Posts by Nancy Adams

June 4, 2024

Understanding the Revised ADA Title II: Implications for Library Publishing

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Accessibility is a critical issue for all library activities, but library publishing has a unique set of opportunities and challenges in this area, including web accessibility and production workflows. With ADA Title II regulations going into effect by the end of June, it is important for library publishers to understand what role they will play. The Library Publishing Coalition and the Library Accessibility Alliance will co-host a webinar on this topic on Tuesday, June 18, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time.  

Join Pete Bossley, former Deputy ADA Coordinator at The Ohio State University and current Senior Manager of Accessibility at Thomson Reuters for a 60-minute webinar (30-minute presentation followed by Q&A) about the revisions to ADA Title II and its implications for library publishing. He will discuss what public entities need to know about their obligations under the new regulations, and what organizations serving these entities can do to support them in meeting those requirements. Angel Peterson, Production Specialist and Accessibility Coordinator at Penn State, as an expert in both digital accessibility and library publishing, will facilitate the Q&A. 

This webinar is critical for all library publishers LPC and LAA members as well as the broader library community to understand these revision requirements and what’s at stake. 

LAA will host the webinar and include American Sign Language interpretation and captioning. A recording of this event will be shared publicly for those who aren’t able to attend.  

This collaborative effort between LPC and LAA is just the first in an ongoing partnership. While libraries and library publishers are beholden to publishers and their platforms, this new partnership seeks to set a path to meaningful collaboration and action toward ensuring our content and systems are accessible.

Speakers

Peter Bossley is an experienced digital accessibility leader, having spent 17 years professionally in the technology field. He currently leads accessibility specialists at Thomson Reuters, working to make products accessible to the widest audience possible. Prior to his role at Thomson Reuters, he led the digital accessibility compliance program at The Ohio State University. He has also provided consulting services to customers in the private and public sector including nationwide retail and food service, state and local government, as well as being an expert witness in federal court for a national disability rights organization. As a person with a disability himself, but with a strong understanding of the challenge of implementing accessibility at scale, he brings a unique and balanced perspective on accessibility issues. He is a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

Angel Peterson is the Production Specialist and Accessibility Coordinator with Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing program. She provides production support for monographs and bibliographies as well as document and web accessibility support and training for all publication types. She has been on the Board of the Library Publishing Coalition since 2023.

Webinar Details

Understanding the Revised ADA Title II: Implications for Library Publishing

Tuesday, June 18, 2024 at 12 PM EDT

Register for Understanding the Revised ADA Title II

May 30, 2024

LPC welcomes Érudit as a new strategic affiliate

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The Library Publishing Coalition is delighted to welcome Érudit as a new strategic affiliate! A statement from Érudit:

With over 5 million users a year, Érudit is Canada’s leading platform for disseminating research in the humanities and social sciences. Supported by an inter-university consortium, it provides French and English research communities with a range of services in digital publishing and dissemination. Érudit works with the Public Knowledge Project in Coalition Publica, a partnership to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Together, we are supporting the social sciences and humanities journal community in the transition towards sustainable open access.

And a statement from LPC on the new relationship:

This new relationship with Érudit builds on our existing partnership with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and our ongoing support of the Canadian community of library publishers (most recently via the Canadian Community Development Working Group). Having both PKP and Érudit as affiliates will allow us to continue to develop our relationships with each community and with their joint endeavor, Coalition Publica. The Canadian library publishing community is a developing model for other regional and consortial publishing efforts, and it is one that LPC is excited to learn from.

Strategic affiliates are peer membership associations who have a focal area in scholarly communications and substantial engagement with libraries, publishers, or both. See our list of strategic affiliates or learn more about the program.

LPC Strategic Affiliates icon

May 8, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Manifold

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Manifold
Website: https://manifoldapp.org/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Manifold works with presses and publishers to create enhanced digital publications that are linked to audio and video files, interactive maps, and other kinds of digital resources. It is an open source project, and libraries have used it most often to create Open Educational Resources, utilizing the reading group and annotation features that Manifold has built to optimize classroom uses. We’ve also seen it used in the library space to give students the chance to become publishers themselves — to assemble and annotate archival material, anthologize their own writings, or to create new editions of classic texts.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We recently released Version 8 of Manifold, which includes a rich text editor so that project creators can make changes to files they’ve ingested into the platform. We’ve tried to make the platform very intuitive and user friendly for everyone, but this is a big step forward in that process. Accessibility has also been an ongoing priority of our work and development of the platform, and we’ve been taking steps to make sure that the Manifold experience, whether that is simply reading, or annotating and engaging, or creating your own project, is as accessible to as many people as it possibly can be.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

A number of our team members are librarians, or have experience working in libraries. We’ve found that libraries and Manifold tend to be “on the same page” in terms of expanding offerings in the open access space, and providing low or no-cost educational materials to students. It has been great to work with library publishers and digital humanities centers to think creatively about what is possible to publish in Manifold; many of these experiments have driven our development of the platform. Recently we’ve seen art exhibit catalogs, audio archives and podcasts, textbooks, all sorts of cool projects coming from this space.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We look forward to seeing some of our users who regularly attend our virtual Manifold Community Meetups in person! It’s also always exciting to see what other projects in the space have been up to, and to check in on the bigger picture things — the state of open infrastructure and the larger institutional questions that a lot of folks are thinking about.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

We are a team of about a dozen working from three locations: the CUNY Graduate Center in New York; the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis; and the development firm Cast Iron Coding in Portland (Oregon). We’ve been meeting regularly online for about a decade now. Every once in a while we get together in person in one of our cities for a more in-depth, in-person discussion, meetings that have been known to lead into late night sessions in bars … Our official team portraitist Jojo Karlin does a lot of the artwork for our releases, and often makes scarily accurate drawings of our team which she calls “doodles.”

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May 7, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Pressbooks

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This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Pressbooks 
Website: https://pressbooks.com/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books. We partner with organizations to support open education initiatives, institutional publishing programs, curriculum development projects, and more.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Pressbooks works with over 500 educational institutions, including many higher education systems and consortia. As we’ve added more of these statewide and regional partners, we’ve been learning more about their unique needs so we can make sure our product fits those needs.

Over the past several months, we’ve worked closely with eCampusOntario, a consortial client, as a co-development partner helping us design new administrative features for this part of our community. We’re excited to launch the result of that work, our new Shared Network Plugin. It’s currently in beta testing, but we’ll be launching it broadly soon. This new feature set will make it easier for system and consortia clients to empower their members and manage how they use Pressbooks to create and share knowledge effectively across their member networks through streamlined administration, enhanced analytics and more.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

At Pressbooks, we love the commitment that library publishers have to making knowledge more accessible (whether that’s through open educational resources or other initiatives). Empowering knowledge sharing is at the heart of Pressbooks’ mission as a company, and so we’ve always found great alignment with those who work in library publishing.

Also, libraries are at the point of the proverbial spear with regard to information and digital transformation. It’s exciting to work with library publishers because they have been eager to embrace the possibilities of digital transformation when it comes to publishing and sharing information. Lots of great ideas and experimentation come out of this community.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Post-pandemic it’s still a bit novel to be able to meet up with people in person, so we’re looking forward to the unique energy that comes from in-person meetings. A lot of long-time Pressbooks clients will attend this meeting, and we always love connecting with our user community and hopefully making new friends. Open education is a strong thread through this year’s conference, so it will be great to listen and learn about what others are seeing and doing in this space. We’re also excited to host two panel sessions on Thursday morning, “From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiative,” and “Growing OER Publishing Programs: Watershed Decisions that Drive Impact.”

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The team at Pressbooks is made up of people who rally behind the mission of making knowledge sharing more accessible. We have a lot of publishing pros, bibliophiles, open source advocates and edtech evangelists. Our founder/CEO, Hugh McGuire, is a familiar face for many in the OER publishing space from his work with Pressbooks as well as The Rebus Foundation. Another longtime colleague, Steel Wagstaff, was an enthusiastic Pressbooks customer supporting open publishing at the University of Wisconsin Madison before he joined the team and became our product manager. Julie Curtis will be at the Forum on behalf of Pressbooks. Julie, our VP Growth & Strategy, has spent much of her career in education technology helping institutions navigate the intersection of digital learning and open educational resources. Together with several of our institutional partners, Julie created the Open Education Maturity Model as a framework to help institutions in this work, and she’ll be presenting this model during the “From OER to Open Press” panel session.

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