Hi everyone,

Thanks for a great meeting today. As it turns out we couldn’t triangulate a date for next month’s meeting, so here’s a Doodle poll with March meeting possibilities. Please vote, and also feel free to suggest other dates/times, too!

http://www.doodle.com/iqixemmmc5eznn6s

Best,
Maura

Hi everyone,

Thanks for a great meeting today. As it turns out we couldn’t triangulate a date for next month’s meeting, so here’s a Doodle poll with March meeting possibilities. Please vote, and also feel free to suggest other dates/times, too!

http://www.doodle.com/iqixemmmc5eznn6s

Best,
Maura

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

Hi everyone,

Just want to give this a bump in your inboxes — if you haven’t already, please vote for a meeting time as soon as you can, thanks!

Best,
Maura

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

Thanks for voting! Let’s call it for Monday, March 26th, from 3-5pm.

Polly, can we get that room in the Library at the GC again? Thanks for considering.

Best,
Maura

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

Hi everyone,

I was thinking of tweaking the meeting flier with the March date info, but realized I’m not sure what we’ve decided on as a topic for this meeting.

I know there’s been talk about the CUE Conference — we could use the meeting as a working session to crowdsource a conference proposal, perhaps? I’m sure there are other ideas as well.

What should we plan to discuss/do?

Thanks,
Maura

[Polly Thistlethwaite]

If you think of a topic, I’ve reserved the Grad Center Reading Room to discuss it in Monday, March 26th, from 3-5pm.

Polly

[Jill Cirasella (she/her)]

Maura, I like your idea of crowdsourcing a CUE conference proposal. Should we maybe combine that with another, more intro-y topic so the meeting will seem more welcoming to first-timers, too? Perhaps, in fact, a discussion of open access textbooks?

[Alycia Sellie (she/her/they)]

I think Jill’s ideas sound good–discussion of OA textbooks and the CUE Conference. How can we help spread the word about the meeting (which is coming up quickly)?

I will post something today to the OA blog and tweet about it, but how can we better reach students and others who aren’t already in the know?

[Stephen Francoeur (he/him)]

CULIBS is worth sending an announcement out on, although that’s a fraction of who we want to notify. I’ll use Twitter and Facebook, too, as there are a number of Baruch faculty I’m friends with on those networks but not here in the Academic Commons.

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

Thanks for the room reservation, Polly!

And huge apologies to all — I completely goofed on the dates, and as it turns out the CUE Conference proposals are due THIS Friday 3/23. (I’m sorry! Too many deadlines swirling around my head these days.)

One thought is to try and crowdsource the proposal *now,* in time for the deadline, then spend Monday’s meeting thinking about how to structure the presentation in a more detailed way. What does everyone think?

And I think a general discussion about OA textbooks would be great at the meeting. After the last LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee meeting I said I’d add some of the OA curricular materials resources we’ve found/promoted here at City Tech to the wiki page that Ann Matsuuchi created, which I haven’t done yet. But I will do before Monday!

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

Oh and P.S. re: PR — I’ve RTed the tweets, will post flyers around City Tech (I promise!), and will bring a stack of flyers to both our College Council meeting today and the library’s Tech Happy Hour event tonight, and anywhere else I can think of this week.

[Stephen Francoeur (he/him)]

Maura, thanks for your re-tweets, flyer posting, etc! Does anyone here want to do a CULIBS announcement? I’d be more than happy to do it, but since I’ve only been to one meeting so far, it seems somewhat presumptuous of me.

[Madeline Cohen]

Hi Maura et. al.: Thank you for the poster. I will circulate as much as possible around Lehman and Tweet on Library Twitter feed.

About the CUE Conference, I am fine with trying to submit a proposal by Fri. Open Access Textbooks seems to be a hot topic. We could do an “intro” with a speaker who is actively involved in this. Unfortunately, I am swamped and don’t have time to write an abstract, but happy to comment. I will attend the meeting on Monday.

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

I can send the message to CULIBS, no problem. Will do it now.

[Stephen Francoeur (he/him)]

D’oh! I just realized that I need to attend a faculty recognition award ceremony thingy this afternoon because I went and published an article last year (which, BTW, is available from the DLIST repository at the U of Arizona). Sorry that I won’t be able to make it today.

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

We’ll miss you, Stephen! I’ll take some notes into a doc here to catch up everyone who can’t make it.

[Maura A. Smale (she/her)]

I know I said I’d take some notes at the last meetup, and I didn’t end up doing that during the meeting. But I wanted to write up a few thoughts about what we discussed.

We started off with a discussion of institutional repositories, both generally as a component of an open access strategy for colleges and universities as well as the possibility for an IR here at CUNY. Jill, Madeline, and I (among other CUNY library and non-library faculty) are on a UFS committee to explore getting an IR at CUNY, which arose out of the resolution in support of OA approved at the December 2011 meeting of the UFS. There’s a meeting of that committee on Monday 4/2, and we can update everyone after. As I think we mentioned at last month’s OA meetup, the plan for now is to write a proposal to bring in an external consultant to help us with our IR strategy, someone with more knowledge about the pros and cons of IR systems and staffing than we have on our committee.

As we’ve also discussed in the OA meetups this year, the CUNY Academic Commons could be a great way to add a social layer for an IR, enabling us to add functionality that is missing from many IR systems like following particular researchers or disciplines, commenting, etc.

We spent some time on the idea of both works in progress and open data, and whether either of those components of scholarly research could have a place in an IR at CUNY. It seems clear that both (though especially raw data) have the potential to gobble up lots of server space very quickly, so it might be prudent to start with finished work and expand to data and other uses once the IR is established.

As planned we also talked about open access textbooks and other educational materials. While we know that some faculty are using or creating open textbooks, given the high costs of textbooks for our students we agreed that it would be great if more courses could move to open materials. (And textbooks are problematic for libraries to provide for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they’re consumables that don’t hold up for very long.) There are lots of open educational resources out there and also some intriguing new models, like the program at Temple University in which faculty are receiving stipends to prepare open textbooks for their classes (http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/temple-project-ditches-textbooks-for-homemade-digital-alternatives/35247).

I’ve been chewing on thoughts about open access scholarly publishing, institutional repositories, and open curricular materials, and our discussions last week addressed many of the same themes. All of these taken together — let’s call it the scholarly communication system (though I’m not certain that’s the best term, as it seems somewhat unclear and too library-ish) — touch many different parts of the university. Faculty research and publishing fall under Research and Academic Affairs, textbooks are relevant to Student Affairs, IRs and other technical tools (publishing systems like OJS, e.g.) may be the purview of CIS.

What if we brought all of these components together into one big open system for scholarly communication at CUNY? An institutional repository to gather and preserve the scholarly output of the university, plus journal and book publishing platforms to enable us to publish scholarly work, too. Textbook and other course resources created by CUNY faculty for CUNY students. A CUNY Press, perhaps?

And what if this lived under the Libraries? Traditionally it’s been libraries that have collected and provided access to the products of the scholarly communication system: the books, journals, and other materials needed by faculty and students to do academic work. This is not at all a novel proposition: many university libraries are implementing systems that incorporate at least some of these components, like the University of Michigan (http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpublishing) and Indiana University (http://scholarworks.iu.edu/). While neither university’s system includes textbooks specifically, I think course materials are a natural addition, especially at CUNY with our strong commitment to teaching as well as research.

An open scholarly communication system for CUNY wouldn’t be free, of course, though there are many free open source software applications that could be used to build such a system. And a CUNY Press would be a boon to faculty, students, and staff at the university, consistent with the university’s mission to provide affordable access to higher education for all.