Digital and Data Sovereignty: The Growing Role of Technology and the Librarian in Guarding Our Shared Truth
Podcast available on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jCPdBCcoDCQf1ZDsz9JLq and SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/epistemicast/the-growing-role-of-technologyIntroduction & Background
Supporting the theme of our sponsor’s PHAIDRAcon2026 event running at Vienna University on 28-29th October, Epistemicast is delving into the topic of digital and data sovereignty.
We look at the increasingly important role of librarians and cultural heritage professionals as guardians of an independent epistemic record. And, in grappling with such a timely and emotive topic, our discussion ranges inevitably dives into current geopolitics, tech giants, social media and social control.
With a perspective that combines the academic librarian, curator, technologist and open source evangelist, our guest on this journey is Rosalyn Metz. As Chief Technology Officer and Associate Librarian for Digital Strategies at Emory University in Atlanta, Metz’ role covers both the university library and its museums. Alongside this, she has helped drive community growth and leadership across numerous open source and open standards projects, including the Fedora Repository, Samvera, AP Trust and the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL).
Links:
Rosalyn’s Blog “The Digital Shift”: https://rosalynmetz.substack.com/
Emory Libraries: https://libraries.emory.edu/
Michael C. Carlos Museum: https://carlos.emory.edu
Fedora Repository: https://fedorarepository.org/
Oxford Common File Layout: https://ocfl.io/
Samvera: https://samvera.org/
AP Trust: https://aptrust.org/Hannah Arendt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/
https://rosalynmetz.substack.com/p/a-shared-realityWelcome to Epistemicast
Rory: Welcome to Epistemicast. In this edition, we’re continuing our exploration of digital and data sovereignty as we hone in our focus more specifically onto its impact on academic and cultural heritage institutions and the role of the librarian. Joining us for today’s discussion is Rosalyn Metz, Chief Technology Officer and Associate Librarian for Digital Strategies at Emory University in Atlanta, covering both the university library and its museums. Alongside this, Rosalyn is also an active member of a number of open source communities in the space, including Fedora, Samvera, AP Trust, and OCFL (the Oxford Common File Layout, which we explored in one of our recent episodes with Neil Jeff). Thank you for joining us.
Rosalyn: No problem.
Rory: So I was going to say that alongside your roles at Emory and with the various organisations, you’re also an author of a highly recommended Substack called The Digital Shift.
“I started that Substack just because I felt like I had a lot of ideas and I didn’t have anywhere to put them… I’m definitely a talker, not a writer.”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn: I started that Substack just because I felt like I had a lot of ideas and I didn’t have anywhere to put them. I’m not big into actually writing things. And one of the things that I’ve appreciated about technology advancing is I can actually speak more to technology. I’m definitely a talker, not a writer.
Rosalyn Metz’s Career Journey from Systems Admin to CTO
Rory: Yeah, I think some incredibly thought-provoking and insightful discussions around what it means to be both a librarian and a technologist in today’s world is what leapt out at me, which is really relevant to our audience and captures some of the essence and big questions of why many of our listeners do what they do. So given that, I think it might be interesting to find out a little bit about what was your lead into your current role, what motivates you, and where you draw your energy and obvious passion that comes through in your Substack.
Rosalyn: Yeah. So, I’ve worked in a variety of different roles and many of them I was the first person in those roles. Early on, I worked at Ex Libris, and part of the reason I took that job was because I knew in a company I would be able to get a crash course in technology that you can’t get all the time in other environments—especially as a woman in technology. We’re not always trusted in the same way, but in a company role it’s like, “Go fast, try to do as fast as you can”.
From there, I actually ended up being a systems administrator, so I learned enough to go on and do systems administration, and that was the very first time that I got involved in open source. I ran the college that I worked for’s instance of Moodle. Because it was a small liberal arts college in the US, we would collaborate with other small liberal arts colleges on Moodle—creating modules together, updating applications together—and I just really enjoyed the camaraderie of that experience.
I actually got divorced—I married and divorced really quickly—and just wanted to move, so I ended up moving to Washington DC. I worked for a web consulting firm for about a year as a project manager and learned a lot about how to organise projects. I then took that and started doing that same work at GW [George Washington University] in Washington DC in their libraries, and then ended up at Stanford because I was on soft money and knew I had to start looking for another job.
I went out to Stanford and fell in love with two of my co-workers there; I just thought they were the most brilliant people. Somebody that I had worked with in small liberal arts colleges was also going there at the same time, so I moved to California. I worked on their repository for three years. That’s actually how I ended up in the OCFL editors group—one of the precursors to OCFL was a standard known as Moab that was created by Richard Anderson at Stanford. I got to work with Richard for a couple of years and was probably the person who knew the most about Moab after Richard. So when we started up OCFL, “the boys” (as I like to call them, because they’re all guys and then there’s me) were like, “Rosie, will you come hang out with us?” and I was like, “Sure”. So I tried to bring that more practical side to OCFL.
One of the things I really liked about Stanford was all the opportunities it gives you—so much to be able to get involved with and do. I really appreciate Tom Kramer for throwing things at me to see what I would do with them.
Digital Sovereignty & Institutional Values
Preserving Knowledge for the Long Haul
Rory: There are many topics we could discuss having spent the last couple of days going through your Substack, but I want to try and focus today’s discussion onto data sovereignty and digital sovereignty. You put here, “Our values are visible in the infrastructure that we design”. How do you think that applies to infrastructure that is designed by academia for academia versus the sort of tech giants that we see dominating infrastructure and providing free infrastructure to universities as alternatives to having their own sovereign infrastructure?
“When we are thinking about building infrastructure for ourselves, we are often going much slower because we recognize that we’re here to preserve for the long haul… We’re thinking about not just today and how we can make the most money, but how can we make sure that society continues on in perpetuity.”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn: So I would say when we are thinking about building infrastructure for ourselves, we are often going much slower because we recognize—especially in libraries or cultural heritage institutions—we’re thinking about, “Okay, we’re here to preserve for the long haul”. That’s one of the things that makes governments and academia very different: we’re thinking not just about today and how we can make the most money, but how can we make sure that society continues on in perpetuity.
We often will think about different cultures and what it is that they need because we’re taking in the content of different cultures. Even though we may be at a national library taking in content for a majority white population, you still need to think about indigenous groups and how they tell their stories. At my institution, we have a lot of Black or African-American collections. The Black experience in the US is radically different than it is in Europe or Africa, and so much of that is understanding their history and how they got to where they are. When taking in those collections, we want to make sure that we describe them in a way that honors their history. Sometimes that means going a little bit slower so that we can create infrastructure that will manifest that history for communities who can’t manifest that history anymore for themselves.
The Danger of Corporate Dominance Over the Epistemic Record
Rory: What would the danger be of that being provided through Google Scholar or corporate influence? When we’re talking about the epistemic record, we’re talking about our definition of truth for humanity and society. Is there something within that that should be kept to librarians and shouldn’t be entrusted to a corporate entity that’s answerable to shareholders?
“When a venture capitalist goes out and buys a company… they’re in it for the data. The worry about handing things over to a corporation is, of course, they don’t really actually have society’s best interest at heart.”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn: Yeah, it is something that I’ve worried about in our technology space. When a venture capitalist goes out and buys a company, I think, “Well, what do you see value in in the data that they’re collecting?” They’re in it for the data. It’s one of the things that is interesting about companies like Elsevier and Wiley too: they are very explicit that they are in this for the data, to understand how people use data and predict where scientific query and discovery is going so they can sell that to make more money.
The worry about handing things over to a corporation is, of course, they don’t really actually have society’s best interest at heart; that’s not their goal. In Jimmy Wales’s book The Seven Rules of Trust, he talks about how you have to be good at something and then be good at that thing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a giant conglomeration, and it cares about things that impact being an encyclopedia. For many of these companies, they care about what gives them more money because that’s why they’re in it. They are not necessarily in it for providing all of the world’s information to humanity.
Rory: You have to be cautious not to stray into conspiracy theory, but executives of a corporation are legally charged with maximizing profits—not with anything else.
Rosalyn: Right.
Rory: When we’re talking about access to knowledge and data, there’s an obvious ability to limit access to knowledge, restrict supply, and charge more money. This reaches into the realms of Neal Stephenson and science fiction, but things are moving in that direction.
Feudalism in Tech & Knowledge Suppression
Corporate Data Monopolies and AI Scenario Planning
Rosalyn: I was part of an ARL [Association of Research Libraries] and CNI initiative on AI where we did scenario planning. We did an exercise mapping where we saw society going on an X and Y axis, and I ended up in the group that saw us heading back into a feudalist society.
“What will likely happen is you will have these big companies who will hold the knowledge, they will give the knowledge to their people, and they won’t share the knowledge with other factions. Everything that we have and do is in service of those big corporations.”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn (continued): In that scenario, big companies hold the knowledge, give it to their people, and refrain from sharing it with other factions. Everything we do is in service of those big corporations, which might eventually have their own universities or K-12 systems.
The Historical Precedent of Technology Suppression
Rosalyn: In reading The Technology Trap by Carl Frey, he talks about how prior to the Industrial Revolution, kings and queens would often suppress technology because it wasn’t in their best interest as landholders. Allowing technology might cause fear among their vassals, so by suppressing technology, they kept citizens in their existing roles.
My worry about these tech companies is that if we are headed in that direction, they will start to suppress knowledge. We already see them doing that through social media algorithms, which are a form of AI.
Rory: Looking at the long-term preservation timelines over which librarians operate, our stable post-war democracy is a tiny fraction of time. So thinking about these risks isn’t conspiratorial; it’s looking at long-term historical trajectories.
Rosalyn: Oh, yeah.
Protecting the Epistemic Record & Shared Reality
Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
Rory: Is the role of the modern librarian increasingly about sovereign technology and protecting sovereign data away from corporate manipulation to preserve a shared reality?
“If we can’t pull from that same pool of meaning, then we can’t make decisions in a way that allows us to create the best of all possible worlds… Librarians preserve what exists so that the future is able to say, ‘Let’s not make these mistakes again.'”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn: I first encountered Hannah Arendt taking a class on evil in college. She wrote extensively about the banality of evil during the post-Holocaust trials—how people turned benign to what was happening in a slow roll, believing they were protecting people when they weren’t. Later in her career, she realized how much depends on a shared reality. If we can pull from the same pool of meaning, we can make decisions that allow us to create the best possible world.
For librarians, it is increasingly about preserving what exists in the world so that future generations can make better choices. For example, when the US ended slavery, it didn’t confront it properly, whereas South Africa engaged in Truth and Reconciliation to confront what happened so as not to replicate systemic racism. Cultural heritage preservation allows us to learn from history.
Information Warfare, Social Media & Algorithms
Vladislav Surkov and the Breakdown of Shared Reality
Rory: This connects directly to an Atlantic article about Vladislav Surkov, the chief political adviser to Vladimir Putin. Surkov drew from the St. Petersburg avant-garde art movement, where a conceptual art piece involved inviting someone to a party where everyone else was in on a scheme to bombard them with strange, inconsistent occurrences. Eventually, their concept of reality broke down, allowing their moral compass to be dismantled. Surkov realized that with modern social media, you can apply this psychological disorientation at a societal level.
Rosalyn: Yes, you can.
Rory: You hit people with endless absurdity and outrage until they throw up their hands and say, “I just don’t watch the news anymore”.
Rosalyn: I am one of those people! I found that article, The Hidden Author of Putinism, and I’m doing everything I can as an American to protect myself from the distorted reality being pushed, just to keep myself sane.
Rory: It makes you question whether it’s an intentional effort to create a surreality.
“By storing knowledge, you’re trying to counteract that version of reality that other people are creating… If we don’t have that shared reality, they can manipulate us to do whatever it is that they want us to do.”
~Rosalyn Metz
Rosalyn: By storing knowledge, librarians actively counteract fabricated realities. When funding for higher education is threatened, it causes panic and instability, which stays with people. That is what Hannah Arendt meant: without a shared reality, institutions and individuals can be manipulated into doing whatever leaders want.
Reimagining the Role of the Modern Librarian
Moving Beyond Books to Critical Information Stewardship
Rory: The role of the librarian today isn’t about stamping books at a desk.
Rosalyn: No! My daughter once told me that a librarian does three things: talk smack, complain, and recommend good books. She said, “You don’t recommend books to people, so I don’t understand how you got your job!” But book recommendation is usually the last thing librarians do. In public libraries, most of the work is akin to social work—helping people navigate government forms, find legal aid, and access the internet.
Counteracting Recommendation Engines and Knowledge Ghettos
Rory: In fact, the role of the librarian is almost the opposite.
“The role of the librarian today within society is to give people the ability to find things away from something that’s profiling them and pushing them further into a knowledge ghetto where they’re surrounded by manipulation.”
~Rory MacDonald
Rory (continued): Google and Amazon are experts at recommendation engines, pushing users into algorithmic ghettos to maximize ad revenue and engagement. The modern librarian provides a path to discover information free from algorithmic profiling and manipulation.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Intentionality in Information Consumption
Rosalyn: I see this manipulation happening on both sides of the political spectrum. People fail to realize when their information sources, social media feeds, and recommendation algorithms are manipulating their view of history and reality. If you are not intentional about where you choose to get your information, you are receiving information that has been filtered or manipulated.
Rory: That brings us to the end of Part 1 of our discussion with Rosalyn Metz. In our next edition, we will examine Rosalyn’s views on the limits of openness. Thanks to Rosalyn for a brilliant discussion, and thank you all for tuning in. All links are available on the Epistemicast website.
Transcript published by Epistemicast and generated by NotebookLM.
