From initiating study of the economics of the Internet and online behavior, to championing open access and new library technologies, Jeff MacKie-Mason’s career is a testament to the power of information and how far it’s come in recent years.
MacKie-Mason’s journey in the field of information sciences first began as a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, where he served as one of the founding faculty members of their School of Information. In 2010, he became its dean and remained in that position until he was hired as UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Scholarship Officer in 2015. At the same time, he was appointed a professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Economics.
“I’m really grateful for how much the School of Information community welcomed me and made me feel part of the community. Everyone made me feel at home, took me seriously as a member of the faculty, and I really appreciated…having a home here,” he said.
According to Marti Hearst, “Jeff was enormously helpful as an advisor to me in my roles as Head of School and Interim Dean, and he played a key role in the success of the I School and in retaining its independence. He has also been a consistent expert voice in matters pertaining to information economics as well as an outstanding steward of Berkeley libraries.”
A standout accomplishment in MacKie-Mason’s role as University Librarian was his successful negotiations for open access to academic publications leading to a series of transformative open access agreements.
Scholars at UC Berkeley, and around the world, publish their work in academic journals and conference proceedings. Most of the cost of research comes from public funding, however, access to the published papers is often costly due to large fees charged by the publishers. While this is a long-standing issue, those costs continued to rise while MacKie-Mason was University Librarian. Thus, as co-chair of UC’s publisher negotiation team, MacKie-Mason took a resolute stand and advocated for open access to such work, brokering a series of open access publishing deals for the UC system and, most importantly, for the public, which largely cannot afford the hefty price of scientific journal subscriptions.
“Once information is produced in digital form, the cost of making copies and providing access is essentially zero,” he said. “The more people who have access to [scholarly] discoveries, the better the world is going to be… public citizens pay to create the research that’s for the benefit of everybody, but then even though it’s on a server where it doesn’t cost anything to distribute it, we make them pay to read it.”
Since then, he has successfully made more than fifty percent of the articles produced by University of California scholars eligible for open access publication. He expects that number to rise to seventy percent in the next couple of years.
“I’m really grateful for how much the School of Information community welcomed me and made me feel part of the community. Everyone made me feel at home, took me seriously as a member of the faculty, and I really appreciated…having a home here.”
In addition to his work with open scholarship, the Library under MacKie-Mason has begun working to utilize artificial intelligence to help transcribe and organize archival materials in the Library. For example, the Bancroft Library recently wrapped up a project with I School Master of Information and Data Science alums that involved using custom machine learning models to extract data from handwritten Japanese-American confinement records. “We’re finding applications like that that are enabling us to make information more available and more findable all the time, which is exactly what the library is all about,” he added.
Another exciting recent project was a collaboration with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and Sichuan University to develop optical character recognition (OCR) for old Chinese manuscripts. With the help of AI, this will make it easier to recognize handwritten characters and digitize them to allow for algorithmic searching.
Alongside these accomplishments, MacKie-Mason has drawn attention in his research, teaching and Library leadership to a growing problem that threatens the future of information use: the rise of mis- and disinformation. New technologies have enabled bad actors to maliciously mislead audiences, whether with false “news” or with doctored texts, photos, and videos.
As a result, the Library is stepping up to help filter out the bad from the good. “The mission statement for this library is that we help users find, evaluate, use, and create knowledge; evaluation is a crucially important and growing function,” MacKie-Mason noted. “We really need courses in information literacy, and we need skills and technologies and practices that greatly improve our critical thinking about information, so we know whether we can believe what we’re reading or not.”
Now that he’s retired, he is looking forward to spending time with his three grandchildren and practicing piano. “I’m going to miss the library and the university. I spent my entire life in school basically, so it’s going to be a big change. I will still be a student, but I won’t be producing as an academic,” he said.
Currently, MacKie-Mason is learning to play Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata, a few of Mozart’s piano-violin duets, Gershwin, and Bach; he will be posting his efforts on his SoundCloud account.
