Community Calls | Library Publishing Coalition

three people in a circle representing the LPC Community Calls

LPC’s Professional Development Committee coordinates Community Calls on various topics, providing a chance for LPC participants to informally discuss topics of interest to the community. These calls are open to anyone at an LPC member institution and invited guests. They are not recorded, since the priority is to create a low-pressure space for discussion, but there are often notes documents that can be shared with those who weren’t able to attend.

Date	Topic	Series or Organizing Group	Additional info
9/24/25	AI and Accessibility Remediation	Crossover: quarterly accessibility touch base calls AND Professional Development Committee AI series	Community members share the ways in which they are using AI tools for accessibility remediation; discussion on efficacy, risks, etc.
8/6/25	AI and Scholarly Publishing: Continuing the Conversation	Professional Development Committee	Follow-up discussion to Forum closing keynote on AI.
5/14/25	Preservation Community Call	Preservation Working Group	Call to gather feedback on the Preservation Working Group’s draft one-pagers
4/15/25	Community Call on Threats to DEIA Work	Anti-Racism Community Calls
3/26/25	PKP Platforms Community Call	Platform Accessibility Community Calls	We invited the three platforms that answered our accessibility questions to talk to the community in a community call.
3/25/25	Pressbooks Community Call	Platform Accessibility Community Calls	We invited the three platforms that answered our accessibility questions to talk to the community in a community call.
3/20/25	Janeway Community Call	Platform Accessibility Community Calls	We invited the three platforms that answered our accessibility questions to talk to the community in a community call.
2/28/25	Documentation Month closing community call	2025 Documentation Month	All other events were webinar-style; this was the only community call during Documentation Month.
12/3/24	2nd accessibility check-in community call	ADA Title II revisions check-ins	At the last community call, we decided to have a quarterly check-in until the revisions to Title II take effect.
11/4/24	Community call with library leaders		We invited 5 current or former library deans/directors to talk to the community about their experiences in leadership
8/12/24	LPC Community Call on ADA Title II revisions (follow up to webinar)	ADA Title II revisions check-ins	Follow up to 6/18 joint webinar with Library Accessibility Alliance
2/29/24	Documentation Month: Accessibility and your Campus Institutional Repository: A Conversation	Documentation Month	Conversation on how universities can approach the challenge of making institutional repository content accessible. Informal, interactive discussion covering workflows, expectations, and pinch points.
2/15/24	Documentation Month: Google Docs Accessibility	Documentation Month	Presentation on how to make Google Documents more accessible to readers regardless of (dis)ability. Topics covered included how to structure your Google Doc for accessibility, how to make images in it legible to those who use assistive technologies, and how to use color in your Google Doc to support readers with no / low vision and color blindness.
2/8/24	Documentation Month: Video Content Accessibility	Documentation Month	Presentation exploring best practices for creating video captions and documenting captioning workflows.
2/1/24	Documentation Month: PDF Accessibility	Documentation Month	PDF accessibility presentation by Penn State Libraries Open Publishing on how to add tags, check the reading order, add alt text, and make sure content is accessible for all. This workshop included a presentation, hands-on practice PDF, and a Q/A session.
11/28/23	Labor Series: Pay Equity and Precarity	Labor Series	A discussion on pay equity, pay precarity, precarious employment, and how can the LPC community learn about and address these issues. Attendees also looked at and discussed the Collective Responsibility project and Best Practices for Archival Term Positions.
11/2/23	Labor Series: Labor Organizing	Labor Series	A discussion on labor organizing in libraries and how or whether there are special considerations for those in library publishing. LPC members talked about their involvement with the unions formed at their academic institutions followed by questions and discussion. Topics covered included the relationship between LPC and labor, the benefits of unions, other kinds of collective action, and motivations for organizing.
10/19/23	Labor Series: Disability in the Workplace	Labor Series	A discussion on disability as it is impacted (and even constructed) by the structures around us – including physical spaces, formal policies, and informal/unspoken expectations. Attendees worked to collaboratively identify opportunities for increasing accessibility at the systemic level. Topics covered included the structures, policies, or workplace customs that impact disability and what aspects of disability are supported or less well-supported.
10/05/23	After Twitter	Staff	A discussion about social media in the library publishing community, including how our community uses social media, how members like to hear about LPC news and events, and how they’d like to interact with other members around the Forum and throughout the year.
9/21/23	Labor Series: Burnout and Overextension	Labor Series	A discussion on burnout and overextension as structural issues in library publishing. Attendees worked to collaboratively identify the larger causes and common threads of burnout and how to address overextension in our field.
1/31/23	Anti-Racism Community Call	Anti-Racism Community Calls	Community Call to discuss LPC’s definitions for DEIA practice and the importance of centering the voices of BIPOC library publishing workers. Attendees shared insights, challenges, and actionable next steps they plan to take.
11/28/22	Ethical Framework for Library Publishing (feedback session)	Ethical Framework Task Force	Session organized by the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing Task Force in order to get feedback from the community on a new draft version of the Ethical Framework. Participants were able to discuss the framework and their responses/reactions to it with the committee.
10/20/22	Digital Preservation	Preservation Task Force	This discussion covered the ways in which library publishers are addressing the need to preserve their outputs. The Preservation Task Force shared their progress on surveying the existing preservation support landscape and asked participants to give feedback on their findings in light of their own preservation experience.
9/20/22	Expansive Digital Publishing		This community call discussed the ways in which we can support “expansive digital publications,” That is, the publication of digital projects and other forms of work that utilize web and digital technologies to enable scholarship beyond traditional publishing. The discussion covered challenges, preservation, collaboration, multimedia publishing, digital humanities projects, and how to support these projects.
4/28/22	University-Based Publishing Futures	Board/staff	Discussion of the University-based Publishing Futures project, a collaboration with AUPresses and ARL. Attendees considered the library publishing community’s practices and values and our current relationship to the larger landscape of “university-based publishing,” particularly the challenges and opportunities involved in collaborating with university presses.
2/24/22	Documentation Month: Documentation Needs Workshop	Documentation Month	This workshop provided an in-depth presentation on and discussion of how to get started with the documentation process, including figuring out what needs to be documented, how to plan for creating it, and best practices.
2/14/22	Documentation Month – Getting Started with Journal Publishing Workflows	Documentation Month	This workshop provided a brief introduction to the Library Publishing Workflows (LPW) project, the methods the project team employed, example documentation, and the reflection tools necessary to make the documentation useful and actionable. Participants then spent some time sketching out documentation for one or more of their workflows and reflecting on practices through the paradigm of the LPW reflection and assessment tools.
2/07/22	Documentation Month – kick off call	Documentation Month	A community call to discuss documentation practices and to host small-group breakouts for the establishment of accountability groups. Accountability groups are a useful tool to encourage steady progress on asynchronous goals. Attendees formed groups, discussed what they wanted to achieve, how they would work together and support each other, and what their next steps would be.
2/4/22	Anti-Racism Community Call	Anti-Racism Community Calls	During this community call, attendees were assigned to small breakout groups to review and discuss draft definitions for some key terms and the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. Attendees discussed how LPC can continue to engage deeply in this work.
3/25/21 (rescheduled from 2/18/21)	Documentation Month – Policy Documentation	Documentation Month	This discussion covered the resources that are available to help you write policy documentation, examples of policy documents that other library publishing programs have created, the kinds of policies your program might need, and the kinds of tools and scaffolding you might need to create policy documentation.
2/25/21	Documentation Month – wrap up call	Documentation Month	A call for reflection, discussion, and documentation show-and-tell to wrap up Documentation Month 2021. Topics included documentation formats, preservation, collaboration, and the challenges of documentation work.
2/10/21	Documentation Month – Library Publishing Workflows	Documentation Month	Presentation on the Library Publishing Workflows project, a two-year (2019-2021) IMLS-funded project to investigate, synchronize, and model a range of workflows to increase the capacity of libraries to publish OA journals. This presentation covered the initial workflow documentation process, including interviewing publishers about their workflows, and the process of creating visualization of those workflows.
2/01/21	Documentation Month – kickoff call	Documentation Month	This call was an opportunity to learn about documentation Month and the LPC resources available to support creating documentation. The discussion covered documentation needs, challenges, benefits, and success strategies. Attendees also had the opportunity to join accountability groups to encourage each other throughout the month.
1/15/21	2021 Peer Mentorship Program		This informal call was an opportunity for current and former peer mentors to reflect on their experience in the LPC Peer Mentorship Program, and for prospective participants to ask questions. Participants said they found the program beneficial and prospective participants were eager for the opportunity to make connections.
10/19/20	Janeway	Platforms	Informal discussion-based call between library publishers and representatives for the Janeway journal publishing platform with no presentations. In general, current users liked Janeway’s accessibility, elegant workflows, and lauded about the excellent attention and support from the platform’s development team. Areas for improvement include content migrations and support for content other than journals.
7/30/20	Creative Staffing Solutions		A general and open-ended discussion of library publishing staffing situations, questions, and solutions with no presentations. Librarians discussed what services they offer and their staffing challenges. They explored solutions including learning how to say “no”, providing templates and guidelines, and developing clear MOUs.
2/08/20	Pressbooks	Platforms	Informal discussion-based call about the PressBooks publishing platform with no presentations. Library publishers discussed hosting options, types of publications, and the pros and cons of the platform. The consensus was that the PressBooks is easy to use, appealing aesthetically, and well-suited to open education resources while somewhat lacking in terms of flexibility and usage statistics.
1/12/20	DOI Registration Services		Informal discussion-based call between library publishers and representatives from Crossref and Datacite about their Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registration services. Topics discussed included workflows, DOI visibility, and what kinds of content should get DOIs.
11/05/19	OJS	Platforms	Informal discussion-based call about the Open Journal Systems publishing platform with no presentations. The discussion covered hosting OJS, upgrading to OJS 3, migrating journals to OJS, HTML and XML publishing, strategies for training editorial teams.
1/30/19	WordPress	Platforms	A conversation between multiple library publishers who are using or are interested in using WordPress as a publishing platform. Attendees discussed the types of publications they use WordPress for and the pros and cons of the platform. Several attendees noted that successful publishing with WordPress requires considerable expertise with the platform.