Last week, my place of work announced that the university campus was going to be primarily online for the upcoming fall semester. From my understanding, the qualifier of primarily is being used because there are some professional programs that have compulsory in-person components such as in clinical nursing.
Replicating hands-on or lab components of classes are a particular challenge in the present moment. How do you replace what an anatomy class might mean to a medical student? When you are training students to do work in a chemistry lab, what do you do when you no longer have a lab to work in?
I have taken my fair share of lab courses and, to be honest, I recall many of them were stressful. I always felt the pressure of being on the clock and having to finish a series of steps towards an outcome that was unclear to me. To be honest, young me would have preferred the option of watching a lab instructor with a go-pro strapped to their forehead, going through the experiment on my behalf.
But watching another person complete a jigsaw puzzle is not the same as doing the jigsaw puzzle yourself.
How can we create rich, online or at-home experiences with choice and agency?
One answer is, The Future of Big Tech.
It’s not the future you think I mean. I’m referring to the 10 minute game The Future of Big Tech which available as pay-as-you-can from Coney’s Pop-Up Playhouse [from the menu, click on : 2+ Players > The Future of Big Tech]
Coney is a UK-based interactive theatre group whose work I’ve been casually following for some years now. I’ve only recently started exploring their online options. This past weekend, I played Big Tech Future with my kids and I really appreciated the opportunity to have a conversation of what the experience meant to them afterwards.
screenshot from The Future of Big Tech
I’m being vague here because I really don’t want to spoil the experience as it is one that you really should try. But if you are feeling apprehensive about putting on your headphones and diving in, I will tell you a bit of what you can expect.
Once you choose your character, you will hear a short description of who you are and how you live in a particular future. You will pick up a phone call and during the call, you will be given choices to make. There are no loud or sudden disturbing noises during the call and the game ends in under ten minutes.
I’m so impressed how much this game achieves in such a short time. I also appreciate that the designers recognized that by dividing the experience into two, the game creates an easy entry into conversation afterwards, as each participant will want to ask the other for their side of the story.
I do not have a good understanding of what academic librarians are currently teaching students in regards to evaluating information they find on the Internet. Rather than read the literature, I searched for the word CRAAP in my custom Google Search Engine for Ontario Academic Libraries. I found that many libraries – including my own place of work – advocate the use of the CRAAP checklist-approach to evaluating information found online.
I have never been particularly enthusiastic about the CRAAP checklist approach to evaluating information and I know that I’m not the only librarian who feels this way. But until recently, if you had asked me what I would suggest as an alternative, I would have struggled to articulate the structure of what to replace it.
As my last series of posts can attest, I have been recently creating creative-commons licensed learning objectswith H5P through eCampus Ontario. I am doing so because in these unprecedented times much of the teaching on the university campus has transitioned to asynchronous online learning and as such, I believe that my teaching should transition as well.
This presentation introduces the reader to the COR (Civic Online Reasoning) Curriculum and the SIFT Method. Both are comprised of a short series of steps to help the reader separate fact from fiction on the Internet. Both methods are built from the strategies employed by professional fact-checkers.
I also found his post, A Short History of CRAAP as particularly enlightening. My jaw dropped a bit at this particular connection:
So when the web came into being, library staff, tasked with teaching students web literacy, began to teach students how to use collection development criteria they had learned in library science programs. The first example of this I know of is Tate & Alexander’s 1996 paper which outlines a lesson plan using the “traditional evaluation criteria of accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage.” ….
… So let’s keep that in mind as we consider what to do in the future: contrary to public belief we did teach students online information literacy. It’s just that we taught them methodologies that were developed to decide whether to purchase reference sets for libraries.
On Saturday night I had a Zoom call with a friend of mine from high school. My friend prefaced our chat with a warning that she was going to keep the conversation short because video calls are exhausting. I heartily agreed. During this call, my daughter and her son would grace our screens and through them, excitedly shared what game-spaces in Roblox they go to play and hangout in, with their friends.
This difference between exhaustion and joy struck me. I didn’t think it was because of any particular characteristic of our respective generations, but I couldn’t entirely place why the reactions were so very different. But then on Sunday morning, during the time in which I dedicate to my longreads collected from a week’s worth of tweets and newsletters, I found an answer that made a lot sense to me.
That essay was Home Screens by Drew Austin from the web publication, Real Life. After I finished, I promptly took to twitter to share my recommendation for everyone to read it. Here’s a passage from it, dedicated to Zoom:
Pure economic exchanges can relocate to screen interactions with a minimal loss of fidelity, but encounters meant to be less instrumental are proving harder to sustain without the texture of physical space. Most of the apps we use for interaction simply unbundle an informational component from the scene of social contact. This was sufficient under ordinary circumstances, when messaging and video conferencing apps merely complemented in-person exchanges. But now those tools leave users wanting more, failing to substitute the richness and depth that interaction in physical space could otherwise provide.
Consider, for example, the video-conferencing platform Zoom. During the quarantine’s first few weeks, it emerged as a flexible (albeit insecure) tool for conducting interactions that could no longer happen face to face, rapidly expanding beyond its established domain of business meetings to accommodate gatherings ranging from happy hours to dinner parties to dates. But rather than providing support for adjacent activities, as an app like Slack does for office work, Zoom replaces those activities altogether. In other words, users experience Zoom more as a stultified form of virtual reality than an augmented one, because it feels as though there is very little off-screen reality available to augment right now.
Drew Austin, Home Screens, Real Life, April 27th, 2020
I’m writing about this essay on this blog rather than my more technology focused outlet, because I want to start exploring this understanding that there is something fundamentally different between ‘virtual libraries’ and ‘augmented libraries’.
In Home Screens, Austin draws on one of my favourite written works from last year:
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell makes an eloquent case for the importance of place as a site of non-transactional human relations. As an example, she describes how, for many, public transportation is “the last non-transactional space in which we are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different destinations for different reasons.” She goes on to summarize Louis Althusser’s contention that true societies can emerge only within spatial constraints, where individuals live in bounded proximity without the ability to easily disperse. In such settings, individuals have no choice but to encounter one another repeatedly and establish durable connections based upon a firmer foundation than the exchange value those relationships promise. This represents a quite different logic than that of an app that enables hiring random (and often unseen) strangers to perform tasks for us at a social distance.
Another non-transactional space in which residents are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different ‘destinations’ for different reasons, is the library.
I don’t mean to spoil the concluding passages of Joanne McNeil’sLurking: How a Person Became a User, but I can’t ignore the connection that I see here:
Librarians are what the internet is aching for — people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future. There needs to be rituals in place online to treat people — users — with dignity, both for the living and the dead. For to speak of the humanity of internet users is to recognize the impermanence, the mortality of that humanity.
Everyone is welcome in a library just for being. A person in a library is a person: homeless or not, hurting or not. My dream for the internet, as a final form, is a civic and independent body, where all people are welcomed and respected, guided by principles of justice, rights, and human dignity. For this, users would express care in return, with a sense of purpose and responsibility to the digital spaces organized with these values. With the internet routing through a planet that is the origin of more than a hundred billion lives, such a project means information in abundance. Segmenting and clustering users and history into communities, rather than mass-purpose platforms, would be an integral component to this ideal internet in its cycles of maintenance and renewal.
I haven’t been a public librarian in over twenty years now, so I am going to limit the following thoughts on augmented vs virtual library space in an academic library context.
First, let us consider that more students come to the library to study rather than to actively engage with library-provided materials, print or otherwise. Does this suggest that the academic library has a responsibility to provide online study space for students?
But let’s not think of virtual spaces. Let’s not try to reimagine the library through an Oculus Rift. Let’s try to start with something a little manageable. Something a little more humane.
With our ability to roam the physical environment necessarily compromised, our platforms – Netflix, Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, etc. etc. – have taken on an even greater significance as the sites of our work and leisure. But how do we inhabit them in psychogeographic terms, as virtual spaces that shape our behaviours and emotions? Is it possible to find alternative paths to the passive consumption modalities that a data-driven culture industry expects of us? Can we amble through our platforms in ways unforeseen by their designers? And understand their infrastructures better through our experiments and investigations?
Ergo, a psychogeographical approach to platform studies as a means to engage with these infrastructures in novel ways (please note: I am not a licensed psychogeographer).
It delights me to no end that Devon published the above as I was writing the draft of this post because I also want to speculate that perhaps we should investigate sound as a platform (please note: I am a licensed psychogeographer).
We don’t all play games the same way. One useful means by which we can categorize types of players by their style of play is through the use of Bartle Types, named after Richard Bartle who formed the characterizations from observing participants playing MUDs:
So, labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they’re always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).
I’m not aware of any system that categorizes university students by their behaviours and motivations and this, I think, is for the best. It is useful to remember that there will always be a percentage of students who are in the process of trying to create or discover their own motivations and personal identity, especially when we are working with young people.
I don’t think I have properly articulated why I’ve become so intrigued by H5P. I only became aware of the H5P Framework once it was made available through eCampus Ontario for Ontario educators in the university and college some months ago. Once I learned that the HTML5 based framework allowed for both accessible and lightweight learning objects (slide presentations, quizzes, simple puzzles) that could be embedded in systems such as Blackboard, WordPress, and Drupal, I invested in the time to learn more. I’m particularly impressed that most of the items I’ve found in both Laurier’s and eCampus Ontario’s catalogues have been licenced openly to encourage re-use.
Here’s a presentation I created using the framework earlier this week:
For the last three weeks, I’ve been spending some time playing around with the formats of H5P, as previous posts in the ludo series can attest.
From the exploration I’ve done this week, I believe that by labeling the H5P format a ‘Personality Quiz’, we might be overlooking that we could use this mechanic to weigh imperfect answers and present the most compelling choice after a series of questions. This might prove to be a more efficient means of guiding a user to a particular answer rather than presenting a large number of binary choices in which every answer is a single end-node of a decision tree.
For example, in a library context we present to the user a list of different databases they might want to use when they perform research. In my place of work, each librarian chooses a subset of options and lists them on a single page, often separated into groups. Here’s the list of resources that I’ve put together as the liaison librarian for UWindsor’s School of Environmental Science: http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/earth-science
I try not to overwhelm the reader with too many choices and have opted to group the options from most specific to more general and then added some options for tools from related disciplines at the bottom of the page. This layout requires the reader to review the entire page of options before making a choice.
But what if I also presented the choices via a quiz to make this decision-making more palatable?
Screen capture of behind the scenes…
This is clearly not going to be as fun as a Buzzfeed Quiz, but it may be a better means to convey to the reader why there are so many available options and that some options may be better for some specific purposes than others. If you have any advice or experiences with this quiz – good or bad – please leave a comment and let me know.
I’m still interested in exploring further and trying other tools of Interactive Fiction to help a reader or researcher navigate through their research journey. I am working on an idea that I hope to showcase in the near future. I’m not going to tell you exactly what I’m hoping to achieve but I will let you know that it is going to be themed around the idea of the manifesto.
I’ve decided to assign all the game-related posts here with the label of ludo. The word ludo is likely related to the words, luden and lusory that you can learn more about from my first-games related post in this series.
Ludo is the name the Danes call the game that Canadians would call Sorry… unless those Canadians were The Dream Warriors, and in that case they would call itLuuuuuudi… lulululu luuuuudi…
Now Ludo or The Game of the Goose are not very good examples of games that can be used for educational purposes. They are not even particularly interesting games. The only people who like to play these Candyland-like racing games are small children. My theory is that they like it only because they haven’t figured out that no amount of magical thinking is going to change the outcome of the game once it starts. The cards or the dice determines who wins and who loses and there is no way for a parent to (legally) intervene if it is apparent that said small child is not emotionally able to handle losing.
(This is why we buy Hoot Owl Hoot! for our friends’ small children instead of Candyland).
Sid Meier, the (Sarnia-born!) game designer of Sid Meier’s Pirates and Civilization, is thought to have said “a good game is a series of interesting decisions.” Now, I don’t believe Meier believes that interesting decisions is the only characteristic that defines a game, but I do agree with him — games with meaningful and interesting decisions, lead themselves to become be games.
“It’s easier to look at it as what is not an interesting decision,” says the legendary creator of Civilization. If a player always chooses the first from among a set of three choices, it’s probably not an interesting choice; nor is a random selection…
… Interesting decisions are persistent and affect the game for a certain amount of time, as long as the player has enough information to make the decision – when early choices can ruin the game experience down the road, developers need to present them in a fashion appropriate to that…
Systems that allow for branching can be quite powerful. They form the fundamental mechanic behind simple quizzes: if you choose the right answer, you are awarded a point and can move to the next question in the series; and if you choose incorrectly, you are given an opportunity to try again, or to proceed to the next scenario but just without a score.
Branching systems also make possible the genre of games/writing called IF or Interactive Fiction. I have played several IF games and I believe they exist as this wonderful space in and between game and story and they expand the way we think about and appreciate text in games.
I am an aspiring game designer in the same way that so many people are aspiring writers. I have been meaning to design games for several years now but despite my good intentions, I haven’t found a way to sit down and do the work.
I have done some self-reflection on why I fail to start particular projects. My conclusion is that I am prone to suffer from analysis paralysis. For example, despite wanting to grow a vegetable garden for many years, it was only until I signed up with a local gardening subscription program that prescribes all the major decisions for me, that I was able to move from intention to action.
To overcome this inertia around game-design, I am going to use what has almost always worked for me in the past: I am going to write a series of blog posts on games and try to develop simple prototype to showcase in these posts.
My intention is not to develop one, singular and epic, amazing game but to create many tiny games that will hopefully improve in their design over the course of their creation. Years ago, I remember listening to a game designer once advise, “Your first 99 games are going to be terrible so you are best to get them over with as soon as possible.” While I didn’t make use of this advice, I kept these words tucked away for future use. I love that this game designer’s simple directive is a distillation of the oft-told Ceramics Assignment story.
My goal is not to become a full-time game designer. What I am hoping for is a better understanding of how I can create well-designed games for play and learning at home, in the classroom, and in the library.
But where to start?
Well, let’s try the beginning.
What’s the first image that comes to mind from the words, board game?
Chances are, you thought of something that looked like one of the boards above.
Candyland, Sorry, and Snakes and Ladders are all ‘racing games’ that are variations of ‘The Game of the Goose‘ – a game that has been around since the end of the 15th century.
I have played many, many, many Game of the Goose Game variations with my children when they were young. Yes, these games were boring for me but my children loved playing them. As we played together, I experienced a not-insignificant-amount of pride and joy watching my children slowly mastering the adding and subtracting of numbers. While I will always recommend playing such games with small children over making them do worksheets (*shudder*) there is no getting around the fact that these games are boring to grown ups.
And you might be thinking, how could such a boring game been so well-played for so much of history?
The answer to that question is, is the same answer to why adults (used to) gather together and play the children’s game of BINGO: gambling
Traditionally, game of the goose games are played with two dice, although they can be designed to be played by flipping a coin, as this game board that I found in Villains Beastro illustrates:
Over the course of my life, I have made quite a few ‘Game of the Goose’ board games. When I was in my elementary school years, many of my independent study projects were a combination of a racing game board and Trivial Pursuit, which was all the rage at the time.
I will share with you the last Game of the Goose Game I made. I made it some weeks ago when I was suffering from a particularly bad bout of paralysis and thought I would try to solve it with a little game theory. I took a bunch of index cards and cut them up. On each strip, I wrote down something I had been meaning to do – both pleasant (play the video game version of Walden) and less pleasant (spend 25 minutes cleaning the garage) and arranged them on a board. When I found myself spending more time weighing what I should do next than actually doing something, I rolled a die and let fate dictate my next action.
Keeping in the spirit of my self-imposed challenge, I spent part of this morning trying to make a Game the Goose prototype using the H5P Toolkit.
While I’m happy that I was able to come up with a movement mechanic for this one-person game, I don’t believe the end-product is a particularly fun experience. Still, here it is for your enjoyment:
Like so many other aspects of our lives, working on the game has felt like three steps forward and two steps back.
But I am trying not to forget that this still means progress.
I have decided that the character that I am going to embody for this quarantine is an advocate of games.
You may notice that I did not use the word gamer to describe this role. The reason why I do not call myself a gamer is because to do so would suggest that the world is made up of gamers and non-gamers. I don’t believe that such a division exists. I believe we are all Homo ludens.
Homo Ludens is a book originally published in Dutch in 1938 by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. The Latin word ludens is the present active participle of the verb ludere, which itself is cognate with the noun ludus. Ludus has no direct equivalent in English, as it simultaneously refers to sport, play, school, and practice.
Let’s re-read that last line again: … Ludus has no direct equivalent in English, as it simultaneously refers to sport, play, and … school??
When I first read the above, the inclusion of school in that list threw me. But then it reminded me of something that I read some time ago from Marshall McLuhan’s work, The City As Classroom (1977):
The book begins with this:
I would like to bring your attention to this directive: “Look up the root meaning of the word ‘school’ (schola < Greek σχολή).
I have done a lot of reading about games since I took this particular stance. And in that time, I have become much more open to the educational potential of not only games but toys, puzzles, and above all, play.
“We should keep in mind that the Greek word for education, “paideia” is rooted in the words for child and play: “pais” and “paidia“… Huh. How about that.
As I try to best embody the character of as advocate of games, I hope to share what I have learn as I work and play from home.
When I was a child, the walls of books in the adult section of our modest public library always filed me with unease and even dread. So many books that I would never read. So many books I suspected – even then – that were never read. I was under the impression that all the books were so old that the authors must all be dead. Unlike my refuge – the children’s section of the library, partitioned by a glass door set in a glass wall – this section of the library was dark and largely silent. The books were ghosts.
I am imagining a library that is made up of two distinct sections. These sections may be on separate floors. They may be in separate buildings. But these sections must be separated and distinct.
One of these sections would be ‘The Library of the Living’. It would be comprised of works by authors who still walked on the earth, somewhere, among us. The other section would be ‘The Library of the Dead’.
When an authors passes from the earthly realm, a librarian take their work from the Library of the Living and bring it, silently, to the Library of the Dead.
And at the end of this text was this:
“We don’t have much time, you know. We need to find the others. We need to find mentors. We need to be mentors. We don’t have much time.”
In the inbox of the email address associated with MPOW’s institutional repository are more than a dozen notifications that a faculty member has deposited their research work for inclusion. I should be happy about this. I should be delighted that a liaison librarian spoke highly enough of the importance of the institutional repository at a faculty departmental meeting and inspired a researcher to fill in a multitude of forms so their work can be made freely available to readers.
But I don’t feel good about this because a cursory look of what journals this faculty member has published suggests that we can include none of the material in our IR due to restrictive publisher terms.
Institutional repository managers are continuously looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their repositories. One way to do this is to create a more inclusive repository that provides reliable information about the research output produced by faculty affiliated with the institution.
Bjork, K., Cummings-Sauls, R., & Otto, R. (2019). Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 7(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2220
I read the Opening Up… article with interest because a couple of years ago, when I was the liaison librarian for biology, I ran an informal pilot in which I tried to capture the corpus of the biology department. During this time, for those articles from publishers who did not allow publisher PDF versions of deposit and authors who were not interested in depositing a manuscript version, I published the metadata of these works instead.
But part way through this pilot, I abandoned the practice. I did so for a number of reasons. One reason was that the addition of their work to the Institutional Repository did not seem to prompt faculty to start depositing their research on their volition. This was not surprising as BePress doesn’t allow for the integration of author profiles directly into it’s platform (one must purchase a separate product for author profiles and the ability to generate RSS feeds at the author level). So I was not particularly disappointed with this result. While administrators are increasingly interested in demonstrating research outputs at the department and institutional level, you can still generalize faculty as more invested in subject-based repositories.
But during this trial I uncovered a more troubling reason that suggested that uploading citations might be problematic. I came to understand that most document harvesting protocols – such as OAI-PMH and OpenAIRE – do not provide any means by which one can differentiate between metadata-only records and full text records. Our library system harvests our IR and it assumes that every item in IR has a full-text object associated with it. Other services that harvest our IR do the same. To visit the IR is to expect the full text of a text.
But the reason that made me stop the experiment pretty much immediately was reading this little bit of hearsay on Twitter:
Yes quantifying difficult! But we know that Scholar will not index IRs with < 25% full-text. Mistake to think CRIS = IR. Different
Google and Google Scholar are responsible for the vast majority of our IR’s traffic and use. In many disciplines the percentage of Green OA articles as a percentage of total faculty output is easily less than 25%. To publish citations when the fulltext of a pre-print manuscript is not made available to the librarian, is ultimately going to test whether Google Scholar really does have an full-text threshold. And then what do we do when we find our work suddenly gone from search results?
Yet, the motivation to try to capture the whole of a faculty’s work still remains. An institutional repository should be a reflection of all the research and creative work of the institution that hosts it.
If an IR is not able to do this work, an institution is more likely to invest in a CRIS – a Current Research Information System – to represent the research outputs of the organization.
Remember when I wrote this in my post from March of this year?
When I am asked to explain how to achieve a particular result within scholarly communication, more often than not, I find myself describing four potential options:
– a workflow of Elsevier products (BePress, SSRN, Scopus, SciVal, Pure)
– a workflow of Clarivate products (Web of Science, InCites, Endnote, Journal Citation Reports)
– a workflow of Springer-Nature products (Dimensions, Figshare, Altmetrics)
– a DIY workflow from a variety of independent sources (the library’s institutional repository, ORCiD, Open Science Framework)
But I think the investment in two separate products – a CRIS to capture the citations of a faculty’s research and creative output and an IR to capture the fulltext of the same, still seems a shame to pursue. Rather than invest a large sum of money for the quick win of a CRIS, we should invest those funds into an IR that can support data re-use, institutionally.
(What is the open version of the CRIS? To be honest, I don’t know this space very well. From what I know at the moment, I would suggest it might be the institutional repository + ORCiD and/or VIVO.)
I am imagining a scenario in which every article-level work that a faculty member of an institution has produced is captured in the institutional repository. Articles that are not allowed to be made open access are embargoed until they are in the public domain.
But to be honest, I’m a little spooked because I don’t see many other institutions engaging in this practice. Dark deposit does exist in the literature but it largely appears in the early years of the conversations around scholarly communications practice. The most widely cited article about the topic (from my reading not from a proper literature review), is this 2011 article called The importance of dark deposit from Stewart Sheiber. His blog is licensed as CC-BY, so I’m going to take advantage of this generosity and re-print the seven reasons why dark is better than missing:
Posterity: Repositories have a role in providing access to scholarly articles of course. But an important part of the purpose of a repository is to collect the research output of the institution as broadly as possible. Consider the mission of a university archives, well described in this Harvard statement: “The Harvard University Archives (HUA) supports the University’s dual mission of education and research by striving to preserve and provide access to Harvard’s historical records; to gather an accurate, authentic, and complete record of the life of the University; and to promote the highest standards of management for Harvard’s current records.” Although the role of the university archives and the repository are different, that part about “gather[ing] an accurate, authentic, and complete record of the life of the University” reflects this role of the repository as well.Since at any given time some of the articles that make up that output will not be distributable, the broadest collection requires some portion of the collection to be dark.
Change: The rights situation for any given article can change over time — especially over long time scales, librarian time scales — and having materials in the repository dark allows them to be distributed if and when the rights situation allows. An obvious case is articles under a publisher embargo. In that case, the date of the change is known, and repository software can typically handle the distributability change automatically. There are also changes that are more difficult to predict. For instance, if a publisher changes its distribution policies, or releases backfiles as part of a corporate change, this might allow distribution where not previously allowed. Having the materials dark means that the institution can take advantage of such changes in the rights situation without having to hunt down the articles at that (perhaps much) later date.
Preservation: Dark materials can still be preserved. Preservation of digital objects is by and large an unknown prospect, but one thing we know is that the more venues and methods available for preservation, the more likely the materials will be preserved. Repositories provide yet another venue for preservation of their contents, including the dark part.
Discoverability: Although the articles themselves can’t be distributed, their contents can be indexed to allow for the items in the repository to be more easily and accurately located. Articles deposited dark can be found based on searches that hit not only the title and abstract but the full text of the article. And it can be technologically possible to pass on this indexing power to other services indexing the repository, such as search engines.
Messaging: When repositories allow both open and dark materials, the message to faculty and researchers can be made very simple: Always deposit. Everything can go in; the distribution decision can be made separately. If authors have to worry about rights when making the decision whether to deposit in the first place, the cognitive load may well lead them to just not deposit. Since the hardest part about running a successful repository is getting a hold of the articles themselves, anything that lowers that load is a good thing. This point has been made forcefully by Stevan Harnad. It is much easier to get faculty in the habit of depositing everything than in the habit of depositing articles subject to the exigencies of their rights situations.
Availability: There are times when an author has distribution rights only to unavailable versions of an article. For instance, an author may have rights to distribute the author’s final manuscript, but not the publisher’s version. Or an art historian may not have cleared rights for online distribution of the figures in an article and may not be willing to distribute a redacted version of the article without the figures. The ability to deposit dark enables depositing in these cases too. The publisher’s version or unredacted version can be deposited dark.
Education: Every time an author deposits an article dark is a learning moment reminding the author that distribution is important and distribution limitations are problematic.
There is an additional reason for pursuing a change of practice to dark deposit that I believe is very significant:
There are at least six types of university OA policy. Here we orga-nize them by their methods for avoiding copyright troubles…
3. The policy seeks no rights at all, but requires deposit in the repository. If the institution already has permission to make the work OA, then it makes it OA from the moment of deposit. Otherwise the deposit will be “dark” (non-OA) (See p. 24) until the institution can obtain permission to make it OA. During the period of dark deposit, at least the metadata will be OA.
Having a more complete picture of how much an article has been cited by other articles is an immediate clear benefit of Open Citations. Right now you can get a piece of that via the above tools I’ve listed and, maybe, a piece is all you need. If you’ve got an article that’s been cited 100s of times, likely you aren’t going to look through each of those citing articles. However, if you’ve got an article or a work that only been cited a handful of times, likely you will be much more aware of what those citing articles are saying about your article and how they are using your information.
Regier takes Elsevier to task, because Elsevier is one of the few major publishers remaining that refuses to make their citations OA.
I4OC requests that all scholarly publishers make references openly available by providing access to the reference lists they submit to Crossref. At present, most of the large publishers—including the American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press, PLOS, SAGE, Springer Nature, and Wiley—have opened their reference lists. As a result, half of the references deposited in Crossref are now freely available. We urge all publishers who have not yet opened their reference lists to do so now. This includes the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, IEEE, and Wolters Kluwer Health. By far the largest number of closed references can be found in journals published by Elsevier: of the approximately half a billion closed references stored in Crossref, 65% are from Elsevier journals. Opening these references would place the proportion of open references at nearly 83%.
Furthermore, releasing citations as OA would enable them to be added to platforms such as Wikidata and available for visualization using the Scholia tool, pictured above.
So that’s where I’m at.
I want to change the practice at MPOW to include all published faculty research, scholarship, and creative work in the Institutional Repository and if we are unable to publish these works as open access in our IR, we will include it as embargoed, dark deposit until it is confidently in the public domain. I want the Institutional Repository to live up to its name and have all the published work of the Institution.
Is this a good idea, or no? Are there pitfalls that I have not foreseen? Is my reasoning shaky? Please let me know.
Introduction: Secret Feminist Agenda & Masters of Text
I am an academic librarian who has earned permanence – which is the word we use at the University of Windsor to describe the librarian-version of tenure. When I was hired, there was no explicit requirement for librarians to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Nowadays, newly hired librarians at my place of work have an expectation to create peer-reviewed scholarship, although the understanding of how much and what kinds of scholarship count has not been strictly defined.
On my official CV that I update and submit to my institution every year, these peer-reviewed articles are listed individually. Under, “Non-referred publications”, I have a single line for each of my blogs. And yet, I have done so much more writing on blogging platforms compared to my peer reviewed work (over 194K words from 2006-2016, alone). And my public writing has been shared, saved, and read many, many times over my peer-reviewed scholarship.
Now, as I have previously stated, I already have permanence. So why should I care if my blog writing counts in my work as an academic librarian?
That was my thinking, so I didn’t care. That is, until a couple of weeks ago when a podcast changed my mind.
McGregor’s podcast is part of a larger SSHRC-funded partnership called Spoken Web that “aims to develop a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development, and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond”.
The first was when their conversation turned to scholarly creative practice (around the 16 minute mark):
What did we learn about scholarly podcasting… How and when and where we create new knowledge, that’s what we call scholarship, generally, right?
Secret Feminist Agenda, 3.26
Their conversation about what counts as scholarship and how it can be valued is a great listen. And it opened the possibility in my mind to consider this writing a form of creative, critical work.
While most of my public writing is explanatory or persuasive in nature, there is definitely a subset of my work that I would consider a form of creative practice. I know that these works are creative because when I sit down to write them, I don’t have an idea of the final form of the text until it is finished. I am compelled to work through ideas that I feel might have something to them, but the only way to tell is to get closer.
The second passage that struck me comes in at the 52:26 mark, when Hannah tells this story:
Hannah: I met a prof at the Modernist Studies Association Conference a few years ago who was telling me that he does a comic book podcast with a friend of his and they’ve been doing it for years and it has quite a popular following, and I was like, “Oh, awesome! Do you count that as your scholarly output?” and he said “No, I don’t need to. I have tenure.” And I was like, “Well, but, couldn’t you use tenure as a way to break space open for those who don’t but want to be doing that kind of work? Isn’t there another way to think about what it means to have security as a position from which you can radicalize?”, but that so often doesn’t seem to prove to be the case.
Ames: “Well, and now we’re back to that’s feminist thinking -what you said there and what that person is illustrating is not feminist thinking…”
Secret Feminist Agenda, 3.26
Oof. Hearing that bit was a bit of a gut-punch.
I can and will do better.
That being said, I’m not entirely sure how my corpus of public writing should be accounted for. Obviously, the volume of words produced is not an appropriate measure. Citation counts from scholarly works might be deemed a valuable measure as but many scholars deliberately exclude public writing from their bibliographies, I feel this metric systematically undervalues this type of writing. And while page views and social media counts should stand for something, I don’t think you can make the case that popularity is an equivalent of quality.
