Original - Information Matters

This article explores how bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems affects healthcare outcomes for South African patients. It highlights real-world examples, including the inaccuracy of pulse oximeters on darker skin and the disproportionate targeting of Black healthcare providers by fraud detection algorithms. Drawing on case studies and policy developments, including South Africa’s National AI Policy Framework, the article examines how biased data can reinforce inequality in medical decision-making. It calls for inclusive data practices, transparent algorithm design, and ethical oversight to ensure AI technologies serve all South Africans fairly and effectively.

Original

September 26, 2025 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Nothing Beats a Metadata Holiday: Hashtags, Memes and the Accidental Information Science of Jet2

What began as commercial ephemera (an advert produced to shift package holidays) has mutated into cultural capital, a memetic passport to viral belonging. I want to explore that the Jet2 phenomenon is less about planes than about metadata. In fact, nothing beats a metadata holiday. I think hashtags, remixes and tags act like boarding passes: they authorise entry into specific memetic communities, classify users within folksonomies and direct cultural traffic through algorithmic hubs. If airlines build infrastructures to move bodies, platforms build infrastructures to move information. Jet2 (perhaps unintentionally?) has done both.

Original

September 18, 2025 Tommy Bui

Artist Residencies and Libraries: The Perceived Perils of Productive Frictions and Co-Creation

Critical to this investigation is to examine how the current scholarship defines and characterizes artist residencies. A surface level description of artist residencies is a program wherein a practicing artist is selected to collaborate with a host institution to address an issue and is afforded resources such as time, space, or financial backing at varying scales and scope. Other core principles of artist residencies and expectations that fall upon the selected artists include being enablers of the creative process, mutual experimentation, and striving toward capacity building.

Featured Original

September 17, 2025 Pathum B Rathnayake

End of an Era? How Libraries Are Thriving in a Screen-Obsessed World

In today’s fast-paced world, many teenagers and young adults in their 20s and 30s seem glued to their screens. They stream videos, scroll social media, and read e-books on devices. This raises a big question: Are physical libraries dying out because young people aren’t visiting them to read books? This review looks at the past, present, and future of libraries to argue that no, this isn’t the end. Instead, libraries are changing to stay relevant, blending old-school charm with modern tech.

Featured Original

September 3, 2025 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

When the Gates Open: Ghost Month and the Hauntings of the Web

At its core, Ghost Month is about infrastructures of connection. The gates of the underworld are said to swing open, allowing for traffic (spiritual, emotional, social) between realms. It is about networks: between the living and the dead and also between generations, between households and temples, between earthly desires and cosmic orders. And here is where I want to ask: what if we read the internet itself as a kind of ghost gate? What if the lag, glitches, hidden circuits of our digital infrastructures are not simply “errors” but hauntings, reminders that our networks, too, are spectral spaces where living and nonliving, human and machinic, constantly mingle?

Featured Original Translation

August 22, 2025 Saleh Lzeik

Rebranding Social Media: Hello, Scroll Media

We still call it social media, but it hasn’t been social in years. What started as a space for connection and conversation has morphed into something quieter, stickier, and far more behavioral. People don’t open these apps to talk anymore. They open them to scroll. That shift in intent changes everything. I call this new reality Scroll Media.

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August 5, 2025 Magnus Igbinovia

Through a Filtered Lens: How Information Retrieval Bias Shapes Users’ Information Consumption

Everyone is interacting with information systems to access, retrieve, and subsequently use information for diverse purposes. What if the information we are consuming to make life-staking decisions has been filtered by an invisible hand? Like the lens of a camera, the invisible hand filters what information we receive, decides for us what is most relevant to our search queries, what is emphasized in our search results, and the ranking order of the information we receive. Unfortunately, this invisible hand is with a “closed fist” (devoid of openness, clarity, and understanding) and is highly subjective.

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August 4, 2025 Kaetrena Davis Kendrick

Considering Beneficence as a Core Librarianship Practice

Apathy. Disengagement. Burnout. Contempt. Anger. These are a few commonly reported long-term behavioral and emotional outcomes of low-morale experiences, which I’ve been talking with academic and public library workers about since 2016. Defined as repeated, protracted exposure to workplace abuse and neglect, these experiences reveal the pervasiveness of dysfunctional behaviors in library workplaces. Just as concerning, long-term exposure to harm also results in increased breaches of ethics, and many library workers report high levels of skepticism, mistrust, and uncertainty towards their colleagues and library users.

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July 30, 2025 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Why Not the Pub? Rethinking UK Bars as Accessible Learning Environments

This isn’t a manifesto to turn every UK pub into a coworking space. I’m not here to replace crisps with coursework or suggest that anyone swap pints for PowerPoint. UK bars serve a really rooted cultural role as social hubs, third places and sites of relaxation, laughter and (often messy) community. But after weeks of hopping between libraries and cafés (some packed, others shutting early or refusing laptops) I found myself quietly wondering: Why not the pub?

Featured Original

July 15, 2025 Shaharima Parvin

Librarians as Cultural Stewards: Preserving Iftar Traditions Through Storytelling

By preserving the traditions of Iftar, librarians play the role of cultural stewards, spiritual witnesses, and bridge builders. In urban societies, many traditions are changing or disappearing. The pressures of modern life – migration, economic transition, climate change – have changed the way people celebrate Ramadan. Preserving Iftar traditions is therefore not only an act of nostalgia but also a means of cultural rehabilitation.