Thursday, May 9, 2:30-3:30pm
Room: RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room (2200)
Textbook Training Wheels: Developing Book Templates to Support OER Production 
Matt Ruen, Grand Valley State University
Description: Producing an open educational resource (OER) often demands more than subject expertise alone. Formatting and designing a book can be as daunting an obstacle as writing the text in the first place, with many book production tools posing a steep learning curve. At Grand Valley State University, most of our library-published OER authors were familiar with software like LaTeX and InDesign, which allowed them to develop OER that look and function like books. But without dedicated support for layout and design work, we are likely missing opportunities for OER creation by other authors.
To address this gap, I am collaborating with one of our OER authors to develop and test a set of templates, beginning with InDesign, to allow authors to focus more of their time and energy on OER creation, rather than on learning the nuances of software or the norms of book production. In this short presentation, I will give an overview of the template pilot and share the resulting templates.
Findable, Impactful, Citable, Usable, Sustainable: A Rubric for Rigorous Digital Publishing
Nicky Agate, Columbia University Libraries; Cheryl Ball, Wayne State University
Description: What makes a digital publication “excellent”? Its intellectual content? Its attention to underrepresented voices? Superior discoverability? Attention to user experience? When a faculty member or student comes to us with a new publishing idea, how do we know when and why to say no (or better, when to say, “yes, but only if…”)? How do we ensure that digital projects are fully integrated into the scholarly publishing ecosystem—and are recognized and rewarded as first-class scholarly contributions? These are some of the questions that the FiCUS team—a group of library publishers, presses, and digital scholars—posed to ourselves at the 2018 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute. Our goal was to built a checklist of (more) questions that publishers could ask themselves before embarking on a new digital project, thereby lowering the risks of multimodal, expansive, or experimental digital publishing for libraries, presses, and scholars alike—and empowering us and other publishers to create digital projects that are more visible, more usable, universally accessible, and sustainable. Building on the work of the Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, the Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, and the FAIR Data Principles, we collaborated on a criteria checklist for robust, impactful digital scholarly publishing—noting standards, making recommendations, illustrating best practices, and suggesting alternatives for each element. Designed as a living, collaborate document, the draft checklist requires community input and expertise. To that end, we plan to present it for community feedback at the Library Publishing Forum, inviting attendees to work with us to test our assumptions and priorities in order to enhance and enrich it to make it a valuable resource for all.
Dive into SCUBA: A Collaborative Conference in a Box (partial)
Sarah Wipperman, University of Pennsylvania; Laurie Allen, University of Pennsylvania; Kenny Whitebloom, University of Pennsylvania
Description: Many institutions offer scholarly communications services, platforms, and tools (e.g., institutional repositories, publishing platforms), but we commonly differ in our approaches and priorities. Our needs often overlap, but it can be hard to find meaningful ways to collaborate when we have different resources and goals (e.g., number of staff).
SCUBA (Scholarly Communication UnBoxed Activity) is a blueprint for hosting events where communities work through collaborative activities (both practical and dreamy) designed to build a shared understanding of scholarly communications and to help participants think together about their practices. It is meant to broaden the conversation about the role of libraries in scholarly communication and the technologies we use and to dream up as many great ideas as possible for how we might tackle a set of sticky problems.
SCUBA is flexible in that the “divers” can choose the topics they want to address and select activities and resources that will best help them achieve their goals during their event. The SCUBA event can be held at a single institution or even with multiple institutions. As they complete activities, SCUBA divers are asked to share back their results with the larger community so that we might build a shared understanding of the issues our organizations face and find targeted collaboration opportunities.
In this hybrid presentation and workshop, we will briefly introduce you to SCUBA and how you can run an event at your university. We will then choose one or two activities to run as a group, diving into a topic of the attendees’ choice.