Letter from the Executive Director, July 2023
Back in 2020, I contributed a chapter to a book on artificial intelligence in libraries and publishing (available as a digital download for free!), on the future growth and applications of AI. In that chapter, I focused in part on the hierarchical model of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to examine how far neural nets and AI have progressed and how much farther they need to go. Despite the impressive advances of the past nine months, anyone who has tinkered with ChatGPT, BARD, or DALL-E 2 would recognize that, as impressive as they are, they fall far short of what we might consider actually intelligent. In some ways, they’re like magic tricks—very remarkable ones—that are designed to impress, but they also have some amazing and potentially impactful solutions.
Last week, during the NISO Annual Meeting—which you can view a free recording of, one of the participants asked what NISO was doing or planning to do about rapid growth in the use of AI tools in information creation, discovery, and reuse. There are a variety of ideas circulating about how AI tools can be integrated into communications systems, from assisting people to read, to tagging images for accessibility purposes, to simplifying note taking and summarization. Even within our own work, we’ve begun utilizing some of these tools for working groups and our own meetings, most of which take place online and are therefore easily converted to ingestible and processible form. What more can we collectively do, and how can we use these tools for improving access and distribution of content, which is NISO’s mission? Well, that needs to be a larger public conversation. Almost as the question was being asked during our meeting, Jason Griffey, NISO’s Director of Strategic Initiatives and organizer of NISO Plus programs, began talking about our next in-person event.
This fall, we’ll be hosting our second NISO Plus Forum in Washington, DC. The title of this year’s event will be AI & Machine Learning in Scholarly Publishing: Services, Data, and Ethics. We’re planning the Forum to focus specifically on the applications, the role of our community’s distributed content, and the ethical implications that are directly related to our community. Like all NISO Plus programs, the goal is to focus on practical ideas, which can then become projects that may then become solutions, which can ultimately be implemented to effect change. The Forum is structured as a group conversation centered around those three topics, in which participants will engage with each other, in several rounds of discussion, on the implications of these topics for our community. Eventually, the attendees will proceed to sharing and vetting those ideas. Ultimately, these ideas will be formulated into sessions for the next annual conference, which will take place in person in February 2024, in Baltimore. As one attendee described the Forum last year, “The format was conducive to vibrant and engaged conversation and provided an excellent opportunity to network.” Registration for the Forum has opened, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all in October!
While we’re busy preparing for the fall and beyond as we begin making 2024 plans, it’s also important for one’s mental health to take a break. In recent years, it has been my custom to share my reading plans for the summer. On my list of to-reads this summer are:
- Tracers in the Dark, by Andy Greenberg, about how the FBI and government agencies have used blockchain tracking to trace criminal behavior online
- A Place for Everything, by Judith Flanders, on the history of how we came to use alphabetical order for things of all sorts
- Spies, Lies and Algorithms, by Amy Zegert, about the history of American intelligence services, such as the NSA and the CIA, and how these services will be developing in our digital futureAnd finally, The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, for some fiction (not my go-to book choice), at the suggestion of a colleague—a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel about how society impacted by climate change works to address those challenges
I hope that you’re all able to enjoy some warm weather (in the Northern Hemisphere!) and reading time and that you have some time to relax and rejuvenate. In between our breaks, we’ll be busy getting things ready for an amazing fall. Look out next month as we start to roll out information about the many things we’re putting in place. Until then, enjoy a bit of unfettered access to the content that best suits your interests, because standards helped to put that content in your hands!
Sincerely,
Todd A. Carpenter
Executive Director
