2017 Program Schedule

In June 2015, the UNT Libraries launched a for-fee service for publishing works of scholarship from authors affiliated with the university. While authors can choose from a menu of editing and design options, all publications are made free to read online through the institutional repository.

We will reflect on our choices in designing the publishing service -- such as not organizing peer review, delivering publications through the repository, requiring free public access but not Creative Commons licenses -- and on what authors have chosen from the menu of options over the past two years.

Type of presentation: Full Session

ABSTRACT

In 2012, at the World Open Educational Resources Congress in Paris, UNESCO declared that governments within their powers should develop strategies and policies that promote open educational resources (OER) as an avenue toward the universal right of equity of access to education. Though OER has increased exponentially in availability since that time, there remain confounding factors that act as barriers to OER adoption, such as ease of discovery, ease of adaptability and re-use, and uncertainty regarding quality and sustainability. Numerous studies have examined these barriers, and these studies should be of concern to librarians who support OER use. This session will provide an overview of findings from the literature on barriers and possible solutions to OER adoption. The goal is to improve librarians’ understanding of these barriers, which may impede their role as OER advocates.

In this case-study presentation, Trinity University’s Head of Discovery Services and the Head of Instruction Services will offer evidence of the ways that both technical and public services collaborate in conversations that function to drive the library’s and the university’s digital scholarship initiatives. Highlighting the benefits available at a liberal arts institution, the speakers will focus on the ways librarians are able to communicate with students, academic faculty, and with one another to offer innovative services as well as access to unique scholarship and collections. Essential factors in facilitating this work will also be considered.

Ever look at a signature and realize you can’t read the name, even though the letters look almost legible? Now imagine there is not a printed name near that signature. Multiply this issue by 2-4 names per item in a collection of thousands. The University of North Texas Libraries recently ran into this problem when adding metadata to recently-digitized theses and dissertations (ETDs) from the 1930s to 1990s. Deciphering the signatures proved difficult and time-consuming because centralized employee rosters do not exist for every year spanning the scope of the ETDs. Without these rosters, the UNT Library catalogers could not compare employee signatures for proper spelling and identification. The catalogers tried several methods to organize signatures including signature screenshots combined with a spreadsheet of authorized name formats and a Word document that held a table of signature images, departments, dates, and authorized name formats. As our list of names grew, each tool became too unwieldy and required an upgrade. This presentation explains how the catalogers addressed the signature problem by ultimately creating a database with increased functionality in order to organize signatures for easier identification. Participants will learn exactly what database characteristics worked for us, while getting to skip all of our less-successful iterations. They will also be able to apply these ideas for their own needs.

With the rise of Open Access (OA), Institutional Repositories (IR), and the “Library as Publisher”, more and more librarians take on an expanded role in scholarly communication. In providing and supporting IRs like ScholarWorks and in publishing new OA journals. Along with this, the need for librarians to provide services comparable to those of traditional publishers is apparent. The effort for librarians to “tool up” and gain the knowledge and skills needed to provide these services can be difficult to learn or even locate. The presentation will cover research into some of the Byzantine standards and expectations that must be met by modern pier reviewed academic journals and their publishers. With this information, I will present a roadmap for librarians and editors to follow that will align their journals with current standards. This roadmap will be available online and provide links to current examples of how existing journals meet these requirements. This roadmap will provide librarians with clear and accessible information they can use to provide the kind of professional services and support previously available from traditional publishers.

While many institutions may have a repository without a campus or departmental open access (OA) policy, an OA policy often requires the institutional repository (IR) for implementation, as noted in Harvard’s guide to “Good practices for university open-access policies.” However, this relationship is sometimes misunderstood when using the IR to discuss the success or failure of an OA policy, similar to the discussion in Catherine Mitchell’s October 2016 blog post on repository metrics and open access policies. When creating assessment models to evaluate the success of an IR or OA policy, it is crucial to understand the strengths and weaknesses of repository operation and campus culture. The IR can generate useful metrics for understanding self-archiving practices by faculty, but it is increasingly being used as a stand-in for an OA policy’s overall success or failure. However, this interchange of IR metrics for OA policy success ignores local culture, institutional resources, and librarian practices that may play a larger role in repository deposits than the policy alone. Ignoring these factors prevents repository managers from learning how practices at other institutions can be translated to their own location.

In creating, managing, and adapting digital collections, managers often face hurdles of technical misunderstanding and sometimes, intimidation. By educating internal stakeholders and creating allies, information managers can facilitate institutional change and are much more able to request and receive funding to pursue innovative programs requiring technical infrastructure.

Felicia Williamson, Archivist at the Dallas Holocaust Museum, will discuss the ongoing efforts to build a more robust technical infrastructure at a small non-profit Museum. Former efforts did not employ metadata standards. Moreover, online access to collections seemed a far off goal. Two main needs emerged: to create and maintain robust metadata and to expand and secure digital management systems that would grow with the collection.

James Williamson, Digital Preservation Librarian at Southern Methodist University, will discuss his recent experience in attempting to replace a digital asset management repository with a more robust digital preservation repository. He will talk about how an open dialogue with diverse stakeholders facilitated a greater understanding for the need of digital preservation beyond simply storing and sharing files. Williamson will also explain the things that worked when discussing digital preservation needs with IT services.