Forum Reflections

January 14, 2025

DEIA Committee Report on the Library Publishing Forum 2024 Demographic Survey

By Nancy Adams

The development and use of this survey was based on the recommendations found in the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This is a charge carried out by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. The 2024 survey was made available to Library Publishing Forum (LPF) attendees in order to understand who attends the Forum. Moreover, this survey helps us track demographic changes over time. (View the reports on the 2023 and 2022 surveys.)

The 2024 Forum was an in-person event held May 15 and 16, 2024 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This may explain the smaller number of registered attendees and higher percentage of survey completion than the virtual forum in 2023. Comparing responses between this year and last year allows us to gauge demographic trends across different conference formats. But we recognize the forum that would be the most comparable to this year’s is the in-person portion of the 2022 Forum. However, since that event was significantly smaller than this year’s, it might not serve as an effective baseline. The 2024 Forum may instead function as the baseline for in-person conferences going forward.

Notes

As all questions were optional, not all questions were answered. Therefore, numbers/counts may not always add up. The respondent information includes both LPF attendees and presenters.

Summary of responses and comparisons

The 2024 LPF had 154 registered attendees, while 2023 had 267 and 2022 had 330 registered attendees (246 were virtual while 84 were in-person).

We received 66 responses to the demographic survey from 2024 LPF attendees, which is an increase in the response rate, but a decrease in total number of responses (86 in 2023, 83 in 2022). The response rate in 2024 was 42%, compared to 26% in 2023 (a virtual/in-person combination), and 36% in 2021.

In 2024, the age of forum attendees ranged from 20 to 60+. Most were between 40-49 years in age (38%), with the next closest range being between 30-39 years in age (34%). This is similar to the 2023 forum. In comparison, the majority of the 2022 forum respondents ranged between ages 30-59.

This year’s results show a decline in attendees identifying as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), from 14% in the 2023 survey to just 6% in this year’s. (Again, the 2023 Forum was all virtual and had a larger number of registrants overall, so meaningful comparisons are difficult.) Participants were given the opportunity to share additional details about their identity. One person who identified as BIPOC shared they were Asian American. The only other respondent did not identify as BIPOC; they used this field to report they were White. In 2022, 20% of respondents selected race and ethnicities typically contained within the phrase BIPOC. Those options included Asian, Black, Hispanic or Latina/o/x, First Nations, Native Americans Alaska Native, or Metis, and I didn’t as another race/ethnicity/Unknown.

Of the 65 responses to the question on gender, most (79%) respondents were women, which is a slight decrease from previous years. Additional responses include men (15%), non-binary (4%), and genderfluid (2%). Participants were also given the option to share additional information on their gender identity. Only one person responded, sharing that though they had identified themselves as a woman in the previous question, they do not identify with their gender.

Only 37 people responded to the question related to having a disability. Most of these (76%) shared they did not. About 22% of those who responded to this reported having a disability, compared to 29% in 2023 and 17% in 2022. Since 2022, respondents now also have the ability to include an explanation or alternative response to this question. These additional responses included chronic conditions, migraines, OCD, and ADHD.

Since 2023, respondents are asked whether they identify as neurodivergent. In 2024, there were 39 responses to the question on identifying as neurodivergent. About 31% of these responses identified as neurodivergent.

In 2024, all respondents indicated they were employed full time, 2 respondents also indicated they were students. In 2023 92% of respondents were employed full-time with 95% reporting full-time employment in 2022.

Beginning with the 2023 survey was the open response question about any other identities. Less than 10 people used this field to share information on their ethnicity (Ashkenazi Jew), sexuality (bisexual, queer), their predominant language (non-English dominant speaking), their political views (socially conservative), their religious culture (Christian), and their caretaker roles (parent, mom).

New to the 2024 survey was an open response asking if something could have been done to make the conference more accessible for attendees. We received 9 substantive responses. Several focused on better audio, consistent use of microphones was specifically mentioned several times, and exploring the possibility of captioning as part of the slide desk display. Others suggested several accommodations for individuals that use mobility aids or may not be able to stand for longer periods. Related to the food service, one respondent asked for more consistent labeling of potential allergens.

Final Comments

The 2024 LPF was entirely in person, while the 2023 LPF was online and the 2022 LPF was hybrid. Moving forward, virtual and in-person years will alternate. This shift in format will need to be considered when evaluating demographic surveys in future years and the comparisons across years.

We recommend that future forum planning committees incorporate accessibility recommendations, as suggested by attendees of this year’s in-person forum. We also recommend thoughtful efforts to reach and engage a more diverse representation of library publishing professionals. Some ideas from previous notes and discussions include coordinating opportunities for in-person/virtual meet-ups for BIPOC library and publishing professionals, establishing a group for BIPOC library publishing professionals, and providing professional development funding and/or mentorship programs for BIPOC library publishing professionals. We also recommend that the Library Publishing Coalition create and regularly issue a census of its committee members and program participants.

We hope that the next in-person forum planning committee will incorporate the recommendations made by this year’s attendees.

The Library Publishing Coalition’s DEI Committee members are incredibly appreciative of the many LPF participants who took the demographic survey during this year’s Forum.

We welcome LPF participants and LPC members to contact us at inclusion@librarypublishing.org if you have additional resources or feedback you would like to share to help us improve our work.

September 20, 2024

Reporting out on the finances of the 2024 Library Publishing Forum

By Melanie Schlosser

This is the third of three planned report-outs on this year’s Library Publishing Forum. The other two were on our COVID policy and on the closing plenary discussion. Check them out!

Conference finances are tricky – ask anyone who has ever planned a multi-day, in-person event. Costs are sometimes unpredictable and revenues almost always are. The last four years have added additional complexities for many conference planners, including wildly fluctuating attendance and binding hotel contracts for events that were forced to go virtual. Conference finances also tend to be somewhat mysterious to attendees, who can be left wondering what their registration fees actually cover and whether the event is intended to break even or to make money for its organizers. We at LPC are big fans of transparency, so we have decided to report out publicly on the financial details of the Library Publishing Forum. We did this once before (as part of a series of reflections on the 2021 virtual Forum), but our plan is to make it a regular component of Forum planning going forward. To that end, this post will report out on the finances for the in-person Forum held in May of 2024 in Minneapolis, MN. We hope that this post will serve as a resource for fellow conference planners, as well as helping our community better understand the decisions we make around the event.

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Water with the word reflections in all caps with a horizontal line above and below

August 13, 2024

A 10-Year Vision for Library Publishing (LPForum24 Closing Plenary Reflection)

By Melanie Schlosser

The 2024 Library Publishing Forum opened with a keynote address that looked back on LPC’s first 10 years. Katherine Skinner reflected on the formation of the community, its original goals, and what it has accomplished. For long-time community members, the talk was a trip down memory lane. For newer folks, it was a stellar orientation. It also fit beautifully with our 10th anniversary theme for the conference, but it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it provided grounding for the real conversation we wanted to have at the event: where we want to be 10 years in the future.

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June 24, 2024

Reflecting on the 2024 LPForum COVID policy

By Melanie Schlosser

A back view of Katherine Skinner, keynote speaker, with McNamara Memorial Hall in the background — Katherine Skinner gives the keynote at the 2024 Library Publishing Forum. Image credit: Adria Carpenter/U of M Libraries

Multiple groups within LPC spent months developing a COVID policy for this year’s in-person Library Publishing Forum. Now that the event is behind us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how the policy was developed, how it worked in practice, and the feedback we received from the community. I hope that this blog post, in conjunction with the policy itself, will serve as a resource for other conference planners.

Policy recap

Our COVID policy was designed around three principles:

As the organizers, we have a responsibility to provide the safest possible conference for our community. In the same way that we provide attendees with chairs to sit on and meals to eat, and speakers with microphones so that everyone can hear them, it is our job to provide attendees with a safe conference environment.
Each attendee has a responsibility of care to the rest of the community. This principle is grounded in our community Code of Conduct, which lays out an expectation that community members will follow health guidelines.
The policy needed to be flexible enough that attendees could determine which precautions were possible for them without having to disclose private medical information to conference staff and other attendees.

Once these principles were clear, the policy itself was fairly straightforward: we would provide masks, tests, supplemental air filtration, and boxed meals that could be taken outside; and attendees would manage their own COVID precautions (encouraged by copious and emphatic messaging before and during the conference). There is more detail in the full policy, including a list of precautions that we encouraged attendees to take, but the overall message was that everyone needs to do their part.

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Banner image for 2020 Virtual Library Publishing Forum

July 28, 2020

LPForum20: Publishing Reality: Developing a Publishing Model For Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Their Related Pedagogical Materials

By Nancy Adams

Editor’s note: When we changed the 2020 Library Publishing Forum to a virtual conference format, we gave presenters the option of converting their presentations into blog posts. This is a guest post in that series.

By David Scherer, Hannah Gunderman, Matthew Lincoln, Rikk Mulligan, Emma Slayton, and Scott Weingart (Carnegie Mellon University)

How does one publish something that is intended to be a completely immersive and interactive experience such as those designed for Virtual Reality (VR)? How does one convey the subjective experiences of emulated real-world environments? That is the challenge of defining a publishing service model for documenting the experiences of AR and VR. In 2019 representatives from the Carnegie Mellon University digital Sciences, Humanities, Arts, Research and Publishing group (dSHARP) collaborated with faculty from CMU’s English Department to publish materials related to Shakespeare-VR, https://dh-web.hss.cmu.edu/shakespeare_vr/.

The Shakespeare-VR project uses virtual reality technologies to bring students face-to-face with professional actors performing Shakespearean soliloquies in a replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse. Beyond Publishing the VR experiences, dSHARP examined the complexity of publishing the accompanying OER-based pedagogical materials produced by Shakespeare-VR. As dSHARP has continued working with colleagues from CMU’s Department of English, a need arose to develop an AR/VR Portal where researchers and scholars designing AR and VR experiences with accompanying pedagogical materials could publish and share their scholarship.

This presentation will discuss the new initiative at CMU to produce and publish materials related to the experiences of AR and VR through using our institutional repository, KiltHub and its connection to the primary web presence of the Shakespeare-VR Project. This presentation will discuss the background and complexities of working with and documenting AR and VR, and how the challenges of working with AR and VR could be addressed at scale. This presentation will also explore how future library publishers can assist in adding context to the publishing of AR and VR materials, and how these could be incorporated into future OER-based pedagogical materials to teach the design, construction, and use of AR and VR.

Watch/access and download the presentation, a PDF of the presentation slides with notes, and a PDF of the presentation slides without notes from the Carnegie Mellon University KiltHub Repository.

July 2, 2020

LPForum20: So you’ve been rejected from MedEdPORTAL: Demystifying Open Access to Medical Educators

By Nancy Adams

By Hannah J. Craven and Rachel J. Hinrichs

Introduction to MedEdPORTAL

Medical educators at our institution are encouraged to publish open educational resources (OERs) in the journal MedEdPORTAL. Published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), MedEdPORTAL is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for medical education scholarship that is now indexed in MEDLINE. These publications contain complete curricula, including objectives, instructor guides, slides, and assessments, ready to be implemented in the classroom. The intended students for the curricula should be training or practicing physicians or dentists, but could also include members of other health professions, as long as there is at least one physician or dentist learner in the classroom. For teaching faculty interested in applying for promotion, MedEdPORTAL can demonstrate the quality of their teaching materials through peer-review, citation counts, and other usage reports.

The Issue

Despite submitting high quality curricula, medical educators receive rejections from the MedEdPORTAL 62% of the time. Reasons for rejection include insufficient educational context and assessment, mismatch of educational objectives and instructional content, and failure to build on existing curricula. Of immediately rejected submissions, 90% also have copyright issues. These copyright issues stem primarily from the use of third-party images. MedEdPORTAL is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and therefore has strict requirements for copyright and licensing images in the education materials. These requirements can be difficult for medical educators to navigate.

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July 1, 2020

LPForum20: Accessibility beyond web standards for improving User Experience

By Nancy Adams

By Israel Cefrin, PKP

Background

Improving the usability of Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a current concern and goal of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Since the OJS3 release in 2016, PKP has undergone usability testing to assess current and new features. Likewise, this version was the first to include a better approach to navigate in the Dashboard using the keyboard to manage submissions. For accessibility purposes, the interaction with a website must include keyboard navigation, since it is considered a basic concept of input. Hence, any interface needs to allow users to interact with it using a keyboard only rather than a mouse.

Since this initial effort in 2016, PKP is aware of accessibility issues in OJS that could prevent the use of the software by people with disabilities (PWD). These issues are related either to the dashboard or user interface and the public reader interface which is managed by themes.Currently, OJS themes that PKP shares to the community are responsive. These themes are templates that adapt the look and feel of journals. They can be used with small screens like smartphones or tablets, but are not fully accessible for desktop users.

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June 30, 2020

LPForum20: Leveraging a Library Journal for Grounding and Growing a Library Press Journal Program

By Nancy Adams

By Tracy MacKay-Ratliff, Perry Collins, Chelsea Johnston, and Laurie Taylor

Collaboration as Foundation

Launched in 2018, SOURCE has evolved into a recurring publication and hallmark of the LibraryPress@UF (LP@UF) program. While building upon a familiar model of the in-house magazine, SOURCE increasingly serves as a platform for public scholarship that draws on contributions from the University of Florida Libraries’ employees, students, and partners. Situated within a very large academic research library with almost 300 employees and seven branches across campus, the magazine makes visible the individuals who bring projects to fruition and highlights connective threads across units and collections. SOURCE has featured 27 unique authors in its three published issues.

SOURCE relies on a collaborative editorial model, with a standing committee made up of volunteers from across the Libraries, a representative from Libraries Communications, and the four-person LP@UF team. This team—the authors of this post—act respectively as Editor-in-Chief (Laurie Taylor), Managing Editor & Designer (Tracy MacKay-Ratliff), and Associate Editors (Perry Collins and Chelsea Johnston). The committee meets on at least a quarterly basis and participates in generating and soliciting feature articles, but we have increasingly placed responsibility for final review, copyediting, and proofreading on LP@UF to avoid an onerous process of collation-by-committee.

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June 30, 2020

LPForum20: Peer-to-Peer Blended Learning: A Model for Training Undergraduate Journal Editors

By Nancy Adams

By Calvin Chan, Christopher Chan, Shelby Haber, Portia Rayner, Keanna Wallace, and Nadiya Zuk
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta Canada, @URIUofA

The life of an undergraduate journal is often a tumultuous one – each journal has its fair share of ups and downs. Yearly editor turnover, ineffective training, and poor team cohesion can result in the collapse of undergraduate journals. New editors may not feel prepared to handle journal workflow or make editorial decisions. This can make them less likely to be invested in the journal’s long-term success.

Last year, student editors at Spectrum, an undergraduate interdisciplinary journal at the University of Alberta, designed and organized a new editor training model. Unlike past years, which used a more traditional seminar-style training, the model focused on blended learning and team-building activities to train new editors during a weekend-long workshop. Compared to previous years, this training experience resulted in increased team unity, more communication between new and returning editors, and improved understanding of the editorial workflow.

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June 22, 2020

LPForum20: Institutional Repository Collaboration: Providing Flexibility and Responsiveness with Hyku

By Nancy Adams

By Gretchen Gueguen and Amanda Hurford

Introduction

Partnering consortia, PALNI (the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) and PALCI (the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium) are collaborating on a new initiative to produce an affordable, open-source, collaborative institutional repository (IR) solution based on the Hyku software. By creating a shared platform, the two consortia hope to create a flexible and responsive repository service — one they can manage collaboratively in order to respond to both longstanding and emerging IR needs presented by their constituents.

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