rumor jumps across communities in hours. A public service reaches some groups quickly but misses others. Platform risks reappear in new forms even after repeated governance actions. In education, healthcare, and emergency management, we have plenty of data—yet decision-makers still struggle to pinpoint which connections, pathways, and bottlenecks truly drive outcomes. What is missing is often not data, but a way to represent multi-actor, multi-relationship, and multi-context complexity in a form that computers can learn from and humans can interpret. This is where heterogeneous graphs come in.
Read More
