Day/time: May 9, 2023, 1:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. EDT

Title: Collaborative Administration of DIY Publishing Tools

Presenters:

  • Corinne Guimont, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Virginia Tech
  • Caitlin Bean, Publishing Services Specialist, Virginia Tech
  • Anita Walz, Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian, Virginia Tech

Description: For many library publishing programs, part of the program is providing do-it-yourself (DIY) publishing tools to the campus community. These tools may include PressBooks, Overleaf, Journal Management Systems, and Institutional Repositories. Every institution has their own policies and procedures in how they administer these tools, and every tool may have its own guidelines within an institution. In this presentation, we will spend the first twenty minutes introducing the tools we provide to our faculty, staff, and students at Virginia Tech, how we collaborate with each other and others on campus to administer access, and policies and procedures we have applied in doing so. We will discuss why we offer these DIY options alongside our more traditional publishing practices and why other programs may want to consider doing so as well. We will note cases where tools are administered differently and why we have made those decisions and how in some cases we have decided to mediate users. Additionally, we will discuss how we encourage users to utilize accessibility features and standards through consultations and workshops.

Then we will provide discussion questions to facilitate a conversation about how other institutions and publishing programs administer similar or different tools to their communities. Questions will focus on what DIY programs other institutions are using, policies and procedures implemented, mediation around users of tools, and more. During this discussion period, we will break up into three groups, each led by a presenter. Each group will take notes on each discussion question in their own PressBooks chapter to generate a small guide on DIY publishing tools as we go. After the session, the presenters will clean up this guide and share with session attendees.