SCN – Page 2 – OER + ScholComm

March 8, 2023

Happy Open Education Week from the SCN Team!

It’s Open Education Week, which is a great chance to highlight the Open Education Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN). If you’re new to the SCN, welcome! Here’s some background about the SCN and its relationship with an open book to be published later this year by ACRL; that book also includes a section on open education with some of the smartest contributors in the landscape.

It’s also International Women’s Day, so take a moment and reflect on the leadership of women around the world who’ve contributed to the growth of open education and every other aspect of our lives. We can think of numerous women who inspire us daily, many of whom we’re lucky enough to have worked with. Thank you.

If you’re new to open education, it’s your lucky day, or week, as there are lots of opportunities to learn about open educational resources (OER) and related practices, including in the SCN. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) describes open education as encompassing “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.” The resources SPARC refers to are often called open educational resources, or OER. Creative Commons defines OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”

In the SCN, you’ll find an Open Education Collection that includes lots of general and specific resources about open education, some foundational and others that explore more advanced issues. These resources are themselves open, so they’re OER about open education. Some of these projects were created with the direct support of the SCN, like “OER for LIS: Toolkit for Building and OER Librarian Course” by Steven Bell, “Trans Inclusion in OER” by Stephen Krueger and Kat Klement, and “OER Community of Learning” by the Scholarly Communication Team at Texas State University Libraries. Others have been added by our wonderful friend and colleague, Regina Gong, who is a widely, nay, universally respected leader in open education. As the Curator for the Open Education Collection in the SCN, Regina scanned the landscape to identify open content that is useful for teaching and learning about OER and open educational practices. She built the collection to nearly 50 resources (at time of publication) that LIS instructors, students, librarians, and allies in other roles might use to learn more about open education and how they can advance it. Regina has built a great collection that we’re confident will continue to grow. If you know of something that isn’t there but should be, here are instructions for adding content to the SCN.

We hope you’ll take this week as an opportunity to learn something about open education and to celebrate the impact it has had and continues to have! In a few weeks, the SCN team is convening in Inverness, Scotland for OER23, where we’re presenting on our work (session: More than a Textbook: Librarianship as a Case Study for Building a Community and Opening Up A Discipline; full program). We’re excited to see friends and make new ones!

February 22, 2023

Happy Fair Use Week! Check out the Copyright and Fair Use Resources in the SCN

Happy Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week! Fair use is an essential tool enabling creativity and scholarship. We build on the works of others when we create something new and without fair use, much of that creativity would be stifled due to the inability to afford licensing fees, inability to determine the correct copyright owner (in the case of orphan works), or, in some cases, when the copyright owner simply refuses to grant permission (wherein fair use is still justified, thankfully). This is not just any Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week . . . this is the 10^th Anniversary of the celebration of Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week! This is the perfect time to highlight the Copyright Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. And who better to tell you about the collection than Sara Benson, Associate Professor and Copyright Librarian at the University of Illinois Library, who curated the collection of open access works about copyright in the collection.

The task was no small one: to gather relevant openly licensed works about copyright that would be relevant to library and information science students and professionals. While this sounds easy enough, there are not as many truly open access works as I would have liked (works with an open license in addition to being paywall free) and some of the works are aimed at K-12 audiences while others are aimed more at law school students.

I think I managed to find a good balance of works, including these open access fair use resources:

The Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries by the ARL
Fair Use Video by Sara Benson
A Framework for Analyzing any U.S. Copyright Problem by Lisa Macklin and Kevin Smith
Copyright X by Harvard Professor William Fischer

One of my favorite copyright tools of all time, though, and not to be missed, is affectionately called the Peter Hirtle “copyright chart” or, officially named: the Copyright Term and the Public Domain Chart. This tool is essential to my daily work as a copyright librarian. Whenever I have a question about an older book, I look at this chart to help me determine whether it is still in copyright. Published in 1945? Missing a copyright notice? It’s in the public domain! Related hat tip to the great work librarians are doing at NYPL, who recently found that up to 75% of books published before 1964 may be in the public domain due to formalities required at the time (VICE coverage by Claire Woodcock).

I encourage you to check out the many open resources about copyright included in the SCN collection. If you’re the creator of something that belongs here, or you’re aware of a resource that could be included, we’d love to know! If you’re interested in adding it yourself, here are detailed instructions. And, exercise your right to fair use!

February 17, 2023February 17, 2023

New to the SCN: Finding Balance

This is the latest post in a series announcing resources created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholcomm topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019, permitting us to pay creators for their labor while building a solid initial collection. These works are the result of one of three calls for proposals (our first CFP was issued in fall 2020; the second in late spring ‘21, and the third in late fall 2021).

Today we’re excited to share “Finding Balance: Collaborative Workflows for Risk Management in Sharing Cultural Heritage Collections Online” (available through Pressbooks and via OER Commons). This work was created by Carrie Hintz, Melanie T. Kowalski, Sarah Quigley, and Jody Bailey. Digitizing material is core work for many cultural heritage organizations, but navigating the rights issues can be a challenge. This team uses their experience at Emory to help the rest of us balance risk with reward to best support users and collections. Here they are to introduce Finding Balance:

Digitizing archives, special collections, and other rare and unique historical documents so they can be shared online is mission-critical work for most cultural heritage institutions. In particular, those with an educational or research mission want to provide open and equitable access to their collections to all users, not just those who can afford to travel across the globe to perform research in person. While most institutions share the goal of digitizing and disseminating the unique resources in our collections, traditional digitization workflows limit our ability to do large-scale digitization. Selecting, imaging, describing, and assessing rights for digitized content can be enormously resource-intensive and time-consuming. Rights clearance work, in particular, is highly labor-intensive, requires specialized knowledge, may require significant research, and has traditionally been conducted at an object level.

In this open educational resource, we offer guidance for creating scalable, cross-functional workflows using a risk-management approach that increases efficiency and distributes responsibility for rights assessment work more equitably across stakeholders. It includes advice for navigating knowledge gaps, building an engaged team with the right skillsets, reimagining workflows, and rethinking traditional archival processing work to build capacity for rights analysis during arrangement and description. The tools and insight in this resource are intended to help organizations make thoughtful, informed decisions about how to implement risk-analysis frameworks and workflows to perform rights analysis at scale. Our ultimate goal is that these tools will help maximize the amount of material we can make available online while working within our institutions’ risk-comfort zones. We hope this OER will prove useful to library and information science students who are interested in working as scholarly communications specialists or archivists after they finish their studies. We also hope that library and archives professional practitioners will find this book to be a rich resource for continuing education.

About the Authors:

Carrie Hintz

is the associate director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University Libraries where she provides vision and leadership for all aspects of library operations, including archival processing, digital collection management, and research and engagement activities. She has led special collections technical services programs at Emory University’s Rose Library and Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3040-2145)

Melanie T. Kowalski was the copyright and scholarly communications librarian for Emory University Libraries from 2013–2022. In this role, she was primarily responsible for copyright outreach, education, and consultation with faculty and students. Additionally, she was responsible for copyright consultation and analysis for digitization and managing rights metadata within the Libraries. In February 2022, Melanie moved on to a new role as the open knowledge licensing coordinator for the Center for Research Libraries, where she is working to operationalize an open knowledge strategy for licensing library content and serves as the primary resource for copyright information policy. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-9410)

Sarah Quigley was the head of collection processing at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University Libraries from 2019–2022. Prior to this, she was a manuscript archivist at the Rose from 2011–2019 and came to this project with significant experience processing collections and providing strategic oversight of the library’s processing program. In July 2022, Sarah became director of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Libraries where she provides vision and leadership for the division, including collection development, digital collections, public services, and technical services departments. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7186-6483)

Jody Bailey is the head of the Scholarly Communications Office at Emory University Libraries and leads a team of librarians and library specialists who are responsible for all library services surrounding copyright, open access and publishing, research data management, and open educational resources. The team also manages two scholarly repositories for Emory faculty and students. Before joining Emory University Libraries in 2018, Jody was director of publishing at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries where she oversaw all publishing and open education services. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4226-4173)

January 9, 2023

New to the SCN: Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication

Today we’re excited to share “Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication” (available through project site and via OER Commons). This work was created by Kath Burton, Catherine Cocks, and Bonnie Russell. We think they’ve done an incredible job! Here they are to introduce Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication:

In Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication, Kath Burton and Catherine Cocks of the Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities working group and Bonnie Russell of the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in Humanities and Social Science) initiative have created a resource intended to increase understanding of how a values-based approach to scholarly communication can address the challenges of publishing publicly engaged scholarship.

Humanities and social science scholars are increasingly interested in doing research with and alongside communities outside the academy. This values-based, publicly engaged scholarship encompasses research, teaching, preservation, and programming conducted in partnership with diverse individuals and communities outside the university. It is intended to deepen and broaden the horizons of scholarship at the same time that it serves the public good in both its processes and outcomes. In short, this kind of research deploys the resources of the humanities to address society’s most pressing challenges.

But these collaborative research projects often call for publications quite different from the standard academic journal article or book. Works that incorporate multiple voices, are broadly accessible, and are designed to intervene in public issues may not fit easily into the standard academic journal article or monograph. Publicly engaged work is about process and methodology as much as it is about outcomes. What options exist for including all aspects of a project’s processes and methodologies, including failures and adjustments? And yet, the standard genres play an important role in an individual scholar’s career progression. Publishing models that support academic success and also include an explicitly values-based approach to scholarly communication are therefore required. In this OER we highlight several projects and we bring you the voices of scholars who are doing this work and finding creative ways to publish it. We also offer an exercise in analyzing the partnerships and publication outputs of several publicly engaged humanities projects.

University-based librarians have important roles to play in publicly engaged research. For scholars, libraries obviously offer crucial resources for conducting research, and some may also be able to provide resources to community organizations. Libraries can support public engagement efforts and facilitate connections between community organizations and scholars in many ways–for example, by hosting reading groups that bridge distinct communities; collaborating to create digital or material exhibits; consulting on issues of privacy and intellectual property; offering space, design assistance, and tools for digital projects, as well as flexible print publishing opportunities; and providing repositories for long-term access and preservation. Perhaps most important, as professionals focused on the broad circulation of knowledge, librarians can help scholars think through what it means to produce research in service to public, rather than solely disciplinary, aims.

To get readers started with values-based, collaborative scholarship, we offer the HuMetricsHSS Values Sorter. HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) was established to assist scholars and scholarly organizations in establishing a values-based approach to guide all kinds of scholarly processes through workshops and interactive tools. The Values Sorter is a self-assessment tool for everyone who wishes to engage in embedding values in their scholarly practices. We look forward to future iterations of the OER where we can include examples of effective practice using the Sorter and the HuMetricsHSS values framework.

Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication takes inspiration from the Scholarly Communication Notebook’s community of practice approach to empowering active engagement across the landscape. We are extremely grateful to colleagues at SCN for their generous funding and guidance as we sought to showcase the many examples of publicly engaged scholarship via this project.

To read the OER visit https://publiclyengagedpublishing.org/.

About the Authors:

Kath Burton is co-convener of the Publishing and Public Humanities Working Group. With extensive publishing experiences, ranging from commissioning to program management, she now leads the editorial development of the Humanities, Media and the Arts portfolio at Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Among other interests, Kath is an avid outdoor swimmer and helps grow community gardens in Reading, UK. ORCID: 0000-0001-7785-9604

Catherine Cocks is the interim director of Michigan State University Press and a member of the Publishing and Public Humanities Working Group. She formerly worked with Teresa Mangum and Anne Valk on the Humanities and Public Life series at the University of Iowa Press and continues to be passionate about publicly engaged scholarship. ORCID: 0000-0001-6581-4740

Bonnie Russell is the Project Manager for MESH Research at Michigan State University where she is the Project Manager (and resident librarian) for Humanities Commons and the Digital Specialist for HuMetricsHSS. She has worked with digital humanities scholars since 2012, helping scholars shape projects and identify technology needs. Before coming to MSU she spent 9 years as the Technical Project Manager at the Wayne State University Press, managing the Press’s online and digital offerings. ORCID: 0000-0002-0374-0384

October 17, 2022

New to the SCN: LIS Teaching OER Toolkit

Today we’re excited to share “OER for LIS: Toolkit for Building and OER Librarian Course” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Steven Bell, who has extensive experience working to advance OER and teaching about it. As we are interested in using open materials to support LIS instruction on topics like OER, this project was right up our alley. Steven has compiled and openly licensed his complete course materials to support LIS instruction on OER. Here’s Steven to introduce OER for LIS:

The beauty of the open education community is its inclusiveness. All are welcome to join the effort to advance openness in education at all levels. One segment within the community of library workers has yet to take hold of this invitation – students enrolled in master’s degree programs in library and information science (LIS). This is through no fault of their own. In their pursuit of the degree these aspiring librarians, especially those seeking positions in college and university libraries, are rarely exposed to the world of open education and Open Education Resources (OER).

More than a few of the approximately 52 American Library Association accredited programs offer a scholarly communications course. Students may be exposed to OER concepts and resources as part of a much broader set of ideas, resources and practices. It is hardly enough to do more than whet their appetite for a deeper dive into the world of open education. That can now change at scale, if more LIS program faculty wish to take advantage of a new opportunity.

New to the Scholarly Communications Notebook is my open resource OER for LIS: Toolkit for Building an OER Librarianship Course. It is based on the Open Education Librarianship course I have taught for four years for the San Jose State University iSchool program. Designed from scratch as an asynchronous course, now any LIS instructor can adopt or modify the entire course to create a similar course within their own program. This article published in the International Journal of Open Education Resources provides detail on the origins and development of the course, as well as student responses to what the course delivers.

The Toolkit provides all the necessary materials, including a syllabus, lecture slides, video lectures, assignments, assignment rubrics, weekly discussion board topics, weekly quizzes, required and recommended readings/videos and supplement course materials such as a resource list, course success tips, instructor’s welcome video and more. While all of this could be adopted as is, my expectation is that other LIS educators will want to customize the materials to better suit their needs. Think of the Toolkit as a starting point, not unlike a blank canvas, awaiting the next owner’s personal creative touch.

To be sure, there are other paths for learning the theory and practice of open education for librarians. Both SPARC and the Open Education Network offer excellent programs for current librarians who wish to develop or enhance their OER skills and leadership capability. There are several outstanding open texts for learning both basic and advanced concepts and practices that are the domain of Open Education Librarians. None of those is quite geared to the needs of LIS program students who must learn the skills within the structure of a credit-earning course. That is a gap I sought to remedy when I first introduced this course in 2020. Now, with the introduction of this Toolkit, I invite other LIS faculty to help continue the work of closing the gap, and instead, fully bring our LIS student community into the world of open education.

About the Author

Steven Bell, associate university librarian at Temple University Libraries is a long-time advocate for open education. In addition to numerous articles and presentations on open education projects, his contributions include serving on SPARC’s Open Education Advisory Board, mentoring participants of SPARC’s Open Education Leadership Program and serving on the Executive Board of Affordable Learning Pennsylvania. Steven currently serves as an adjunct instructor for the San Jose State University iSchool, and regularly contributes blog posts to the Charleston Hub. You can learn more about Steven at stevenbell.info