Towards Open Annotation: Examples and Experiments

Authors : Lindsey Seatter

This article interrogates how digital text annotation tools and projects facilitate online engagement and virtual communities of practice. With the rise of the Web 2.0 movement and the proliferation of digital resources, annotation has evolved from an isolated practice to a collaborative one.

This article unpacks the impact of this shift by providing an in-depth discussion of five web-based tools and two social reading projects.

This article examines issues of design, usability, and applicability to pedagogical intervention as well as underscores how productive group dynamics can be fostered through digital, social annotation.

URL : Towards Open Annotation: Examples and Experiments

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.49

Joining Voices: University – Industry Partnerships in the Humanities

Authors : Lynne Siemens, The INKE Research Group

University-industry partnerships are common in the Sciences, but less so in the Humanities. As a result, there is little understanding of how they work in the Humanities.

Using the Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Networked Open Social Scholarship (INKE:NOSS) initiative as a case study, this paper contributes to this discussion by examining the nature of the university-industry partnership with libraries and academic-adjacent organizations, and associated benefits, challenges, measures of success, and outcomes.

Interviews were conducted with the collaboration’s industry partners. After several years of collaboration on the development of a grant application, industry partners have found the experience of working with academics to be a positive one overall.

Industry partners are contributing primarily in-kind resources in the form of staff time, travel to meetings, and reading and commenting on documents. They have also been able to realize benefits while negotiating the challenges.

Using qualitative standards, measures of success and desired outcomes are being articulated. This work developing the partnership should stand the larger INKE:NOSS team in good stead if they are successful with securing grant funding.

URL : Joining Voices: University – Industry Partnerships in the Humanities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.42

Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

Authors : Tomas A. Lipinski, Katie Chamberlain Kritikos

“Open access” (“OA”) refers to research placed online free from all price barriers and from most permission barriers (Suber, 2015). OA may apply to research outputs published traditionally, such as books (Schwartz, 2012) and articles in academic journals (Suber, 2015), and non-traditionally, such as student dissertations and theses (Schöpfel & Prost).

The lack of legal barriers is grounded in and given effect through the law of copyright and contract, and the submission of content by authors is often executed through a publication agreement.

This paper studies the contract aspects of OA and the open publishing movement in library and information science (“LIS”) scholarly communication. To explore this phenomenon, it undertakes a case study of the publication agreements of five OA LIS journals.

The sample consists of a brand-new open journal with an agreements drafted by copyright librarians (journal 1) and top-ranked LIS journals that converted to OA (journals 2 through 5) (Scimago, 2017).

With a descriptive data analysis based on that in Lipinski and Copeland (2015; 2013) and Lipinski (2013; 2012), the case study investigates the similarities and differences in the agreements used by the sampled OA LIS journals.

The study builds on the best practices from the Harvard Open Access Project (Shieber & Suber, 2016; 2013). It recommends best practices for the drafting and content of OA LIS publication agreements.

URL : Legal and policy implications of licenses between LIS open access journal publishers and authors : A qualitative case study

Alternative location : http://www.qqml-journal.net/index.php/qqml/article/view/440

Strategies for Supporting OER Adoption through Faculty and Instructor Use of a Federated Search Tool

Authors: Talea Anderson, Chelsea Leachman

INTRODUCTION

Open educational resources (OER) are gaining traction in higher education and becoming accepted by academics as a viable means for delivering course content. However, these resources can be difficult to find and use, both due to low visibility and confusion about licensing.

This article describes one university’s work with faculty members to identify barriers in their search process when they are looking to adopt OER.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

A scholarly communication librarian and science librarian partnered to collect faculty and instructor reactions to a particular OER search tool, with the intention of better understanding the difficulties encountered during the search process.

Eight interviews were conducted as participants were asked about their preferences when it comes to locating OER, understanding licensing information, and adopting materials for class.

NEXT STEPS

From these interviews, the librarians identified practical recommendations for instruction/liaison librarians and technical services/systems librarians as they continue working to support faculty and instructors through the OER discovery and selection process.

These recommendations relate to four themes uncovered in interviews with faculty and instructors: the need for increased transparency in search tools, the importance of intuitive narrowing and broadening features in search tools, the need for detailed and consistent metadata in OER records, and the need for clarity in intellectual property statements.

The librarians note that these recommendations might best be pursued through wide-scale collaboration across library units and, more generally, between libraries, consortia, and institutions.

URL : Strategies for Supporting OER Adoption through Faculty and Instructor Use of a Federated Search Tool

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2279

Data Management Practices in Academic Library Learning Analytics: A Critical Review

Author : Kristin A Briney

INTRODUCTION

Data handling in library learning analytics plays a pivotal role in protecting patron privacy, yet the landscape of data management by librarians is poorly understood.

METHODS

This critical review examines data-handling practices from 54 learning analytics studies in academic libraries and compares them against the NISO Consensus Principles on User’s Digital Privacy in Library, Publisher, and Software-Provider Systems and data management best practices.

RESULTS

A number of the published research projects demonstrate inadequate data protection practices including incomplete anonymization, prolonged data retention, collection of a broad scope of sensitive information, lack of informed consent, and sharing of patron-identified information.

DISCUSSION

As with researchers more generally, libraries should improve their data management practices. No studies aligned with the NISO Principles in all evaluated areas, but several studies provide specific exemplars of good practice.

CONCLUSION

Libraries can better protect patron privacy by improving data management practices in learning analytics research.

URL : Data Management Practices in Academic Library Learning Analytics: A Critical Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2268

Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

Authors : Sabina Pagotto, Wei Zhao

This article discusses Scholars Portal Journals (SP Journals), a library consortium-run platform that aggregates and archives licensed scholarly journal content in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Born in the early days of e-journals out of a need to provide consistent and long-term access to scholarly materials in the sometimes volatile world of online publishing, SP Journals has evolved into a major digital repository and archive.

With over 55 million full-text articles and serving a student population of just under half a million, SP Journals represents a major investment in access to online scholarship.

This article explains the lifecycle of content on the platform, from initial publisher negotiations to delivering usage reports, and discusses considerations of running a locally hosted journal platform.

URL : Access, preservation and analysis in a consortial journal archive: the evolution of Scholars Portal Journals

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.458