UC Berkeley Library

This is a poster presented by Timothy Vollmer and Kendra K. Levine from UC Berkeley Library at the 2025 American Library Association Annual Conference. 

Librarians at the University of California, one of the largest public university systems, recently completed a year-long negotiation process to reach a new labor contract.

The poster presents central bargaining issues, data, and member stories that: 

(1) Highlights our negotiation strategies and tactics on key issues, including salary, professional development funding, academic status, flexible work arrangements, and workload. This includes conducting background research, collecting data through librarian surveys and requests for information, developing our table bargaining approach, and more.  

(2) Describes our systemwide and campus organizing actions we used to build power amongst the librarian ranks and our allies. This includes 1:1 conversations, information sharing through email and social media, soliciting member input through online town halls, and more. 

(3) Summarizes our key takeaways (both positive and negative) from the now-completed campaign, and what we hope to change for the next negotiation.

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining - Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”) is a National Endowment for the Humanities Level 1 Advancement Grant project addressing legal and ethical issues faced by U.S. digital humanities (DH) practitioners whose text data mining (TDM) research and practice intersects with foreign-held or - licensed content, or involves international cooperations.

LLTDM-X is a collaboration between the University of California Berkeley Library and Internet Archive, and builds upon the previous NEH-sponsored institute, Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM). That institute provided guidance and strategies to DH TDM researchers on navigating legal literacies for text data mining (including copyright, contracts, privacy, and ethics) within a U.S. context.

A common challenge highlighted during Building LLTDM was the fact that TDM practitioners encounter numerous and complex legal problems in cross-border TDM research. These occur when: (i) the materials practitioners want to mine are housed in a foreign jurisdiction, or are otherwise subject to foreign database licensing or laws; (ii) the human subjects they are studying or who created the underlying content reside in another country; or, (iii) the colleagues with whom they are collaborating reside abroad, yielding uncertainty about which country’s laws, agreements, and policies apply.

We designed LLTDM-X to identify and better understand the cross-border issues that DH TDM practitioners face, with the aim of using these issues to inform prospective research and education. We also hoped that LLTDM-X would yield preliminary guidance to benefit researchers in the meantime, as instructional materials are being developed. In early 2023, we hosted a series of three online round tables with U.S.-based cross-border TDM practitioners (“Practitioners”), and law and ethics experts (“Experts”) practicing in six countries. The round table conversations were structured to illustrate the empirical issues that researchers face, and also for the Practitioners to benefit from guidance on legal and ethical challenges. Upon the completion of the round tables, the LLTDM-X project team created a robust and hypothetical case study that (i) reflects the observed cross-border LLTDM issues and (ii) contains analysis to facilitate the development of future instructional materials.

Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining - Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”) is a National Endowment for the Humanities Level 1 Advancement Grant project addressing legal and ethical issues faced by U.S. digital humanities (DH) practitioners whose text data mining (TDM) research and practice intersects with foreign-held or - licensed content, or involves international cooperations.

LLTDM-X ​​is a collaboration between the University of California Berkeley Library and Internet Archive, and builds upon the previous NEH-sponsored institute, Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM). That institute provided guidance and strategies to DH TDM researchers on navigating legal literacies for text data mining (including copyright, contracts, privacy, and ethics) within a U.S. context.

A common challenge highlighted during Building LLTDM was the fact that TDM practitioners encounter numerous and complex legal problems in cross-border TDM research. These occur when: (i) the materials practitioners want to mine are housed in a foreign jurisdiction, or are otherwise subject to foreign database licensing or laws; (ii) the human subjects they are studying or who created the underlying content reside in another country; or, (iii) the colleagues with whom they are collaborating reside abroad, yielding uncertainty about which country’s laws, agreements, and policies apply.

We designed LLTDM-X to identify and better understand the cross-border issues that DH TDM practitioners face, with the aim of using these issues to inform prospective research and education. We also hoped that LLTDM-X would yield preliminary guidance to benefit researchers in the meantime, as instructional materials are being developed. In early 2023, we hosted a series of three online round tables with U.S.-based cross-border TDM practitioners (“Practitioners”), and law and ethics experts (“Experts”) practicing in six countries. The round table conversations were structured to illustrate the empirical issues that researchers face, and also for the Practitioners to benefit from guidance on legal and ethical challenges. Upon the completion of the round tables, the LLTDM-X project team created a robust and hypothetical case study that (i) reflects the observed cross-border LLTDM issues and (ii) contains analysis to facilitate the development of future instructional materials.

Dr. Liladhar Pendse presented this paper at the 10th ICCEES World Congress 3–8 August 2021, Concordia University – Montreal. 

In the aftermath of the Presidential elections, the UC Berkeley Library's curator for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies created a web archive of Belarus Protests (2020-2021) to document contemporary dissent and protest movements against the autocratic rule of President Lukashenko. This paper provides information about the process management, selection criteria for the websites, and the project outcomes.

It will be almost a year since the Presidential elections in Belarus; they took place last year on August 9, 2020. And the outcome of these elections did not surprise anyone when the Central Elections Commission of Belarus declared that the incumbent President Lukashenko was yet again elected with approximately 80% of votes cast. However, one can see that 20% of the votes cast and counted or counterfeited or undercounted meant there was an underlying level of dissent in the country. The ensuing persistent popular demonstrations that continued although the police actions of OMON (Атрад міліцыі асобага прызначэння) and the use of social media by multiple individuals represented an opportunity to harvest robust and granular archival data related to social protest moment in Belarus. Thus the idea of the web-archiving project took hold at UC Berkeley. At the same time, one can contest the ephemeral nature of digitally born content or even argue the need for documenting and preserving multiple views as expressed in the popular media of Belarus, the importance of preservation and representing the diverse voice in Belarus.

UC Berkeley Library secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities to help key stakeholders to learn to better navigate legal issues in text data mining. UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services led a national team from more than a dozen institutions and organizations to teach humanities researchers, librarians, and research staff how to confidently navigate the major legal issues that arise in text data mining research. 

Our institute was called Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM), and ran from June 23-26, 2020.

This white paper describes the institute’s origins and goals, project overview and activities, and reflections and possible follow-on actions.

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (CASE Act) was swept into law during the final days of 2020 as a part of the 5,500 page federal spending bill. In theory, the CASE Act aims to provide a venue for individual creators (such as photographers, graphic artists, musicians) to address smaller copyright infringement claims without spending the time and money required to pursue a copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal court. In reality, however, this additional bureaucratic structure created outside of the traditional court system is fraught with problems that will mostly incentivize large, well-resourced rightsholders or overly litigious copyright owners to take advantage of the system. At the same time, it will confuse and harm innocuous users of content, who may not understand the complexities of copyright law, and who do not know whether or how to respond to a notice of infringement via this small claims process. From our perspective, it will chill users who rely on crucial statutory exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, in their research and teaching activities.