Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our research project Pro OAR DE investigates current challenges in operating institutional repositories (IR) in Germany. Since completing our initial research phase—which included a systematic review and an interview study with IR managers at academic institutions—we have organized four networking forums since November 2024.

In April, two members of our research group were featured in interviews: Dorothea Strecker, who has been studying shadow libraries for many years, was interviewed by the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen (Stormyren Larsen and Ugelstad Aas 2025). The interview was prompted by the investigation “The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem” published in The Atlantic (Reisner 2025). Heinz Pampel was interviewed for the @mediasres program

The commonmeta Go library has seen a major update this week that dramatically simplifies working with the Research Organization Registry (ROR) data dump, including conversion to other serialization formats (e.g. JSON Lines) and metadata formats (InvenioRDM), and integrated affiliation matching.File Download ROR metadata are updated regularly (typically about once a month) and made available as a file download via the Zenodo repository under a

por Cristina Sacristán Andrés Ríos Molina, Breve historia de la locura y la psiquiatría en México, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2024.

Puzzles to solve, but how? It keeps occupying my mind. This has to do with finding the right mix of the public values that are connected to justice, humanity and autonomy, and the “neutral” position of the library (or not?). I have now attended three of the six afternoons that form part of the SURF Course on Digital Sovereignty (for Executives in the field of education & research). And would like to make up my mind as a mid-term activity.

This site is running in 11ty and is built locally, after which the live site (which gets built into the _site folder) is pushed to my Reclaim Hosting account, where it's served up as kfitz.info. As an intermediate step, I have been pushing the code and content that builds the site to a GitHub repository, and then the _site folder to another GitHub repository, kfitz-site, mostly for preservation/backup purposes;

Introdução A falência de uma instituição financeira não é, em geral, o produto de um único erro ou de uma circunstância isolada. Trata-se, quase sempre, do acúmulo dinâmico de vulnerabilidades, decisões arriscadas e pressões contextuais que se inter-relacionam ao longo do tempo. No caso do Banco Master, a liquidação extrajudicial anunciada em 2024 não pode ser explicada por um fator único.

This is the Second installment in the Appalachian History series, which delves into the rich, complex past of the Appalachian region—exploring the people, events, and forces that have shaped its identity over generations. On a sweltering July dawn in 1973, the sleepy hamlet of Brookside woke to the rumble of coal trucks and the sight of cardboard signs nailed to wooden

This is the first installment in the Appalachian History series, which delves into the rich, complex past of the Appalachian region—exploring the people, events, and forces that have shaped its identity over generations. On a gray Tuesday morning—May 5, 1931—a handful of laid‑off coal miners shouldered rifles along the Poor Fork Road just east of Evarts, Kentucky.

This is the third weekend I am working on Scholia, the first two part of the April 2025 hackathon. It follows the hackathons last year October and November hackathons. There is some urgency for this unpaid work, because Wikidata is splitting the RDF into two SPARQL endpoints (see this The Signpost and this post by Finn). This split has happened, but there is a legacy server for tools that have not been upgraded.

This post describes an issue I’ve had with writing correct types when using PEP-696 defaults in typing.TypeVar. I posted the exploration in a companion repository on GitHub. The motivation behind this comes from my work in biomedical data integration and the semantic web.