Day/Time/Room
June 17, 2026 | 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. | HUB 214
Title: Altered State Publishing: Workshop on Designing Workflows for Alternative Publishing
Presenters:
- Mackenzie Salisbury, (she/her) Curriculum Innovation Librarian, Northwestern University
- Basia Kapolka, (she/they), Digital Humanities Librarian, Northwestern University
Description: Library publishers have developed robust workflows for digital journals and open educational resources (OER). Yet, the vast majority of our physical collections remain static, “finished” products of a traditional, often exclusionary canon. While critical pedagogy encourages students to “remix” and “intervene” in these texts, libraries lack the publishing infrastructure to legitimize and preserve these physical interventions.
This workshop proposes a new model: “Guerilla Publishing.” In this model, libraries do not just host finished books; they act as platforms for student-authored “tipped-in” pages, marginalia, and physical inserts that critique or expand the existing collection, utilizing weeded, discarded, or non-library books. Since this model challenges standard library operations, this session functions as a design charrette. Participants will work collaboratively to blueprint the infrastructure required to turn “student projects” into a “published record.”
We will allow attendees to self select into one of two core operational hurdles to engage with:
1. The Policy Layer: How do we distinguish between “defacement” and “enrichment”? We will draft a “Statement of Participatory Stewardship.”
2. The Metadata Layer: How can cataloging workflows be adapted (e.g., local notes, 590 fields, linked digital surrogates) to make ephemeral student contributions discoverable?
Participants will leave with a collaborative “Guerilla Publishing Toolkit”—a draft framework for managing student-authored physical interventions in their own libraries. This session bridges the gap between critical library instruction and the operational realities of library publishing.