“The COVID-19 pandemic, and the global scientific effort to develop treatments and vaccines, is the latest large-scale event to show the power and urgency of collaboration and data-sharing to solve society’s greatest challenges. Research libraries and librarians play a critical role in data management, education, and policy, empowering researchers to use data more effectively….
The Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) —a community of leaders, practitioners, educators, and librarians—came together to expand the cumulative experience of the cross-disciplinary Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments to other institutions. ADSA holds virtual events on scaling data-science capacity. Libraries and librarians are involved in data science as data curators, trainers, tool builders, and more. To meet this moment, ADSA has also amassed COVID-19 data-science resources and is crowdsourcing expansion of those resources….
In January 2020, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) filed public comments with the US Patent and Trademark Office on “Intellectual Property Protection for Artificial Intelligence Innovation.” The LCA explained how the right of fair use in US copyright law clears the way for much of the data processing—often involving large volumes of copyrighted material—that makes machine learning possible. …
Text and data mining are also critical tools in the digital humanities, and require “legal literacy,” or the knowledge and confidence of finding and using sources for this work. Funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, a team of librarians, legal experts, and scholars are building an open educational curriculum called “Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining.” …”