40 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 299 2019 information and digital literacy, Clark identifies a gap in the Association of College & Research Libraries information literacy framework revealing “a lack of an understanding around the rules that govern our software and shape our digital experiences.”28 The anticipated “Algo Report” from Project Information Literacy will present findings from a national study of college students in the US and address “how algorithms affect the information that streams at them constantly throughout the day in order to be truly information literate in the 21st century.”29 AI-Authorship: An Explainability Sandbox An interesting and instructive example of the role of XAI in research libraries arose earlier this year when Springer Nature published an open access book written by AI: Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine- Generated Summary of Current Research.30 The author, identified as “Beta Writer,” algorithmically categorized and summarized more than 150 key research publications selected from over 1,000 published from 2016 to 2018, thereby synthesizing a large and complex corpus of the current research literature. The algorithmic processes that created this book, using a combination of various “off the shelf” natural language processing (NLP) tools, included preprocessing the documents to address various linguistic and semantic normalizations clustering documents by content similarity (that is, the content in the chapters and sections of the book) generating abstracts, summaries, introductions, and conclusions and finally outputting XML as a completed manuscript. The details are outlined in a human-written preface and provide an interesting comparison to current cataloging and metadata processes and to accepted scholarly communication practices.31 Henning Just as information literacy provides users with skills and perspectives to assess resources, algorithmic literacy is an explainability strategy allowing users to navigate and utilize algorithmic tools and services.
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