LPC Blog

June 22, 2020

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

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 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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June 15, 2020

LPForum20: Leveraging Library Expertise for Student Journal Success

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 Stephanie Savage and Gavin Hayes

Download pptx with audio (15.6 MB)
Download pdf with notes

At the University of British Columbia undergraduate research is a growing area of interest both for students and the institution. While UBC is actively supporting increased opportunities for undergraduate research, this interest has yet to extend to student publications.  Despite the value of undergraduate journals and the central role they can play in the research process, there is little formalized support available to them and most rely on varying levels of financial and mentoring support from their affiliated departments. This presentation will outline a small grant-funded project to provide services and support for undergraduate student journals on campus as one initiative to engage undergraduates in the research process. 

To begin we will summarize the four main objectives that we entered into the project with:

1. To conduct an environmental scan of the student journal landscape
2. To manage and grow a community of practice for student journal editorial staff
3. To provide targeted professional development opportunities for student journal staff
4. To encourage journals to adopt practices and policies that will enhance sustainability in the face of high turnover rates among journal staff

We will then outline how we operationalized each of these objectives throughout the course of the project. Specifically, we will speak to the identification and outreach strategies we employed when contacting journals and will share the results of the data we collected, including the results of a survey we distributed to student journal editors asking them to share their workflows and potential areas for professional development opportunities. Additionally we will point participants to the resources we have created for the student journals and our plans to facilitate better communication and knowledge sharing among them.

We will also speak to some of the challenges of doing this work, including the difficulty of engaging students, who are often busy and hard to schedule in-person events with, and the impact of high turnover on a sustained outreach campaign.   

June 9, 2020

LPForum20: “OK Publisher”: Undergraduate Internships as a Model for Sustainable Publication

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 Jonathan Grunert, SUNY Geneseo, @j_grunert

Note: Nicole Callahan, a student editor for Proceedings of GREAT Day, contributed to the proposal and planning for the presentation at LPF 2020. The COVID-19 crisis limited her involvement in writing this short essay.

Proceedings of GREAT Day is an undergraduate research journal that shares research presented at SUNY Geneseo’s annual undergraduate research symposium. GREAT (Geneseo Recognizing Excellence, Achievement, & Talent) Day has been a campus staple since 2006, and the Proceedings began highlighting research from the symposium in 2009. 

Producing this journal has, since its founding, been a student-centered endeavor. Student editors have been the primary creators of the journal, as they communicate with authors, suggest article revisions, copyedit texts, and format the journal. Though the faculty supervisor has overseen these operations, students have been central to doing the work of publication.

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May 4, 2020

LPForum20: Make the Open Access Directory Better for All: A Library Publishers Edit-a-thon

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 Julie Goldman, Sally Gore, Lisa Palmer, and Regina Raboin

This blog post is brought to you by the Editorial Team of the Journal of eScience Librarianship. 

About the Journal of eScience Librarianship

The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) is published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that explores the role of librarians in supporting scientific research through services such as research data management, data literacy, data curation, data sharing, and librarians embedded on research teams. 

Launched in 2012 with funding from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the journal focuses on the development of eScience librarianship as a discipline, while also promoting open access and the transformation in scholarly communication. The journal emerged as an outgrowth of numerous eScience outreach projects and conference meetings that took place in New England among science and health sciences librarians, and continues now as a global effort with Editorial Board members from around the country, and a global readership.

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May 1, 2020

LPForum20: Fellows Forum

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. In this case, the post is also an entry in the ongoing Fellows Journal series. 

By Talea Anderson (Washington State University) and AJ Boston (Murray State University), 2019-21 Library Publishing Coalition Fellows

AJ Boston, Apr. 24: Hi Talea. Thanks for agreeing to transition our Fellows Forum panel for the 2020 Forum into this collaborative blog post. The way I imagine this going is that we write back and forth in a shared Google Doc, prompt each other about the topics we broadly recognize the other had an interest in speaking about at the Forum, and then spiral out organically from there. A caveat to that “organically” being that we can edit and condense as we go along. (I’ll refrain from editing this initial block of text, for the sake of the reader.) Before I hop into some of the questions I have about your experience as an LPC Fellow, is there anything you want to add?

Talea Anderson, Apr. 27: Thanks, AJ—this sounds great. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is how you talked early on in the fellowship about your experience with libraries and library publishing as a parent. I think, in light of COVID-19, that type of reflection might be of particular interest to others in this community. It’s so challenging right now juggling work, kids…mental health….

AJ, Apr. 27-28: Yes! I saw someone on Twitter say they wanted to give 100% to parenting or working, rather than half-assing both. I feel like that. Our five-person household has been homebound almost every day for the past six weeks. Within that span of time, I was originally scheduled to attend the Library Tech Conference, present at the in-person Library Publishing Forum, and coordinate my campus student scholars week. 

The last thing I did in-person was coordinate a statewide student poster event at our capitol in March. Virus warning signs were beginning to really register, but public response hadn’t caught up yet. The SXSW cancellation announcement came just the day after we held our event, and that was the first Big Announcement that I can recall. LPC announced the cancellation of the in-person Forum on the following Monday. I felt guilty not canceling our poster event, but I was still bouncing back from a tremendous family loss a couple weeks earlier. In hindsight, I see why my judgment was cloudy.

The campus scholars week event I coordinate was scheduled for April, and by that time students were attending class remotely. I was working from home by then too. In light of the burden that students and teachers were facing with the transition to remote learning, we held a virtual version for those students who genuinely needed the opportunity and we postponed work on our companion student journal. A fraction of the students who would normally have participated did so; I respect each student who opted out. I wasn’t teaching this semester, so I can only imagine what this abrupt shift has been like for them. My closest glimpse to the post-apocalyptic Zoomiverse is my service on the LPC Program Committee. 

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