OER at ACRL

Posted on by
Reply

acrl sign

Co-authors of this post: Dawn Cadogan and Kate Fuller

OER is the acronym for Open Educational Resources, a phrase which represents the movement for teaching materials that are freely available for use and re-use. The movement has been gaining steam in the last few years, primarily due to student advocation for more affordable textbooks.

As members of the Libraries’ Open Textbook Initiative, we are learning that other universities are also invested in this issue. This was confirmed while attending this year’s ACRL Conference. These are some of the OER-related presentations we attended during the conference.

Papers

Brian Young from the University of Mississippi contributed a paper entitled, “Assessing Faculty Perceptions and Use of Open Education Resources (OERs)”. Ole Miss provided grants to faculty willing to adopt open educational materials for their courses. These faculty were surveyed before and after their OER courses. Young found that locating high-quality and up-to-date open educational materials was time-consuming for faculty. By contrast, traditional textbook vendors offered services which simplified the evaluation and selection process for faculty customers. During the post-course survey, a promising finding was that faculty found that students are more likely to bring their OER materials with them to class than when the faculty assign traditional textbooks. This is likely because the students could access OER texts easily through laptops or mobile devices. There were two takeaways which Young highlighted. First, libraries need to develop better marketing of library-licensed resources. Faculty need to know how they can use these resources for their courses. Young noted UNC’s e-textbook portal. In addition, Young found that faculty are confused by the nomenclature; libraries need to review how they talk about OER. Young believes phrases such as “free textbook alternatives” or “free internet materials for teaching” get the message across more succinctly that “open educational resources”.

Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) spoke on her invited paper titled, “Open Expansion: Connecting the Open Access, Open Data and OER Dots.”  In this presentation, she encouraged libraries to use open materials to think bigger – to consider how “open” can help solve problems, as well as be used to help create new opportunities.   The biggest problem open content can address is cost; open content removes intermediaries, reducing or eliminating costs.  But in addition to addressing cost, “open” also means full reuse, which has large implications for teaching, research, learning, and making.  Understanding the significance of open as the default mode is crucial for enabling new works and creating new value.

Poster Sessions

Librarians from Georgia Perimeter College shared their role in GPC’s affordable textbook initiative. In their poster, Mary Ann Cullen and Ann Mallard, described how the library was able to help faculty to identify existing OERs for use in English composition classes. They even were able to participate in the selection of textbooks to adopt. The College was recently awarded a $30,000 grant by Affordable Learning Georgia to create an open textbook. See Cullen and Mallard’s poster at http://guides.gpc.edu/oerposter.

Carmen Mitchell, Institutional Repository Librarian at California State University San Marcos, presented a poster on CSU’s project – Cougars Affordable Learning Materials (CALM).  Started in 2013 with funding from the Chancellor’s Office, CALM began by establishing marketing materials and preliminary partnerships with campus entities like the bookstore, student groups, and Institutional Planning & Analysis (who added questions to student evaluations) – and introducing the concept of CALMing the cost of textbooks to faculty.  For the past 3 semesters using a competitive application process, CALM has granted 35 faculty awards ranging from $500-$3000 for implementing cost reduction techniques, and has saved CSU students over $700,000.  More information on CALM can be found at http://csusm.edu/ids/calm/index.html .

Brigham Young University- Hawaii, a small undergraduate college, took a different approach to address textbook costs. In their poster, Librarians Becky DeMartini and Marynelle Chew described their library’s decision to make every course textbook available on reserve after finding that 56% of surveyed students either only sometimes or never purchased the required textbooks for their classes. Deeming this program a success, they have found that the reserve textbooks circulate about 5x as much as other books in the collection.

International ILLiad Conference 2015

Posted on by
1

Each year Atlas Systems sponsors the International ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach. This year there were close to 400 attendees from six countries, including Egypt, Japan, the UK, Canada, and Singapore.  Representatives from Atlas, OCLC, Reprints, and the Copyright Clearance Center were on hand to meet, present, and converse.  In terms of the work of our unit, there is no better conference to attend; it’s a total immersion into the world of resource sharing and the product that runs it.  Sessions are focused on how to use the system more efficiently, how to deliver better service, and how to better manage to create time and cost savings.  The setting is dynamic and includes conversation both ways.  There is no better venue to raise issues to a larger scale and create change.

Three DD-ILL staff presented posters: Terry Palacios-Baughman presented on how she has transformed her student operation to be much more efficient and self-managing, and Erika McNeil and Stan Huzarewicz presented on serving students with disabilities using ILLiad.  The poster session was over two hours long and we literally had lines of people who wanted to talk with us about what we’re doing.  One comment from someone who talked with Terry: “If there was one thing that made this conference worth going to, it was this.”

The keynote, “Is Your Library Visible?,” was given by Eric Miller, from Zepheira, who is leading efforts to apply advanced Web architecture and linked data principles to help libraries organize disparate materials in order to solve real-world problems.  He recently founded Libhub, an initiative that focuses on raising the visibility of libraries on the Web.

There were many conference sessions to choose from.  Leadership in Resource Sharing focused on using data to demonstrate our impact, exposing gaps, and expanding the kind of information we offer that can be useful to others in an organization.  Attendees of this presentation were interested to learn of our recent experience with Tableau.

Textbooks and ILL related one institution’s experience with moving from “no textbooks” to “any textbook.”  This new service philosophy significantly impacted the way patrons viewed the library, and their process became much less mediated.

There was an update meeting led by OCLC and Atlas Systems that related what’s new in this summer’s ILLiad update.  Exciting to those in resource sharing: an Addon to place British Library requests that includes real time availability, new options in “days to respond,” improvement in the IFM process, and more.  This was followed by an open floor discussion of the upcoming changes and attendees were offered an invaluable opportunity to ask questions and provide comments and feedback before official implementation.

There was a lot of fun to be had in What Would *You* Do?  ILL Best Practices for Worst-Case Scenarios.  From the traditional “my cat ate it,” and “we have bedbugs” to “I left my book on a mountain in Tibet, can I have another copy?” and “they burned the book we mailed back to your country at the border,” everyone had a story.

One session previewed a new ILL cost calculator that is coming soon, building upon a cost study that we participated in several years ago with folks from Kansas and Las Vegas.  We will be an early adopter of the study which will allow us to enter and compare costs in real time.  This project is being led by OCLC Research in collaboration with SHARES partner institutions.  We will be able to enter data yearly, compare our costs with other institutions, track changes, simulate changes we might make in joining a consortium or acquiring a piece of equipment, run reports, and so on.

Bucknell gave a talk ILLiad, GIST, and EBL: How Bucknell University’s PDA + DDA Collection Development Model Gives Patrons What They Want, While Saving the Library Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars a Year.  They cancelled their print approval plan and automatic shipments and moved to a completely patron-driven acquisitions monograph collection development policy.  GIST is free and open source, and merges and streamlines Acquisitions and ILL request workflows using ILLiad, leveraging systems to do more work while reducing the staff time necessary to make informed decisions and process materials.  Originally part of New York’s IDS project, the toolkit is now in use at institutions all over the country, such as Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Missouri, Texas, Virginia, etc.  Here’s a link to their paper.  More information on GIST can be found here: http://www.gistlibrary.org/illiad/#.VRBYrvnF98E.

GIST Workflow

Let’s Play Nice: Shared Server 101 offered detailed information about the ILLiad Customization Manager settings and provided caution regarding partner site settings in a shared ILLiad environment. The information will be very pertinent in regard to potential changes to UConn Health’s adoption of ILLiad as a satellite to Storrs.

We took advantage of having representatives from Atlas and OCLC to discuss various transitions we’re going through right now, as well as to talk about potential enhancement requests with ILLiad WebCirc.  Also significant to our unit, I met with Yale’s Associate Director for Resource Sharing and Reserves and we came to an agreement of reciprocity.

It was all this and more.  This was my first time to this particular conference, and I’m still having conversations that were begun there.  There’s a world of information and possibility in this gem of a conference.

Copyright for Educators and Librarians

Posted on by
Reply

Did you know that you may be a copyright owner and not realize it even if you haven’t published a paper? That a library included text from books in its floor with impunity?
I took the advice of my colleagues and registered with Coursera for my first MOOC, a four week professional development course on Copyright for Educators and Librarians that focused primarily on U.S. copyright. The course ran for four weeks from July 21st to August 18th.There were three instructors who all had library degrees, then went on to obtain JDs and work in the Scholarly Communication Offices at their respective universities – Kevin Smith, Duke University; Anne Gilliland, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Lisa Macklin from Emory University. They were passionate about what could have been a very dry subject.

The course was divided into four units. The first three weeks had video lectures by one or more of the instructors. There were readings including selections from books by Kenneth Crews and Peter Hirtle, which served as our main textbooks. You may have heard Hirtle speak when he gave a lecture at Homer Babbidge Library last April entitled, “Living with Risk. Managing the Risk of Copyright.” We also studied the U.S. Copyright Act, sections of Title 17 of the U.S. Code, which required careful scrutiny. All readings were provided online. Students were expected to participate in the weekly forum and acquired points for posts. Then there was a quiz at the end of each week. Week 4 required a written Framework Analysis applied to a very complicated copyright situation. When the course started it wasn’t required for successful completion of the free version but during the second week the rules were changed, which did surprise me. I didn’t pay in order to use the Coursera symbol but did all the work and received a “Certificate of Accomplishment with Distinction” for achieving a high grade.

Unit 1 “A framework for thinking about copyright” covered the history of copyright going back to the king and queens of England. Queen Mary chartered the Royal Company of Stationers in 1557 and it had begun before her with the “Letters Patents”. In this unit we also learned that copyright happens as soon as the original work of authorship is fixed in a medium perceptible to the human senses. Registration is a different matter and is needed if you wish to sue in federal court.

Unit 2 “Authorship and rights” This is the unit that says you own copyright too. Students own copyright as well. Teachers should ask students permission to use their work. Some may want it kept private. Many institutions have a policy about using student work. Authorship of works for hire is a complex subject that was covered. The employer owns the rights unless it is an independent contractor in which case it should be spelled out in a signed contract. I was wondering who owns the rights to the beautiful fountain in the UConn Waterbury courtyard.

Unit 3 “Specific exceptions for teachers and librarians” I learned that the TEACH Act provides exceptions for teachers in the classroom but it does not apply to online resources, such as reserves, because reserve readings are not face to face use. Something I have become very familiar with lately due to obsolete VHS tapes that faculty still want is the Copyright Law Section 108 provision for making a copy with the notice if a reasonable effort has been made to find a replacement.

Unit 4 “Fair use” This is the part I was most familiar with but was interested in learning more as I sometimes need to evaluate the four fair use factors when posting reserve materials to HuskyCT:
1. The purpose and character of the use
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount of the portion used in relation to the whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market

If you are interested in music or photography, this class covered those subjects as well. Copyright infringement of songs has been in the news lately. A song may have different copyright owners for the music and the lyrics. When you use a photo, you may need copyright permission for the building in your picture. If this course is offered again, I highly recommend it.

Works Cited

Crews, Kenneth. Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2012. Print.

Hirtle, Peter, Emily Hudson and Andrew Kenyon. Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives and Museums. Cornell University Library, 2009. Print.

Operational Trip: Book buying trip at Feria Internacional de Libros (FIL)/International Book Fair at Guadalajara, Mexico

Posted on by
2

From November 29th to December 4th, I had the opportunity to attend FIL in Guadalajara, Mexico, the biggest book fair in the Americas and the second biggest in the world (the biggest is in Germany, the Frankfurt International Book Fair). I was able to attend partly thanks to ALA-FIL travel grant, which paid for hotel, book fair registration and breakfast, and our library which support me by paying for airfare.

ALA has for many years partnered with the Mexican government and the FIL coordinators to bring American librarians, both from the public and academic sector, to the fair as a way to improve the quality of American libraries by being able to buy directly, not only from Mexican publishers, but also from publishers from all over Latin America, the Caribbean and even Europe and Asia.

It has been almost two years since my last visit to the FIL so I have a lot to catch up in the buying department. Because I arrived during the weekend I was able to get an early start. First thing I did was to visit the stands of several Central American countries. Central American countries (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc.) had small print runs so if you don’t get their books early they may run out before you have visited their stand! My diligence paid off and I was able to acquire several interesting books from novels to social sciences studies about immigration, politics, economy and gender and human rights issues. Other country that I visited early was Peru which had several books I wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn’t buy all of them in my first day since some of them were not ready for sale. One of the major activities at the book fair was to present new books—there were 590 of such presentations—with a formal ceremony and a discussion leaded by experts of the field who discussed the value of the book to the public. After the ceremony, you can buy the book—which I did!

Because the fair is so huge—the convention center is the size of a football stadium— and there were so many stands—1,945 publishers attended the fair— I decided to plan my week based on the countries I wanted to visit and not to spend all my budget in one day. During my visit I bought books from Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile and Peru on such subjects as immigration, gender studies, social justice, human rights, social movements, labor and literature. In addition, I asked my Mexican distributor to make a selection of Mexican books sold only in the FIL—since Mexico by itself take over half of the convention center!

I think this strategy helped me focused on the countries we don’t purchase many books because of cost and/or availability, while my distributor used a purchasing profile for Mexico that I gave him so he could acquire the type of materials my users need. This profile is based on the feedback I received from my constituents about their research and teaching needs in Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Sciences, Human Rights and Spanish. I have profiles for each country that we have consistently acquired materials through the years, and I have added new countries as new faculty and research interests had shifted since I started working in 2007. Using these profiles, I made purchases decisions trying my best to balance between “just in case” and “just in time” philosophies while at the book fair.

Just to give you an idea of the size and the amount of people that attend this book fair, here are some figures from the FIL website for this 2014 book fair.

  • Attending Public: 767,200
  • Book Professionals (librarians, dealers): 20,393
  • Publishing houses: 1,945
  • Countries represented by publishing houses: 44

What are the benefits of attending a book fair?

  • Talking directly with the different publishers from each of these countries help me identify emerging areas of interest that may have not reached the US academia yet, e.g. promising new authors that have won national or regional awards, new mixed media and literature genres such as encoded images in fantasy fiction. For example, I found a novel, Fuego Lento by Costa Rican writer Jessica Clark, which incorporated a code inside the illustrations used in the book cover and each chapter divider. When using the right apps in your smartphone, you can see 3-D images on the phone screen–like an animation jumping out of the page–which enhances the reading experience of this tale of apocalyptic proportions set in San Jose, Costa Rica.
  • Being able to buy books for a fraction of what it would cost us to obtain them through a distributor. For example, I have the pleasure to meet Agustina Ponce, the director of Ediciones Vigía, one of the most famous homemade/artists’ book publisher in Cuba. Usually these books are hard to find in the US, and when you get them, you paid between a 300-400% mark-up. This time around, since I met directly with the publisher, I was able to pay the actual cost of these books and saved us quite a bit of money.
  • Meeting fellow librarians from the US and Mexico and exchange news and ideas about how to best approach buying books in the fair.
  • Learning about new trends such as the ebooks market is another plus of attending the fair–mainly the emphasis is in popular fiction but there is some interest to expand into the academic sphere.
  • Finally, there is nothing more satisfying to be in a book fair and walk among thousands of books and seeing young and old, buying and reading books! Paradise on Earth!

Final observations: Even though this was a well-attended book fair and the usual amount of countries were presented, there were less books sold at the fair compared with past years. I asked some of the vendors why they had fewer books in their stands this time around and many replied that because an increase in shipping cost they brought half of the amount of what they usually bring. So, it was a good thing that I attended early to be able to acquire as many books I could since otherwise I could have missed out on many great titles.

I should be getting all the books from the book fair by the end of this month and I plan to create lists in WorldCat of what I acquired at the fair to share with my faculty. I hope to do a “Show and Tell” later to showcase some of the books that I acquired with my faculty. Finally, I am working with Prof. Odette Casamayor to do a small exhibition using books from Ediciones Vigía to showcase the books I acquired during this trip and others that we already have at the archives.

I can go on talking about the book fair but I will stop here. Please enjoy the photos I took during my visit and if you have questions about my trip feel free to contact me anytime.

LANE (Latin American Northeast) Library Consortium Fall meeting

Posted on by
Reply
Poster of exhibit at El Barrio Museum, Manhattan. Posters reads: Marisol pops New York!

Picture taken at El Barrio Museum in Manhattan (not taken during the LANE meeting but after Christmas. I just thought it looks good with the post)

As the UConn representative to LANE, twice during the academic year, I attend the LANE meetings, where we meet to discuss issues, concerns and share information regarding the acquisition of Latin American, Caribbean and Spanish (Spain) materials for our libraries. We meet each autumn for a whole day meeting, usually in NYC, and at the SALALM Annual meeting when we meet for a smaller meeting.

This last fall, we met at the Bobst Library at New York University. We have a very busy schedule and several guest speakers. The highlight of the meeting was the discussion on ebooks and streaming options for Spanish materials and a demo of new streaming product, Digitalia Film Library.

At this point, options are still limited and business models are still in flux in the Spanish language world (and the same can be said about other foreign languages options for ebooks and streaming films). After our discussion, we realized that although it is a good sign that there are several players entering the Spanish language ebooks market (e.g. Digitalia in Spain, Casalini in Italy(1), and Ventara in Argentina) and one new player in the streaming film market (Digitalia), the whole marketplace is still in its early infancy and there are issues that need to be improved. For example, for ebooks, we are still seeing DRM ebooks; clunky interfaces, and streaming is still an emerging business. Although there is a good amount of Spanish (Spain) publishers represented in ebooks format, Latin American and Caribbean publishers are less represented and therefore the ebooks inventory is very limited—especially for academic-level books. The only vendors selling academic books from Latin American and the Caribbean to libraries are Ventara from Argentina, and Digitalia from Spain, who had made contracts with several academic presses in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico). Mexico does have an ebooks market but they are focusing more in popular titles than in academic ones. So far, Mexico doesn’t have a vendor(s) approaching US academic libraries to sell ebooks yet but it is a matter of times to see such a player enter the marketplace.

In the streaming film area, Digitalia is the only Spanish company offering streaming for libraries. The selection of films in this new product is decent and it’s still growing. One issue that we discussed was the fact that the films in this product do not have subtitles, which is an issue for most of us since students learning Spanish don’t necessarily have the skills to follow the dialogue of movies without subtitles.

Even though things are not perfect yet, it was noted by several librarians in the group that these vendors welcome feedback from LANE and SALALM librarians, and are open to explore new business models, and improve their products to appeal to the US academic libraries’ market. One of the outcomes of our discussion was identifying these issues to be able to contact vendors and share our concerns with them to see if they will address them in the near future. We believe that if many of us share the same concerns with them, the possibility for these vendors to improve their products to make them more appealing to us will increase.

There were two guest’s presentations during the meeting. One by the librarians at the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjold Library, in New York, who talked about the many free resources online available at their website (from statistics to reports from each of the many departments that comprised the United Nations), and a second presentation by the Library director and the bibliographer of the Museum of Modern Art Library, who talked about their amazing Latin American art collection available to researchers at both their NYC locations (Manhattan and Queens), at their website and at the Arcade, “the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)”. One of the choices to search is “Latin American collections” which allow researches to search MoMA’s Latin American art collection.

All in all, a great day conference!

Next posting, Guadalajara’s International Book Fair!

Notes:

(1) Casilini’s Torrossa ebooks platform not only offer ebooks in Spanish but also in Italian, French and Portuguese.

Beyond the Search I

Posted on by
Reply

I, along with Valori Banfi attended Beyond the Search I: Protocol Development and Methodology for Systematic Reviews.

This webinar, held on October 22, 2014, was part of the continuing education program of the Medical Library Association. The webinar was hosted  for New Englanders at the Lamar Soutter Library of the University of Massachusetts Medical School but was conducted by two informationists from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Each presenter, Mark MacEachern and Whitney Townsend, has authored several systematic reviews.

The goal of the webinar was to provide the audience with the tools to develop protocols for systematic reviews.  Systematic reviews are a type of publication frequently seen in medicine. They are also becoming popular in other fields concerned with treatment outcomes, such as psychology and health communication. Systematic reviews “attempt to collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question” (Higgins & Green, 2011). A protocol is simply is a plan that explains how a systematic review will be conducted. As such the protocol is outlined before the review begins.

Why establish a protocol? Systematic reviews are meant to be comprehensive and exhaustive, which means they take a long time to complete. Many systematic review standards (Institute of Medicine, 2011; Liberati et al, 2009) recommend protocols in order to notify the research community about a forthcoming systematic review on a topic. This helps to prevent a duplication of effort. Protocols also serve as a means to reduce bias ex post facto. The presenters recommended several online templates for protocol-building and suggested registries where protocols can be filed.

Besides this helpful advice, the webinar also focused on how to communicate with prospective systematic review writers, including how to educate them through the process. Perhaps most interestingly for librarians was the discussion on how to negotiate roles and expectations with members of the systematic review team. For example, if the librarian/informationist wants to co-author or be acknowledged in the publication, those wishes need to be made known during the initial consultation.

This was the first installment of MLA’s systematic review series. The second installment, which will be held on December 3rd, will cover the exportation and management of systematic review data.

Higgins, J.P.T, & Green, S. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, Version 5.1.0.   Available from http://www.cochrane.org/handbook.

Institute of Medicine. (2011). Finding what works in health care: Standards for systematic reviews. Available from http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2011/Finding-What-Works-in-  Health-Care-Standards-for-Systematic-Reviews.aspx

Liberati A, Altman D.G., Tetzlaff, J., Mulrow, C., Gøtzsche, P.C., Ioannidis. , J.P., et al. (2009). The PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies that evaluate health care interventions: Explanation and elaboration. Annals of Internal Medicine. 151(4), W65-W94. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-151-4-200908180-00136

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Conference

Posted on by
2

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Last October I attended the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Advisory Board Meeting and Biennial Conference: Prensa, Latinidad y Legado: Spanish-Language Press and Print Culture in Syracuse, NY.

The Recovery Project is “a national program based at the University of Houston that locates, identifies, preserves and disseminates the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times to 1960*”. This project was established in the 1990s by Nicholas Kanellos, “Brown Foundation Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of both Arte Público Press and the Recovery Project.*” The people involves with the Recovery Project feel very strongly about making sure that the documentary evidence of Hispanics in the United States don’t get lost or destroy because of lack of institutional or financial support at the state and federal level. This project was started in the 1990s because many Hispanics felt at the time that there were few ethnic archives supported by archival institutions (either private or state institutions), especially those interested in acquiring and preserving materials that documented the long history of the presence of Hispanic in the what it is known today as the United States. At the time, private funding was plentiful and they were able not only to create the first newspapers’ union catalog that track Hispanic newspapers from the XIXth century to the 1960s but later on to find, acquire and microfilmed many of these newspapers to make them accessible to researchers. Through a partnership with Readex* this collection was digitized and made available online as a product from which the Recovery Project gets royalties that they then reinvest to continue acquiring, cataloging and preserving these materials. After the success with Hispanic newspapers, they extended the project to include archival collections such as personal papers of distinguish Hispanic American involved in the civil rights movement. These collections of rare newspapers and archival collections that they acquired are now available at the University of Houston Hispanic Collection archives.

After 9/11 in 2001, funding for this kind of project has diminished and the Recover Project decided to partner with EBSCO to digitize and make available these new materials (pamphlets, books, newspapers, images, manuscripts, etc.) through a new product, The Latino-Hispanic American Experience: The Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection** (Part 1 and 2) as a way to generate royalties that again are reinvested into the project to continue their works.

Every two years, as members of the Advisory Board, we meet to discuss Recovery current projects and new projects and this year the main discussion was to decide new directions for the Recovery project, in specific, to extend the time period for acquisition of materials from 1960 to 1990. Although we didn’t achieve a final consensus about the extension, there were many good discussions on why it is important to find sustainable ways to acquire, preserve and give access to materials that document the cultural heritage of Hispanic people in the United States after the 1960s especially considering the arrival of the Internet and the Web, electronic media and social media networks.

After the Advisory Board meeting, as board members we support the biennial conference as moderators of panels. I had the pleasure to moderate the panel: “Pedagogy, Research and Archives”. The panelists, Dr. Enrique Mallén, director and general editor of the On-line Picasso Project, https://picasso.shsu.edu/, Caryl Ward, subject librarian for Latin American Studies at Binghamton University, and Lisa Cruces, archivist of the newly created Hispanic Collections at University of Houston, talked about how to incorporate freely accessible digital collections, and archival collections into the teaching and research of Hispanic American print and media culture. A variety of challenges were discussed such as insufficient financial support and/or staffing, changing technologies, and quality of scanning, but all panelists agreed that it is worth the effort to make primary sources available freely to complement what is behind pay walls. They also emphasized the important to establish collaborations between librarians, archivists and faculty to make sure that their classes benefit from materials both found online and offline (in the archives).

Another panel that I attended of great interests to librarians and faculty alike was the presentation done by the library staff at Syracuse University which regaled us with three great presentations of the many hidden treasures that document Hispanic literary culture in the United States. For example, Brett Michael Barrie, Rare Book Cataloger and Lucy Mulroney, Interim Director of Special Collections shared their experience of processing donations that document the relationship between a NYC independent press (Grove Press) and many Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo and Pablo Neruda (and the correspondence between editors, translators and writers) about the translation of these writers works into English; and a Spanish professor’s book collection that documented  relationships between major writers from Latin America and Spain during the 20th century.

There were many other panels during the conference that I couldn’t attend but some of the ones I attended were for example one on the research documenting the presence of Dominican(s) in New York City, one example was the case of Juan Rodriguez, who was in New Amsterdam (today New York City) in 1613– while another focused on the strong presence of Cubans in New York city prior of 1898, especially the presence of Cuban Independence champion, José Martí. Other panels focused on the struggles of Mexican American in the United States after the Mexican-American War as documented in newspapers and personal correspondence. Much of the research done and discussed in this conference came from materials found by the Recovery project and available through Readex or EBSCO.

As a final note to this post, EBSCO did a presentation about Series II of the Arte Público collection and acknowledged that because missteps from their parts it hasn’t sold as well as series I. Part of the reason is that many libraries are unable or unwilling to pay the price set by them since it is too high and it used the whole FTE of an university regardless if only a fraction of the registered students would ever used this resource. Therefore EBSCO is considering for their pricing scheme to use instead something called relative FTE that account better the actual potential usage based on the departments and their student body size, instead of all the students at a particular university. So there is hope not only with this Arte Publico product but other primary sources products to be priced on a more reasonable way so more university can acquire it for their faculty and students.

Overall, this was a very worthy conference to attend and I am happy to be part of the advisory board of this commendable project. In 2016 is the 25th anniversary of the project which I hope to attend.

—-

Librarians on the Threshold: An Overview and Panel Discussion of ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

Posted on by
Reply

Event held Friday, Oct. 31, Barnard College, New York City
Co-authors of this post: Shelley Goldstein and Kathy Labadorf

To say that the new ACRL Thresholds Concepts have been facing an easy transition within the info lit world is like saying that the library world waved flags of delight when the card catalog drawers were recycled as planters and print journals joined the list of extinct species. Trudi Jacobson On Halloween, we ventured to the upper West Side in New York to hear Trudi Jacobson, co-chair of the ACRL Info Lit Competency Standards Revision Task Force and Head of  the Info Lit Dept at SUNY Albany, where she  reviewed  the latest draft version (coming out soon) of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy built on Threshold Concepts, a theory of teaching and learning developed by two UK professors, Meyer and Land.

It has been a rocky road for the revisions of the ACRL IL Framework, originally released in February 2014, and haunted  (excuse the pun) with criticism for its complex lingo, particularly its focus on “metaliteracy.” Jacobson  indicated that the language has now been been modified and assured us that the new draft includes an added “lightness.”

Jacobson allowed for a fairly interactive 90-minute presentation, beginning the session by asking participants to describe in one sentence how they perceived students’ research skills. Comments such as “more Google and Wikipedia,” “seeking tried and true tools,” and “immersed, yet unaware,” allowed her to segue into her own slides.ACRLNY She highlighted the research of  Alison Head from the Project Info Lit  (PIL) [http://projectinfolit.org/] and reviewed the tenets of the threshold framework, stressing that info lit in the new framework goes beyond teaching students to push buttons or work with a checklist. Instead, the frames are derived from the core concepts  or big ideas that underlie a deeper understanding of Information Literacy. This allows for flexibility of instructional content within disciplines and varied instructional situations at a variety of educational levels. Unlike the Standards, the Framework aims to develop students’ abilities as “content creators,” involving a more rich understanding of the process of information creation and the contextual nature of authority, two of the frames.

In discussing what the thresholds’ potential may be, despite predominant support by many who indicated that we are moving away from the mechanical way of instruction, concerns were also raised about how to realistically apply concepts within the classroom, obtain support from colleagues, and assess impact. Assessment has always been difficult in Information Literacy because of its distributed nature — it has single no home, not just the library or course classroom, a constantly changing playing field of formats and delivery mechanisms. Jacobson offered some help to the audience recommending Megan Oakleaf’s “A Roadmap for Assessing Student Learning Using the New Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” [http://meganoakleaf.info/framework.pdf]

After Jacobson’s overview, panel members Silvia Lu,  Laguardia Community College, Nicole Brown, New York University, and Ian Beilin, New York City College of Technology offered some more insight. Lu’s lively presentation was based on the premise that “learners don’t start at the same place, nor do they leave at the same place.”  While teaching a multi-session course she uses newsworthy events, such as the Snowden incident, to encourage evaluation of a variety of sources. Brown has gained some support from first-year writing faculty by hosting a wine and cheese event and including an activity that asked them to revisit the time when research “came alive for you?” Predictably, it was a was not during a first year writing class and the responses opened the door for discussion about the new framework offered by ACRL. Brown has also hosted brown bags for teaching librarians to encourage dialog about threshold concepts.

Ian_BeilinBeilin, who shared a variety of critiques from approximately 493 responses from a survey, twitter, and the blogosphere, indicated that most librarians showed enthusiasm about the threshold concepts and felt that it was a step in the right direction. In terms of assessment, he stressed that the language was deliberately vague so that it could be tailored to particular disciplines within institutions. His criticisms of the Framework centered on critical information literacy issues of unearthing the hidden assumptions and accepted practices inherent in teaching about information. Issues like the unquestioned acceptance of “peer review” as the gold standard, awareness of unequal power and unheard voices in scholarship — these are integral to information and could be addressed in the Framework. Students need to question sources, their quality, their authority, and become more aware of how information affects their lives and how information can be a powerful force in changing their lives and affecting the world they live in.

The program ended with a Q&A between all presenters and the audience. One topic which took most of the focus was the fate of the 2000 Competency Standards. Some librarians mentioned that they have built their whole programs on that document and would prefer to just continue in that way without using the Framework. There was a discussion of the inherent problems in the Standards and the benefits of the Framework. Trudi responded that ACRL still expects the Standards to be sunsetted once the new Framework receives official approval and, indeed, that is the intention of the Board. Change is hard. These are still in draft so the adventure continues. How long did it take to give up those card catalogs?

At this time, we awaiting the final draft in November and subsequently approval  by the ACRL Board.

Works Cited

Meyer, J. & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. (ETL Project Occasional Report 4). Retrieved from http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/ETLreport4.pdf

A visit to CRL-LARRP: Representative Trip

Posted on by
Reply

CRLlogoHi all,

In this installment of Marisol’s representative travel here is my report of my trip to CRL (Center of Research Libraries) to attend my first Executive Committee meeting of CRL-LARRP (Latin Americanist Research Resources Project)

LARRP, part of CRL’s Global Resources Program**, “is a consortium of research libraries that seeks to increase free and open access to information in support of learning and scholarship in Latin American Studies. It mobilizes collaborative activities among individuals and organizations on a global scale but focuses on relationships within the academic library community.”

As part of my new role as a Member-at-large, I attended LARRP business meeting at CRL’s headquarter in Chicago to discuss the new initiatives, new working groups and revise several proposals for funding to be submitted later this year to the membership for vote.

Last year the membership voted for new by-laws and the LARRP Exec Board put forward a new planning document to map out the new directions for the consortium, with a bigger emphasis to support Open Access (OA) Initiatives. So, the first part of the meeting was to official welcome the new chairs of these new (and old) working groups, and to discuss next steps for each groups. The new working groups are:

  • The Collections and Analysis Working Group [charge is to] improves the scholarly experience through targeted activities to gather and analyze data, and to launch follow-on collaborative initiatives.
  • The Digital Initiatives Working Group [charge is to] encourages the production of digital resources on Latin America
  • The Resource Discovery Working Group [charge is to] facilitates the visibility of research resources for Latin America. This group liaises with content aggregators, discovery tool providers, and other information creators for the benefit of the Latin Americanist research community.

We also listened to a report from CRL about several projects in the making such as the digitization of “a portion of its [CRL] archives… [to] establish an open web repository representing ten nations in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa where the integrity and survival of these government documents is known to be threatened.” LARRP hopes to focus its efforts to add to this new initiative by increasing the presence of Latin American countries in this project.

The second part of the meeting was to review several funding proposals to make sure that these proposals support the main mission of LARRP to make Latin American materials freely accessible. The proposals ranged from traditional digitization and microfilm projects to a proof of concept pilot project for making OA ebooks available through a commercial vendor. Although not all proposals were approved for voting, the conversations about each proposal and how they support LARRP main mission was quite enlightening and I felt I learned a lot by being part of this conversation. I am also happy that I was able to contribute in the discussion about the OA eBooks pilot project thanks to our experience here at UConn with our own PDA pilots.

I feel honored to be part of LARRP in this new capacity and continue representing UConn Libraries in this very important organization.

**: The other Global resources projects are:

  • AFRINUL: Cooperative African Newspapers Project
  • CIFNAL: Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections
  • DSAL: Digital South Asia Library
  • GNARP: German-North American Resources Partnership
  • HRADP: Human Rights Archives and Documentation Program
  • ICON: International Coalition on Newspapers
  • TRAIL: Technical Report Archive & Image Library)

Ninja Strategies & Labyrinthine Travels in Librarianship

Posted on by
Reply

As a member of the Research & Access Services Pedagogies and Online Objects Workgroup, I attended a Continuing Education session co-sponsored by The Massachusetts Health Science Libraries Network and Western Massachusetts Health Information Consortium on Friday, September 26th, in Holyoke. Rebecca Blanchard, PhD, Med, Director of Medical Education and Research at Baystate Health presented a lively session on using stealth strategies for teaching. She described how we can teach our faculty members or staff, as well as students by capturing the “opportunistic teaching moment” without their even realizing that is what is taking place. Since Ninjas were known for their stealth, she entitled her session “Ninja Teaching: Stealth Strategies to Conquer Any Teaching Scenario.”
Dr. Blanchard’s presentation focused on important aspects of working with adult learners. Emphasis was on incorporating their past experience, while keeping it relevant, allowing the learner to be self-directed and respecting them as individuals. The skills that we frequently use in a reference interview or consultation to determine the real question that we need to answer were very relevant to this session. The emphasis was on providing learner-centered, engaging instruction.
The learner has things that they know, things that they know that they don’t know and things which they are unaware that they don’t know. Ideally, we would like to move some of those unknowns to the known from both of those last categories. To find out what those unknowns are, we need to “diagnose the learner” by listening to their perceived needs and setting realistic expectations. The needs of the learners are beyond what they realize. There will always be barriers, such as time constraints. We can encourage self-reflection and self-direction by highlighting the bigger picture and drawing on their past experiences.
Periodically, Dr. Blanchard broke us into pairs to discuss different scenarios including 1:1 teaching and small and large group teaching. In the process, we used think-pair-share and role playing. We discussed the differences between the scenarios, what goes well and the challenges of working with each scenario.
Some of the ideas which came out of the session are the following. In the case of 1:1 teaching, establishing the context, using hands-on application, relating past experience and working together with the learner using a positive approach are techniques that work well. Challenges include the learner who is overwhelmed or the unrealistic learner who expects an exact answer to their question. In the small group scenarios, looking for a common goal or interest in the group, monitoring the group dynamics, or using a sample case to explain something are useful techniques. Learners may have different attitudes and goals. In a small group you may want to pair someone who is more familiar with the topic or process with someone who is less familiar. Challenges include a more formal setting, that learners have different levels of knowledge or experience, and making sure that they understand why we are all there. Adapting the Ninja Teacher strategies to large groups is more difficult. Try to meet them where they are indicating that we are in this together. Identifying one project or person and have the entire group contribute suggestions is a good strategy when you cannot individualize to all. Active learning strategies can include iClickers, videos, debates, role-play or Jeopardy to help determine if they understand the material. Frequent polling is helpful in a large group. Often our best teaching is accomplished by being a supportive listener and setting realistic expectations within the context.
The second part of the program was “The Use of Labyrinths in Stress Reduction.” It was presented by Donna Zucker, RN, PhD, FAAN, from the University of Massachusetts, School of Nursing. She gave a history of labyrinth use to increase memory and improve learning. You cannot get lost in a labyrinth, unlike in a maze. A labyrinth is a metaphor for the twists and turns in life. Dr. Zucker has worked with the Sheriff’s Office of Hampshire County, where she has helped develop a labyrinth walking curriculum at the county jail. Currently she is completing a labyrinth walking study in high stress library environments. Dr. Zucker also introduced the Sparq Meditation Labyrinth, a portable, projected labyrinth which allows the user to select from a variety of culturally significant patterns. Labyrinth walking has been linked to decreased blood pressure and stress and improved quality of life.