Digital Research & Scholarship Archives

When Social Movements Collide: Open Access for Climate Justice

You’ve heard of climate change, but how familiar are you with the term climate justice? It’s the topic of the week since it’s the theme of International Open Access Week 2022, an occasion for challenging each other to raise awareness and take action on climate justice through the open and interdisciplinary sharing of data and resources.

With hurricanes, heat waves, and forest fires appearing more regularly in our news cycle, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the discussion of our changing climate is becoming a bigger part of our lives. As we better understand the enormous threat that climate change poses to our planet, we more desperately than ever need to also have a grasp on climate justice–the aspiration to have all people, regardless of personal or community characteristics, treated fairly when it comes to protection, risks, policies, and decision-making around the impacts of climate change. In other words, when it comes to our environment and the changes happening globally, we must strive to consider everyone, understand how they’ll be impacted differently, and make decisions fairly.

While the term may be new to some, in reality calls for climate justice have been ongoing for decades. In fact, climate justice was born out of the environmental justice movement and is related to other calls to treat people more equitably such as movements for racial or social justice. Why is this so important? We know from past catastrophes that people’s level of vulnerability can vary widely based on their personal circumstances or their community’s demographics. This is one aspect of climate change where data and Open Access become very important; we need the open sharing of knowledge in order to address this important social and environmental issue and ensure justice for all. But, who has access?

Free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research on climate change and how various demographics and geographies are impacted would be a powerful tool to aid and equip the communities most at risk. Removing barriers to accessing climate research would also enable faster communication and better engagement of both the general public and policymakers on related societal issues. Instead of data being individually owned and only available to those who can afford to access it, the general public would have the right to use scientific research results as needed. The best examples of this have been projects attempting to map overburdened, at-risk communities by incorporating a wide range of data, going beyond looking at risk from a one dimensional geographical perspective.

For example, check out the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. Start by putting in the zip code of your hometown, and use it to have a look at the environmental and economic conditions of various communities. Then try exploring the area around FSU to familiarize yourself with the communities nearby and see how their issues compare to those in your hometown.

Such tools are a great visual way to represent the combination of so much data. Use them as inspiration for starting conversations about climate change and/or justice. Climate Justice demands cross disciplinary collaboration, so campus forums like the Open Scholars Project could also serve as incubators for the climate action needed in our region and beyond. Through open information exchange and collaboration, we can create resources for understanding the needs of communities as well as non-human environments by evaluating their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Join together with your neighbors, campus groups, or local organizations to consider how best to take action to improve the resilience of communities where you live, study, work, or play. Whether that means volunteering, marching, donating, or joining, we need everyone’s contribution to make our communities more just and resilient in the face of climate change.

For more information about how the FSU Libraries supports open access, please visit our Research and Publishing web page here.

Author Bio: Mila S. Turner is the Social Science Data & Research Librarian at FSU Libraries and a broadly trained environmental sociologist. Her research spans diverse areas including how social inequalities intersect with environmental justice, racial equity, and natural disasters. Her thought leadership has been featured in The Hill, World War Zero, Quad Magazine, and more.

My Time as the Immersive Scholarship Graduate Research Assistant

During the Fall ’21 and Spring ’22 semesters, I served as a Graduate Research Assistant with the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) at FSU Libraries. Collaborating with Matthew Hunter, the Digital Scholarship Librarian, I worked to increase FSU Libraries’ support of research services that utilize 3D scanning and modeling, 3D printing, and extended reality technologies. Working on various immersive scholarship- and digital humanities-based projects, including a self-curated exhibition, has made this one of the most memorable experiences of my graduate student career!

FSU Open Education Month 2022

Celebrate Open Education Week all month with FSU! Open Education encompasses resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment (SPARC). Join us for this opportunity for sharing and learning in open education on campus and beyond. To learn more about FSU Libraries’ open education initiatives, visit our OER & Textbook Affordability Initiatives, eTextbook Information, and OER Guide.

Week 1

March 3: Open Office Hours – Faculty Informal Lunch Space (FILS) is Open Education focused throughout the month. Open space to connect, collaborate, ask questions, or bring your lunch. Dirac Library Conference Room, 11 am – 1 pm.

Week 2

March 8 – 10: OpenEd tabling on Landis and in Strozier Library : Learn more about OER and textbook affordability efforts happening on campus and how you can join the movement. Tuesday, March 8, 4 – 6 pm; Wednesday, March 9, 2 – 4 pm; & Thursday, March 10, 3 – 5 pm

March 10: Open Office Hours: Faculty Informal Lunch Space (FILS) is Open Education focused throughout the month. Open space to connect, collaborate, ask questions, or bring your lunch. Dirac Library Conference Room, 11 am – 1 pm.

March 11: OER Happy Hour: Celebrate our efforts and connect with OER colleagues. Ology at Power Mill, 5 – 7 pm

Week 3

March 17: Open Office Hours: Faculty Informal Lunch Space (FILS) is Open Education focused throughout the month. Open space to connect, collaborate, ask questions, or bring your lunch. Dirac Library Conference Room, 11 am – 1 pm.

Week 4

March 24: Open Office Hours: Faculty Informal Lunch Space (FILS) is Open Education focused throughout the month. Open space to connect, collaborate, ask questions, or bring your lunch. Dirac Library Conference Room, 11 am – 1 pm.

March 25: Equity, Inclusion, and Textbook Affordability at FSU, presented as part of Fellows Forum, Lindsey Wharton and Shawna Durtschi present on how open educational resources can provide opportunity and support diversity, inclusion, and equity efforts. (Zoom link coming soon), 11 am – 12 pm.

March 28: Open Education at FSU: Join us for a discussion on where we are with open education efforts today, from a national perspective (Sonya Bennett-Brandt, Assistant Director of Institutional Efforts at OpenStax), an OER champion on campus, and our student advocates and leaders (Graceanne Hoback, Textbook Affordability Campaign Coordinator, FSU PIRG). (Zoom link: fla.st/Q1H7OGNM ; 12 – 1 pm)

Learn more and join the open community with Open Education events happening nationwide at https://www.oeglobal.org/activities/open-education-week/.

Moving into a new house: FSU Libraries updates and improves Research Repository

By Rachel Smart and Camille Thomas

In the Summer of 2021, FSU Libraries migrated DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository to a new home that is completely hosted and maintained by Florida State University. DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository features FSU’s theses and dissertations, open access research and digitized archival collections. DigiNole is Florida State University’s unified platform for FSU-created and maintained digital resources providing access to a wide range of different materials in the Digital Library and Research Repository.

The transition between site hosts involved a complex, multi-layered process. This transition took two years to complete, beginning in the planning stages and ending at the time of public launch July 15, 2021. Users will notice better responsiveness to mobile devices, a more elegant interface, and better overall site performance. Users are also able to directly download video and audio files from records which is a functionality available in the new system.

Since the launch of the upgrade system on July 15, 2021, the Libraries’ internal Working Group began exploring new features such as a 3D object viewer and integrating ORCID as part of a new repository submission process. The internal group is also working on ADA compliant enhancements to ensure the accessibility for theses and dissertations. Additionally, audiovisual items will display closed captions streams.

FSU faculty, staff, students and postdocs are invited to submit research outputs such as articles, book chapters, reports, datasets, and posters to the Research Repository to make them publicly available at no cost to the author. Library workers are available to assist in compliance with copyright, publisher policies and the FSU Faculty Senate Open Access Policy.

The Research Repository is the platform for self-archiving published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (according to publisher policy) in an institutional archive such as DigiNole or a disciplinary repository such as arXiv.org. This is often referred to as “Green Open Access” and aligns with the FSU Faculty Senate Open Access Policy.

FSU students, researchers, and faculty wanting to submit their works to the Research Repository, this process is unaffected by the system changes. Users submit their works through the online submission form.

Figure 1. This animated image demonstrates the utilization of the search bar on the Research Repository’s homepage.

Figure 2. This image is a continuation of the search process introduced in Figure 1., featuring the search results page and the selection of the record the user was searching for.

Our developers are leaders in contributing to the Islandora open source development community. For example, it is the first time ISLE (dockerized Islandora) has been deployed and hosted as a distributed deployment (multiple servers for different parts of the stack) in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment, featuring one of the biggest Solr search engine indexes in the digital repository community. The process included building and sustaining this technical infrastructure in a cloud-based computing environment (AWS), deploying an updated version of the repository’s software stack (Islandora) within this environment, and transferring the contents of the old repository to the new one in a way that maintains their integrity and discoverability.

For more information on the system migration, visit https://www.lib.fsu.edu/diginole/diginole-migration or please contact lib-support@fsu.edu with questions.

Introducing FSU Libraries eTextbooks Search

Lindsey Wharton, Michael Pritchard, Finley Talley

As we welcome the start of 2021 Summer C, FSU Libraries are proud to announce the launch of our eTextbooks in the Classroom portal!

FSU Libraries’ new eTextbook program identifies currently available eBook titles assigned as required course materials. Instructors and students are able to search by course code, instructor, or book title to see if required course materials are available online through the Libraries. Since its implementation, this project has identified 848 total titles in Spring 2021 and 343 titles in Summer 2021 available through the Libraries’ existing licenses. In these two semesters, the total potential student savings is $1,941,369.

This initiative was inspired by ongoing student feedback about the high cost of course materials. The Libraries’ eTextbook program builds upon our current Course Reserves service and bolsters advocacy for the program as part of the broader Libraries’ Open & Affordable Textbook Initiative.

Here is a message of support from a student whose textbook was identified as currently licensed by the Libraries:

It’s well known that textbooks can be an onerous additional cost for those pursuing any degree, so it was a welcome and extremely helpful surprise when my professor announced that the library had added an electronic version of the course textbook. This happened two semesters in a row, and the savings across those semesters was close to $200 just for two classes. The ease of access is also a huge benefit that I was very grateful for.

FSU Libraries eResources expand the amount of materials available for higher-level coursework and complements other open educational resources. Furthermore, this program provides a crucial opportunity to support student success by ensuring equitable access to teaching and learning materials. Our eResources work to benefit our FSU community by…

…Positively impacting student success & engaged learning

20 out of 28 instructors from studies between 2015 and 2018 reported that learning outcomes improved with open textbooks. FSU Alternative Textbook Grant recipient Vanessa Dennen, Professor of Instructional Systems & Learning Technologies, recently published results from her customized OER project in which students offered positive feedback because the OER were customized to meet their needs and received accurate, relevant, and focused learning materials. This OER and eTextbook integration in the classroom meets these same learning outcomes by providing students and instructors access to paid information that is covered by FSU Libraries.

…Ensuring an affordable FSU education for all students regardless of socioeconomic status.

A ground-breaking study from the University of Georgia found that drop, fail and withdrawal rates (DFW) decreased significantly for low income (Federal Pell Grant Recipients) and part-time students when Open Educational Resources (OER) were used in courses. There was a 53.12% increase in average course grade and a 29.54% decrease in DFW rates for students who were not enrolled full-time. The average final grades of self-identified non-white students in the study were higher with OER and their DFW rates were lower.

…Allowing instructors to incorporate perspectives that prepare students to live and work in a diverse and global society.

Open Educational Resources support a diverse community of learners including those with accessibility needs and multicultural perspectives and active student participation with materials. Sixty-four percent of faculty members in studies between 2015 and 2018 reported that using OER facilitated meeting diverse learners’ needs and sixty-eight percent perceived greater student satisfaction with the learning experience when using OER.

We look forward to growing our eTextbook program as part of our larger affordability initiative to reduce barriers to information access and reduce the cost of higher education.

If you are interested in adopting a library-licensed or open eBook to replace your traditional textbook, please reach out to Lindsey Wharton or learn more at our eTextbook Information for Instructors.

Alternative Textbook Grants

Instructors, this one’s for you!

ABOUT

The Alternative Textbook Grant program caters to main FSU campus instructors as it addresses the rising cost of college textbooks. This textbook affordability initiative by FSU Libraries will be awarding grants of $1,000 each over the 2020-21 academic year to instructors who adopt Open Educational Resources (OERs) or library-licensed materials to replace commercial textbooks. These grants support the university’s strategic goals to support overall student success and enhance diversity and inclusion.

Open textbooks go through the process of being written by experts, peer-reviewed and published under flexible copyright licenses for downloading purposes, distributed, and adapted for free. The grants can also be used to purchase eBooks for course textbooks that are purchased as a part of the FSU Libraries collection with unlimited user licenses.

DH Currents: The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection

Land Acknowledgement: Florida State University is located on land that is the ancestral and traditional territory of the Apalachee Nation, the Muscogee Creek Nation, the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. We pay respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to their descendants and to all Indigenous people. We recognize that this land remains scarred by the histories and ongoing legacies of colonial violence, dispossession, and removal. In spite of all of this and with tremendous resilience, these Indigenous nations have remained deeply connected to this territory, to their families, to their communities, and to their cultural ways of life. We recognize the ongoing relationships of care that these Indigenous Nations maintain with this land and we extend our gratitude as we live and work as respectful guests upon their territory. We encourage you to learn about and amplify the contemporary work of the Indigenous nations whose land you are on and to endeavor to support Indigenous sovereignty in all the ways that you can.

“DH Currents” is a blog series conceived in the summer of 2020 by the members of the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship at Florida State University Libraries. The goal of the series is to identify and highlight digital scholarship projects that take-up anti-racist and decolonial causes as part of their methodologies, content, and intentions. These initiatives foreground the principles of inclusion, truth telling, and dismantling the often oppressive practices of academic and cultural heritage preservation work. Each post will include a project description in addition to input gathered from its principal investigators, maintainers, and other participants. This series aspires to provide both a platform to share information about these scholars’ important contributions to the field of digital scholarship and to spark dialogue on topics related to ways academic libraries and other memory institutions can engage in this urgent, necessary labor.

3D-printing COVID-19 face shields at the FSU Libraries

Due to the shortage of readily-accessible personal protective equipment for first-responders and healthcare providers around the world, many involved in maker communities have responded by crowd-sourcing ways of rapidly manufacturing makeshift equipment to fill in the gaps while supply chains can respond. This is happening at the local level as well — Tallahassee’s local makerspace, MakingAwesome, and several departments at FSU began exploring ways of leveraging various rapid-manufacturing technology available on campus (such as 3D printers, desktop laser-cutters, and more) to answer this call. By the end of March, a partnership between the FSU Innovation Hub, FSU College of Medicine, High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Master Craftsman Studio, University Libraries, and MakingAwesome was formed, and The iHub began coordinating the donation materials such as sewn face masks and 3D-printed face shields at the beginning of April. This partnership was spearheaded by FSU College of Medicine faculty Dr. Emily Pritchard and iHub director Ken Baldauf.

Digitizing the Past: My Time as a Digital Cultural Heritage Intern

By Grace Robbins, Office of Digital Research and Scholarship Intern, Fall 2019

During this semester I have been working as the Digital Cultural Heritage Intern in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. You might be wondering, what in the world is digital cultural heritage? It seems like a fancy title, but for what? Essentially the concept of digital cultural heritage is defined as preserving anything of cultural significance in a digital medium. Anything we preserve becomes part of a “heritage” to something, whether that be to an individual person or a whole culture. I was interested in working more with the intersection of digital humanities and archaeology after volunteering on the Cosa excavation in Italy directed by FSU. Archaeology is such a material driven, hands-on discipline (and science!), and it proves to be an effective tool to understanding–and interacting with–the past. However it generates so much data. Archaeologist Ethan Watrall writes, “The sheer volume and complexity of archaeological data is often difficult to communicate to non-archaeologists.” Furthermore, many discovered artifacts and architecture remain inaccessible to most of the general public. Thus, the goals in my internship revolved around understanding how digital platforms affect accessibility to these “heritages,” specifically in the contexts of archaeology and the humanities, so that scholarship is furthered for people in academia but also, hopefully, the general public.

I did most of my work with the Digital Cosa Project, which included uploading data from the Cosa hard drive onto DigiNole, FSU’s Digital Repository. My tasks confronted some organizational and technological challenges, however, as the large amount of data to be ingested meant rethinking the best way to organize the digital collection. We ended up switching plans from organizing by excavation year to organizing by type of file (artifacts, plans, maps, stratigraphic unit sheets, etc.). I also practiced coding, which most historians or archaeologists may not be familiar with. It begs the question, should these disciplines incorporate more digital education in the future? How useful would this be?

I also wanted to experiment with visual technology, including 3D applications such as 3D modeling and 3D printing.

3D model of a trench from 2019 excavation season being built in Meshroom, a free and open source photogrammetry program.

I especially enjoyed learning about 3D printing because it ran simultaneous to the FSU Archaeology Club’s “Printing the Past” exhibit in Dirac, which displays one important way digital humanities can further archaeological knowledge: hands-on learning! I couldn’t have learned about ancient Rome better than when I was unearthing ancient material on the dig and providing such artifacts in the form of 3D printing for non-archaeologists to interact with bears pedagogical significance.

Standing with the Cosa poster for the “Printing the Past” exhibit by the FSU Archaeology Club. I helped 3D model and 3D print the 3^rd object from the left, an inscription found in the 2019 excavation season.

3D scanning was not as easy of a task, as new technology always comes with a learning curve, but in the future I want to continue working with this practice.

3D scanning the Napoleon Bonaparte death mask in Special Collections.

In my time at the internship, I have broken down my understanding of digital humanities from a broad concept to a web of applications that further humanities and archaeological knowledge. I will continue to work in the internship next semester, and I hope to continue mastering 3D modeling and printing and am looking forward to developments in the Digital Cosa project as we finalize our plans for the Cosa digital collection. Most importantly, I am eager to experiment with more creative ways these digital applications can be used in academia and the general public that will enable us to be more “in touch” with the past.

Open Access at FSU Libraries: A Year in Review

Open access is a global movement to freely publish research in online repositories and open publications instead of the costly subscription-based publishing models that have dominated the scholarly publishing industry for decades. Paywalled research is only available to those who can afford to pay subscription costs, leaving many researchers and institutions around the world unable to access critical findings in their fields. Open access allows research to reach a wider, global audience and leads to greater readership, citation, and innovation. Authors can publish their work openly by archiving accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories like DigiNole, publishing completed drafts on preprint servers, or submitting to open access journals.

Open Initiatives at FSU

In 2016, the FSU Faculty Senate adopted an Open Access Policy that grants the Libraries permission to archive scholarly works created by FSU faculty. The policy is intended to increase the availability of research developed at FSU to readers and scholars around the world. The Libraries use mediated deposits and automated harvesting workflows to populate DigiNole, our institutional repository. A three-year review found steady growth in repository deposits since the Open Access Policy was implemented. This trend continued in 2019 which saw over 2,000 objects added to DigiNole. Departments with 100 or more DigiNole uploads this year include the Department of Psychology, the Department of Biological Sciences, and the National High Magnetic Field Lab.

Another way the Libraries support open access includes the Open Access Fund which helps authors publish in open journals. Some open access journals require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to finance the technical work that goes into preparing, publishing, and preserving web publications. APCs can cost upwards of $2,000 for some publishers. To help authors mitigate this expense, the Open Access Fund provides awards of up to $1,500 for qualified proposals. In 2019, the Libraries funded 38 open access articles with funding support support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Office of the Provost.

Open access is not limited to research articles. Textbook costs have increased 82% since 2002 (nearly three times the rate of inflation), and textbook affordability for students is a growing concern nationwide.¹ Instructors are turning to open educational resources to reduce textbook costs. In the 2017-2018 academic year, 43% of students in Florida reported spending over $300 per semester on textbooks, and 64.2% of students were unable to purchase a textbook due to high costs.² Florida Virtual Campus hosted an Open Educational Resources Summit in the spring of 2018 where librarians and educators from across the state came together to discuss challenges and opportunities for implementing OER on their campuses. Mallary Rawls represented FSU Libraries at the Summit and reported on the event in a March blog post.

Instructors at FSU have been adopting open course materials and using resources from the Libraries to decrease textbook expenses for students. Dr. Vanessa Dennen in the Department of Education created an open textbook in 2018 and reported on student’s perceptions of the open materials in a recent issue of Online Learning. The Libraries published two open access textbooks this year in DigiNole to fill subject gaps in existing open materials.

Dr. Giray Ökten and Dr. Arash Fahim received Alternative Textbook Grant awards that helped transform their lecture notes into open mathematics textbooks. First Semester in Numerical Analysis with Julia and Financial Mathematics: Concepts and Computational Methods support subjects that are not well-covered by traditional textbooks in the field. The Alternative Textbook Grants have saved students $333,356 since 2016. Instructors can visit the Alternative Textbook Grants webpage for more information.

In addition to cost savings, open course materials have the added benefit of perpetual access. Unlike access codes and textbook rentals that are only available for a limited time, open materials are freely available online or through the library without access restrictions. With open online course materials, instructors can easily update textbooks with new material, and students can be assured they are accessing the most current version of the information. Open educational resources offer greater flexibility for instructors to customize their course content and increase textbook affordability for students.

Open access is critical for advancing the global knowledge commons and scientific innovation, and open educational resources promote student success by increasing the accessibility of course materials. The Libraries are proud of the progress we have made this year in furthering open access, and we look forward to continuing this important work in the future.

US GAO. (2013). College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-368
Florida Virtual Campus. (2018). 2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. Web.