Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article offers an overview of the Knowledge Exchange Research Group (KERG) West African Elibrary Collaborative (WAELC) study of West African scholars' systemic restricted access to digitized scholarly databases. WAELC, an ongoing qualitative and quantitative study, explores limited accessibility to current open‐access digital repositories and platforms at some African universities. A practical output of the study is to inform the development of a sustainable institutional repository and support the development of an open‐access multimodal digital platform that will feature scholarly and creative works of global Black people. The WAELC data addresses gaps in previous research on library access and usage at African universities and critically responds to the general African Digital Divide literature. A central focus of this article is to discuss the sociocultural and historical practices and processes that shape current digital access to electronic scholarship in Africa. Foregrounded in a Black feminist autoethnographic approach, the author's research process and researcher positionality were central to developing the WAELC research project. A significant finding of this research is that the systemic inequities framing global knowledge access and production in Global South institutions are reproduced in infrastructures weakened from colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal social, political, and economic systems.

International audience ; Shadow mass-literature online libraries in Russia developed during the early Post-Soviet years. They are a phenomenon rooted in both the practice of circumventing constraints caused by state censorship, and a book production process of insufficient quality. Since the fall of the USSR, Russian legislation has aligned itself with international standards, adopting their strictest instantiation. In 2013, an "anti-piracy" legislation made "information intermediaries" responsible for illegal content, introduced an "eternal" blocking of sites, made pre-trial negotiations more difficult. Successive amendments have sought to respond to the circumvention tactics developed by shadow libraries. In this context, for a library which is not part of the book market, remaining in the legal realm means freezing its own content or becoming a self-publishing platform. Libraries that become illegal have to ensure the sustainability and growth of their collections by multiplying their dissemination means, to provide personal security to the administrators through a "safe" geographical location or strict anonymity, and to guarantee an access to their collections on the Russian Federation territory through inventive circumvention techniques. They leave the public struggle against state and industry regulation of the Internet to the digital rights advocates, and promote a particular vision of "freedom" anchored in the mastery of technical tools and in uncensored cultural practices.

International audience ; Shadow mass-literature online libraries in Russia developed during the early Post-Soviet years. They are a phenomenon rooted in both the practice of circumventing constraints caused by state censorship, and a book production process of insufficient quality. Since the fall of the USSR, Russian legislation has aligned itself with international standards, adopting their strictest instantiation. In 2013, an "anti-piracy" legislation made "information intermediaries" responsible for illegal content, introduced an "eternal" blocking of sites, made pre-trial negotiations more difficult. Successive amendments have sought to respond to the circumvention tactics developed by shadow libraries. In this context, for a library which is not part of the book market, remaining in the legal realm means freezing its own content or becoming a self-publishing platform. Libraries that become illegal have to ensure the sustainability and growth of their collections by multiplying their dissemination means, to provide personal security to the administrators through a "safe" geographical location or strict anonymity, and to guarantee an access to their collections on the Russian Federation territory through inventive circumvention techniques. They leave the public struggle against state and industry regulation of the Internet to the digital rights advocates, and promote a particular vision of "freedom" anchored in the mastery of technical tools and in uncensored cultural practices.

At present, the WTO's multilateral trading system faces the acute challenge of adapting to the digital and commercial economies' rapid evolution. The recent regional trade agreements embody the corresponding achievements of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), and the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) in facilitating the free flow of data and regulating digital barriers to trade. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has also developed several new norms for promoting free data flow and protecting personal data privacy. The new regional trade agreements fulfil the digital trade threshold, prohibit delocalization by the data center and establish organized frameworks for cross-border data flow and personal privacy protection. In the negotiations on trade services agreements, China should focus on implementing a new management structure, speeding up domestic legislation and legislative reforms, and establishing a legal framework that promotes the free flow of data, fair competition, and personal information among corporations.

There are substantial inequalities in access to and use of the Internet. These inequalities build on enduring social and economic inequalities that have themselves been rooted in previous rounds of the development of electronic technologies and have largely resisted public policies designed to remedy them. Rapid developments in the use of the Internet have great potential for commercialization and democratization, but digital inequality means that this potential is not always exploited to the advantage of the poorer sectors of the community. Recent public policies have attempted to remedy digital disadvantage, but there is little evidence that they are fundamentally transforming them. Constant innovation enables the more advantaged sectors to advance their position, while many are still excluded from compensatory attempts at catch up. An increasing body of experience suggests ideas for new approaches, but the magnitude of the challenge of eroding digital inequality should not be underestimated.

Digital technologies can be important to policy-makers and public servants, as these technologies can increase infrastructure performance and reduce environmental impacts. For example, utilizing data from sensors in sewer systems can improve their management, which in turn may result in better surface water quality. Whether such big data from sensors is utilized is, however, not only a technical issue, but also depends on different types of social and institutional conditions. Our article identifies individual, organizational, and institutional barriers at the level of sub-states that hinder the evaluation of data from sewer systems. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to compare 23 Swiss sub-states and find that two barriers at different levels can each hinder data evaluation on their own. More specifically, either a lack of vision at the individual level or a lack of resources at the organizational level hinder the evaluation of data. Findings suggest that taking into account different levels is crucial for understanding digital transformation in public organizations. ; ISSN:0032-2687 ; ISSN:1573-0891

Digital technologies can be important to policy-makers and public servants, as these technologies can increase infrastructure performance and reduce environmental impacts. For example, utilizing data from sensors in sewer systems can improve their management, which in turn may result in better surface water quality. Whether such big data from sensors is utilized is, however, not only a technical issue, but also depends on different types of social and institutional conditions. Our article identifies individual, organizational, and institutional barriers at the level of sub-states that hinder the evaluation of data from sewer systems. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to compare 23 Swiss sub-states and find that two barriers at different levels can each hinder data evaluation on their own. More specifically, either a lack of vision at the individual level or a lack of resources at the organizational level hinder the evaluation of data. Findings suggest that taking into account different levels is crucial for understanding digital transformation in public organizations.

AbstractDigital technologies can be important to policy-makers and public servants, as these technologies can increase infrastructure performance and reduce environmental impacts. For example, utilizing data from sensors in sewer systems can improve their management, which in turn may result in better surface water quality. Whether suchbig datafrom sensors is utilized is, however, not only a technical issue, but also depends on different types of social and institutional conditions. Our article identifies individual, organizational, and institutional barriers at the level of sub-states that hinder the evaluation of data from sewer systems. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to compare 23 Swiss sub-states and find that two barriers at different levels can each hinder data evaluation on their own. More specifically, either a lack of vision at the individual level or a lack of resources at the organizational level hinder the evaluation of data. Findings suggest that taking into account different levels is crucial for understanding digital transformation in public organizations.

AbstractThis article builds on existing literature on digital inequality and the digitised welfare state to elucidate one underexplored way in which the rise of e‐government platforms further disadvantages already‐marginalised people: by requiring that they possess a verifiable digital footprint distributed across multiple public and commercial platforms. We illustrate the pertinence and nuances of this particular risk through lived experience research in a UK public library where limited users receive help with digital skills. Although there is a growing recognition of both the inevitability of digital welfare and the risks to marginalised communities, little work has been done to connect these abstract policy discussions to lived experience—to pinpoint how digitisation creates these exclusions, beyond simply having internet access or not. This article argues that the prerequisite of a digital footprint engenders a double disadvantage: (1) lacking a digital footprint is the result of barriers that are largely invisible to data‐driven, digital‐by‐default systems, and (2) when marginalised users establish a sufficient footprint, this entails a disproportionately onerous responsibility for managing a distributed personal data trail in the long term. This combination of mundane barriers and the burden of responsibility for a digital identity points to policy implications for governments aiming to advance inclusive digital transformation agendas.