We’re Open Access—But Are We Accessible?

The open access movement, from the Budapest and Berlin declarations onward, has consistently focused on removing economic and legal barriers to scholarly information. While this has increased access to research for many, it implicitly assumes that content need only be online, free, and openly licensed for everyone to have access—an assumption which neglects the barriers that may lurk within content, preventing disabled or impaired users from enjoying the same access to scholarship. This assumption is as prevalent in library open access services as elsewhere; like many other repository teams, we have focused on recruiting content, not evaluating it. This year, with strategic priorities from the university and library increasingly focused on accessibility, we are challenging that assumption. However, as we began asking whether our repository content was accessible, we realized that not only did we not know the answer, we didn’t know where to start asking questions! To remedy this, we partnered with accessibility experts on campus, explored best practices for accessibility, and developed a rubric for evaluating repository content. Through a subsequent “accessibility audit” we identified opportunities to change policies and practices, in order to make our open access content more truly accessible. In this presentation, we will describe this accessibility audit: the resources and expertise which helped us understand what to evaluate, the tools we developed to guide our analysis, what we learned about our repository materials, and the changes we are making in response to what we learned. We will share and discuss our rubric and also suggest some best practices for Digital Commons administrators. Through this discussion, we hope to spark a conversation about how repository managers can balance the time and opportunity costs of improved accessibility with the benefits of making open access research truly accessible

FRE 202: Intermediate French II: Language and Culture OER Curation

This OER curation is an annotated bibliography of prospective OER for the GVSU course FRE 202: Intermediate French II: Language and Culture. The instructor requested particular attention to materials related to inclusive (e.g., gender-inclusive) language and writing, as well as Francophone culture outside of France itself. Note: this bibliography was assembled by searchers not fluent in French, which limited our ability to exhaustively search French-language collections

The Case for OER as the Advancement of Knowledge/Creative Expression

The nature of scholarly and creative activity, at Grand Valley State University and across the higher education sector, is rapidly evolving. Amidst this ongoing transformation, the characteristics of OER – free access plus permission for adaptation – empower Grand Valley’s teacher-scholars to share their expertise with a global audience and simultaneously remove barriers to education for Lakers. This memo, submitted for consideration by the University Academic Senate at GVSU, argues that the creation of OER can demonstrate several of the forms of scholarly activity described by Boyer (1990) as well as the criteria established for the Advancement of Knowledge or Creative Expression category. By recognizing the potential for OER to meet the same criteria as peer-reviewed papers, scholarly books, or externally reviewed trade publications, the University Academic Senate will recognize and support faculty who engage in the significant intellectual and creative effort of developing high-quality, peer-reviewed OER

A Good SCAM for Building Connections: Scholarly Communications Activity Mapping

Are you looking for new ways to connect with faculty? Do you know how to best support faculty publishing? Grand Valley State University Libraries has developed a scholarly activity mapping template to document current scholarly and creative practices of faculty. The data gathered can be used to identify unmet faculty scholarly needs and reveal new opportunities to build relationships with faculty. Over the last several years, our liaison librarians have worked to closely integrate library instruction services into the curriculum of their liaison areas through the use of instruction plans. At the same time our research and publishing support expanded, largely driven by faculty needs in these areas. These two threads combined in 2016 as a group of librarians collaborated to develop a framework for exploring and documenting research practices across the university. By mapping current scholarly activity, we are gathering information that can strengthen library connections with faculty, identify needs our services can meet, and inform our instruction and collection development. A few liaison librarians are piloting this new scholarly activity map for the 2016-2017 school year. Challenges and lessons learned will be shared, in addition to benefits already noticed and future plans for utilizing these scholarly activity maps more broadly. In this poster presentation we will describe the process of developing our template, challenges we have encountered, and the progress of our pilot project. This poster will be of interest to academic librarians looking for new opportunities to connect with faculty, especially liaison, subject, and scholarly communications librarians. The information and resources we share will help academic libraries grow a scholarly communications program and expand support for faculty research activities. In addition to the poster, we will share copies of our current scholarly activity mapping template and the documents that inspired this project

Choose Your Own Initiative: Exploring the Landscape of OER and Textbook Affordability Programs

Congratulations! Your college or university is ready to plan (or maybe expand!) a campus-wide initiative focused on Open Educational Resources or other textbook alternatives. But OER and affordability programs vary widely in scope, funding, and strategies, described in articles, book chapters, and news stories. At Grand Valley State University, library OER supporters faced this situation when our faculty senate established a task force to identify university-wide strategies for OER and affordable course materials. To help this task force hit the ground running, we surveyed the landscape of programs at other institutions, identified organizations actively engaged in OER work, and selected readings on related issues. The resulting background report gave our task force members a shared foundation of knowledge, models to borrow from, and ideas for their subsequent work. We are now excited to share this resource with a wider audience, especially anyone looking for ideas and inspiration in their own OER initiatives. If the variety of potential OER support strategies is daunting or you aren\u27t sure where to start, go to Takeaway 1. If you\u27re excited by the wide open world of OER and want to know more about the background report, go to Takeaway 2. If you\u27re a savvy OER traveler with expertise to share, go to Takeaway 3. Takeaway 1: This poster presentation shared highlights from our environmental scan and illustrated how our context made some models particularly good (or bad) approaches for a campus initiative. Takeaway 2: We also shared the latest version of this living document and discuss our Summer 2019 work to make it useful to a wider audience. Takeaway 3: Education is sharing, so please share with us! We invited participants, and invite online readers, to suggest new examples, resources, and relevant readings for this compilation, as well as new ideas for OER initiatives. Leave a note on our poster, strike up a conversation, or join in online

OER & Textbook Affordability Initiatives: an Introduction

An overview of initiatives and programs supporting the use and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER) or other Affordable Course Materials at higher education institutions. The report also identifies relevant organizations, addresses related issues in higher education and the textbook industry, and provides further readings and resources on OER. This was originally assembled as background and reference materials for the 2018-2019 University Academic Senate Task Force on Open Educational Resources and Affordable Course Materials, at Grand Valley State University (Allendale, Michigan). It was subsequently revised and expanded in Summer 2019. The report focuses primarily on the Michigan context, and is intended to be illustrative, rather than exhaustive

Open Partnerships: Identifying and Recruiting Allies for Open Educational Resources Initiatives

Cummings-Sauls, Ruen, Beaubien, and Smith extend conversations about OER-enabled partnerships by exhaustively describing the roles and responsibilities harbored by potential stakeholders in OER initiatives and highlighting the ways in which librarians might instigate partnerships between these groups. By clearly identifying the stakes of library, faculty, student, administrative, instructional design, information technology, and bookstore partnerships, the authors promote a sort of inventory for how and why we might meaningfully engage these local audiences in support of OER. Looking beyond our institutions to the broader external communities, legislation, and services related to OER, this chapter introduces the importance of considering how conversations might (and ultimately 8 OER: A FIELD GUIDE FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS should) scale to include metrics that are worth sharing outside of our respective institutions

Exploratory Evolution: Using Participatory Change to Rethink and Reorganize Digital Collections Services

Change is the only constant in digital collections work. Evolving technologies, resources, and needs require a constant flexibility in not only what work is done, but how and by whom. Over the course of the 2017-2018 academic year, Grand Valley State University Libraries held a series of facilitated conversations to analyze the workflows, organizational structure, and overall support for the management of digital collections and repositories. This article summarizes the facilitation process and highlights areas of opportunity, aspirations, and future directions