WCAG AA 2.0 ADA + OA: one library\u27s story of balancing an institutional repository, a policy, values and a vendor

In the January 2018, Syracuse University passed an Accessibility policy requiring WCAG 2.0 AA compliance with the American Disabilities Act. The university also received an Office of Civil Rights complaint that required a review of the the University’s most widely used sites, once of which was the institutional repository, SURFACE (surace.syr.edu). In this presentation, I will share the story of how the Syracuse University Libraries evaluated requirements necessary for WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, and detail changes made to the institutional repository. This will include considerations and conclusions, internal collaborations within the Libraries, workflows, and project management patterns. Findings disclosed will include challenges, successes, and practical workarounds regarding accessibility and the technology infrastructures of Digital Commons that were experienced, especially impacting the discovery, metadata, and interoperability of the IR collections.As time passed, and the principles of our department and university did, as well as the dynamic with the vendor, bepress/Elsevier. As advocacy is a core element of scholarly communication (SC) work, the discussion will draw to a close with a discussion of how definitions of access to information now takes on a whole new meaning, how this influences Open Access, and why this still matters

The Cost of Paid Sick Leave

How much would it cost employers to offer paid sick leave to their employees and how does this compare to typical industry expenses? The answer to this question is important because more cities and states are considering legally requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. Such mandates would help provide paid sick leave to the 32% of private industry workers who currently lack access. However, if the costs imposed on employers are too burdensome and they significantly raise prices or reduce staffing to adjust, workers and consumers may suffer. We find for the subsectors examined, the cost to extend paid sick leave coverage to all workers is relatively minimal. For the restaurant and fast food industries, the sick leave cost would increase prime cost as a share of sales—an industry measure viewed as sustainable between 60 and 65%, by only 0.3 percentage points. The cost increase would amount to only 15% of average annual changes in total expenses, meaning it is well within the range of cost fluctuations businesses regularly adapt to. In general, we find the cost increase is relatively small when compared to overall expenses; it is no more than 0.5% of total operating expenses. Even if the entire cost increase is passed onto consumers in the form of increased prices, overall prices in the fast food industry would rise at most by 0.3%, meaning the price of $3.99 Big Mac goes up by one cent. Funds to cover the complete cost increase of paid sick leave could also come from shifting the allocation of resources among stakeholders within a firm. Publicly traded companies in the food and drinking industry, for example, could reduce the amount of share buybacks by 15% to completely cover the cost increase. Furthermore, a reasonable estimate of the benefits of reduced turnover indicates those costs savings alone could cover almost all of the paid sick leave cost increase

The Effects of RtI and Computer-Based Programs on Addressing Literacy Acquisition Skills

The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, control group design study was to investigate the effects of Response to Intervention (RtI) and computer-based programs on addressing literacy acquisition skills. This study is important because there is an inordinate number of students who are designated as requiring special education services due to a lack of reading achievement. This study is significant because the success of student achievement, and promotion from one grade to the next, hinges on students’ reading ability. This study sample was drawn from 55 first and 55 second-grade students from a Title One school in the upper state of South Carolina. The control group of first and second-grade students completed a pre and post-test using the Measure of Academic Progress English Language Arts assessment (MAP-ELA). The treatment group received computer-based supplemental literacy instruction, and the control group received traditional reading instruction. An Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) test was used to determine if there was a difference in literacy scores between students who received RtI through a supplemental computer-based program, Raz-Kids, as measured through MAP-ELA testing when controlling for the pretest. All Assumptions of ANCOVA were tested and met, concluding that the study resulted in no significant difference between students who were exposed to treatment as compared to the students who were in the control groups. Further research is recommended. Recommendations include ensuring each class is heterogeneously mixed, treatment is utilized 15-20 minutes each day, every test taker uses their time efficiently, there is a co-proctor in each group taking MAP-ELA, and there is an extra researcher to monitor the appropriate implementation of Raz-Kids

Products of Circumstance: Eighteenth-Century Runaway Indentured Servant Advertisements in a Changing Atlantic World

Although indentured servitude remained a viable source of labor in colonial America and eighteenth-century England, newspaper advertisements demonstrated the transformations of the perceptions associated with indentured servants in the midst of a changing Atlantic World. Not only were indentured servants perceived as a type of commodity in the rising consumerist culture of the eighteenth century; but, the perceptions of these individuals – reflected in runaway newspaper advertisements – changed depending upon the political, social, and economic circumstances in which they existed. The volatile nature of colonial life combined with the social, economic, and political implications of the changing Atlantic World, complicated the traditional colonial perception of an “other” and colonial America’s relationship with labor, indentured servants, and poor whites. Maintaining degrees of separation between the colonists and those defined as an “other” within the increasingly diverse colonies. Servitude in its various forms steadily increased throughout England as the changing Atlantic world created economic opportunities and cheaper access to luxury commodities such as servants for the middle class and the perception of an “other” shifted to exclude their colonial counterparts. Even as they maintained social control through the paradoxical nature of servitude and the intimate “othering” exemplified within the master-servant relationship. Although the layout of newspapers and the information included, at times, looked remarkably similar, the perceptions associated with indentured servitude vastly differed when placed in the context of the changing Atlantic World

Abolition’s Informal Gatekeepers: The Role of County Courts in the Making of Pennsylvania’s ‘Free’ Border

Because Pennsylvania was the first state to implement legislation that slowly ended slavery within the state, contests over freedom and the enforcement of where it began and ended became an essential element of Pennsylvania’s border-making policies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The struggle over the territorial extent (by which I mean legal and geographical) of Pennsylvania abolition between enslavers intent on retaining their human chattel by any means necessary and enslaved men and women intent on asserting their freedom once they touched Pennsylvania “free soil” in turn, served to solidify the geopolitical boundary of the state in the late eighteenth century as crossing the state line might mean the difference between freedom, slavery, or possible re-enslavement. Establishing and enforcing a precise territorial border was not only essential for Pennsylvania’s recognition as a newly established sovereign state independent of Great Britain but also in affecting the legal practice of gradual abolition by defining the state’s literal geographical and judicial boundary. Treaties with neighboring states, such as Maryland and Virginia, and legal disputes like the “Connecticut Claim” contributed to the solidification of the Pennsylvania border in the late revolutionary period. As concerns about Pennsylvania\u27s ability to safeguard the policies and practices of gradualism within the state increased during the antebellum era, the Pennsylvania General Assembly responded by enforcing unique border control measures that managed movement into and out of the state, be it forced or voluntary, and rearticulated the state\u27s territorial claims to freedom as defined by the state line. Clearly evident by the 1850s, Pennsylvania\u27s concern over its sovereign authority and legal jurisdiction was deeply rooted in the state\u27s history of territorial conflicts that began long before the passage of the 1780 Act. This project focuses on the intersections of geography, slavery, and the law in the decades following the passage of the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Not only did the passage of the 1780 Act reorient the legal and geographical landscapes of Pennsylvania around gradualism, but it required communities, regardless of race, status, or their personal convictions on slavery, to reconfigure their own spatial logic through the lens of free and unfree spaces. The differing interpretations of where exactly gradual freedom began and ended –in literal and imagined terms— featured prominently in court cases along the Pennsylvania state border. These cases illustrate how the 1780 Act informed individual understandings of where the state (and its legal jurisdiction) stopped and, concurrently, where Pennsylvania freedom started. While state legislators worked to define Pennsylvania’s geopolitical boundaries from on high, border-dwelling communities, both white and Black, enslaved and free, also contributed to the state’s geopolitical legitimacy through their participation in county courts on the ground

Generalized Hot Enhancons

We review what has been learnt and what remains unknown about the physics of hot enhancons following studies in supergravity. We recall a rather general family of static, spherically symmetric, non-extremal enhancon solutions describing D4 branes wrapped on K3 and discuss physical aspects of the solutions. We embed these solutions in the six dimensional supergravity describing Type IIA strings on K3 and generalize them to have arbitrary charge vector. This allows us to demonstrate the equivalence with a known family of hot fractional D0 brane solutions, to widen the class of solutions of this second type and to carry much of the discussion across from the D4 brane analysis. In particular we argue for the existence of a horizon branch for these branes.Comment: 25 pages, Late

Collaborations Infrastructure Research Support

Different organizations providing research infrastructure often co-exist within the same university, failing to benefit from each others expertise and duplicating efforts

Open Access Repositories A Review of SURFACE and other repositories

Presentation on SURFACE, Syracuse University\u27s institutional OA repository, and a review of other subject and disciplinary repository and a discussion of how green OA is different from gold OA

Introduction to Open Access

Presentation for Open Access week 2017 at Syracuse University Libraries providing an introduction to what open-access is, and how it relates to scholarly communications and publishing, copyright, and voice. A review of the types of open-access and rights as well as the history, reasoning behind open-access, and definitions

Austerity Versus Green Growth for Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is experiencing a severe economic and social crisis. The crisis conditions began emerging in the late 1990s after the collapse of a development model dependent on U.S. corporate handouts. The island is now saddled with an overwhelming and unpayable level of public debt. Various proposals for solving the crisis are now being fought over by the Puerto Rican government, its creditors, and the Financial Oversight Board established by the U.S. Congress in 2016 to manage the crisis. But the predominant idea guiding these discussions is an austerity agenda. Austerity policies in Puerto Rico now will deepen the crisis since it will lead to declining incomes, private spending and business sales, and a diminishing tax base for servicing debt. We develop a “green growth” program for Puerto Rico as an alternative to austerity. In its essentials, our green growth plan consists of two elements: large-scale annual investments in both energy efficiency and clean renewable energy. Through these investments, low-cost, domestically-produced clean energy will steadily supplant imported fossil fuels, with the target being that by 2050, clean energy sources will have replaced fossil fuels entirely in Puerto Rico. This green growth program is capable of delivering much lower energy costs on the island, while also steadily reducing, and finally eliminating altogether, its dependence on fossil fuel imports. The green growth program will also be a major new source of job opportunities and will create widespread opportunities for small-scale ownership forms to flourish within the island’s energy sector. Major debt write-downs will be necessary to enable the green growth program to move forward at a significant scale