LIBRARIES HAVE BEEN building and cultivating collections of trustworthy print publications to fulfill their function as reliable storage facilities for centuries. The scope and selectivity of the collection were always criteria for the library's rank. Collection development has typically been regarded as the noblest task of the academic librarian. Today, digital publications are ubiquitously available. Funding agencies consider the continued collection of printed materials by libraries to be problematic, because there is no guarantee that there will be a future demand for them. From this perspective, it seems reasonable for libraries to care only about information and texts in electronic/digital format as currently needed by their users. In this essay I argue that library collections, which are a combination of printed books, other media, and digital resources, still add great value to research. Every single library, however, can fulfill its task only within a network of other libraries.

There is no other institution for which the question of collecting is so existentially important as it is for libraries. Government archives receive their material more or less automatically through the administrative activity of the institution to which they belong. The reason for most museums’ existence is similar: to add original objects to their holdings and to develop them into unique collections. For them, digital media are only the means to an end, to improve users’ access to those objects. Academic libraries predominately deal with non-unique objects that are accessible from many different places. Thus it remains completely open as to whether or not libraries should develop their own collections for the future. At any given moment in the here and now, thousands of decisions for or against collections are being made that will be pivotal for the future of libraries, their function, and appearance.

Collecting in Anticipation of Demand versus Just-in-Time-Delivery

Funding agencies complain the loudest about the alleged “waste” of money by libraries. Financial experts accuse libraries of purchasing sources for an uncertain demand without being able to promise that they will ever be read. They ask if libraries could not acquire just the publications that are currently necessary for teaching and research purposes.

This chapter explains what corporate surveillance is, describes the corporate surveillance ecosystem and its evolution, and analyzes the human rights risks associated with corporate surveillance. The chapter also motivates the need for transparency and accountability in the modern ecosystem of big technology companies.

This chapter explains how the collected data can be processed with the aim of extracting meaningful measures, and how statistical analysis can be used to support significant conclusions. This chapter first introduces common quantitative measures for transparency research, including measures for tracking, privacy, fairness, and similarity. To compute most of these measures, data need to be preprocessed to extract the response variables of interest from the raw collected data, for example using simple transformations or heuristics, machine learning classifiers or natural language processing, or static and dynamic analysis methods for mobile apps. Finally, the chapter explains statistical methods that allow to make meaningful and statistically significant statements about the behavior of the response variables in the experiment.

This chapter examines the formidable challenges that remain in transparency research, not least due to the rapid evolution of technology. This chapter highlights four areas of challenges: methodological challenges that call for new methods for transparency research; open research questions related to existing systems; research questions related to new and emerging systems such as the internet of things; and challenges related to systems that are pervasively embedded into real-world systems and infrastructure, such as smart cites.

This chapter discusses results for user-facing services that show whether the services show biases towards specific groups of users, whether they comply with policies, laws, and regulations, and how they use user data in providing their services. The chapter first focuses on network-level services, such as server-side blocking and the provision of wireless internet access. Then, the chapter discusses web-based services, including privacy policies, search, social networks, and e-commerce. The chapter closes by discussing results for mobile services, such as the characteristics of app stores, third-party libraries, and apps.

This chapter explains how corporate surveillance works on a technical level: how individual users can be tracked across their use of web and mobile services, for example through stateful tracking with cookies or stateless tracking with fingerprinting; how information collected through tracking is consolidated in comprehensive user profiles; how analytics services contribute to tracking and profiling; and how advertising technology works, including ad targeting and ad sales.

This chapter explains how transparency research can lead to real-world change. After introducing impacts that are commonly realized by transparency research, the chapter systematizes types of impacts and explains a process for planning impact throughout a research project. Finally, the chapter explains, using real-world examples, how various groups of stakeholders can be engaged, including the public, policy-makers, courts, regulatory bodies, standardization bodies, non-governmental organizations, publishers, and developers.

This chapter explains how to design experiments to study black-box corporate surveillance systems. The chapter first examines the kinds of research questions that can be asked about corporate surveillance systems. Then, it describes different high-level study designs for transparency research, followed by a look at longitudinal studies and how they can be conducted. After examining the challenges that transparency researchers face in designing these experiments, the chapter focuses on input variables that are influenced and varied during an experiment, variables that are outside the experimenter's influence, and variables that are measured (response or output variables).

This chapter focuses on the inner workings of networked services – what technologies they use and how they work – which will enable a deeper understanding of the methods used for corporate surveillance. The chapter first introduces the internet protocol suite and its most important protocols, and then explains the systems and languages used to deliver web-based content and mobile content.