A fascinating Financial Times article looks at Spotify’s new practice of charging record companies to include specific songs in Spotify’s algorithm (“Spotify must wait to find out if digital ‘payola’ hits the right notes”, 27 November 2020). Alex Barker, author of …
I can’t resist surveys. I always sign up for website user experience surveys, because I feel that since I am in the business of digital information, I ought to be prepared to participate to help UX people design better sites. After …
OCLC have published an interesting-sounding report. The full title of this report is: Social Interoperability in Research Support: Cross-Campus Partnerships and the University Research Enterprise, a bit of a mouthful. The term “social interoperability” is defined as “the creation and …
Any report with 25 authors must be taken seriously. Or perhaps promises to be fairly dull, since 25 people are unlikely to agree on much that is really innovative. So it wasn’t with huge expectations that I started reading this paper, …
When you use an academic library catalogue, what are you actually searching?
The graphic shows the main search screen of Cambridge University Library, called iDiscover (actually powered by Primo). The user is presented with, as you might expect, a simple search …
Dan Kolkmann made an interesting point in his recent post about algorithms, entitled, charmingly, ““F**k the algorithm”?: What the world can learn from the UK’s A-level grading fiasco”. The article looks at an example of algorithmic bias, and how …
Recommender systems are the El Dorado of the 21st century. Retailers, manufacturers, content aggregators such as Netflix and …
I’ve written before about Wikipedia categories, using the example of a brand of toothpaste, and this post is an attempt to understand them a bit better. …
I was interested to see a new report, Machine Learning + Libraries, commissioned by the Library of Congress. Actually, the report is from LC Labs, a team in the Library Digital Strategy Directorate, so it …
A new publication from OCLC outlines progress on the use of linked data for research archives and special collections. There is a list of 21 members of the relevant OCLC linked data review group, so this publication looks to represent a …
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