Tag: repository

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.

Scholarly Articles in DigiNole by Year

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.

 

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

It All Starts Here: Digital Scholarship @ FSU

This semester I set to the task of conducting an environmental scan of digital scholarship at FSU, focusing specifically on projects, faculty, and researchers incorporating various kinds of audio-visual media, tools, and platforms into their work. This project, building off my previous research in digital humanities initiatives using audio-visual media outside the University and the growing interest in such projects in the DH field at large, attempts to identify new horizons and domains for DRS to explore.

The goals of this undertaking lie somewhere between generating a possible blueprint for preservation and access to such projects (a goal traditionally sought by archives or media labs) and making new connections for FSU’s Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) which is a goal aligned with this emerging entity in academic libraries we are calling digital scholarship centers (Lippincott, et al 2014). Over the course of the semester, I’ve spoken with ethnomusicologists, new media artists, choreographers, digital humanities scholars, GIS experts, digital archivists, and web developers (just to name a few) with the hopes of finding common threads to weave into a shared infrastructure of AV media-focused resources for library collaborations. Although daunting, the value of such an environmental scan has been concisely articulated by E. Leigh Bonds:

I was less interested in labeling [the research of faculty at Ohio State University] than I was in learning what researchers were doing or wanted to do, and what support they needed to do it. Ultimately, I viewed the environmental scan as the first step towards coordinating a community of researchers (2018).

Bonds’ mission of “coordinating a community” is especially apt considering the wide array of scholarship happening at Florida State University. Despite differences in disciplines, approaches, and aims, the use of digital technologies in working with AV media has become a ubiquitous necessity that requires distinct but often overlapping tools and skill-sets. The digital scholarship center, as noted by Christina Kamposiori, operating under a “hub and spoke” organizational model, can effectively serve as a networking node and site of scholarly intersections and cross-pollination (2017).

Such an arrangement, eclipsing traditional conceptions of the library as simply a book repository or service center, better positions library faculty and staff to exercise their knowledge and expertise as technologist partners in scholarly projects working with digital AV content while also enhancing the research ecosystem through developing shared resources. This setup, while dependent on many complex factors, is attainable if the digital scholarship center can effectively check and track the pulse of its community of researchers, identifying their areas of interest, needs, and prospective directions. For DRS, some observations drawn from my environmental scan seems like a good place to begin.

One genre of support DRS and other library units working with digital media can begin to cultivate is providing documentation, preservation, and data management frameworks for digital projects whose final form exists outside traditional “deliverables” of academic scholarship (i.e. print-based publications, and the like). These can be “new media” objects like e-publications and websites, or more complex outputs like performances and/or artworks incorporating many different layers of digital technologies. The work of Tim Glenn, Professor in the School of Dance, is a great example of this kind of intricate digital scholarship which blends choreographic craft and technical execution to create captivating performances. One piece in particular, Triptych (2012), relies on the coordinated interaction between dancers’ bodies, cameras, projectors, and pre-edited video to create what Glenn calls “a total theater experience.”

The amount of digital data and infrastructure that goes into such a project is a bit staggering when we consider the lattice of capture and projection video signals, theater AV technology, lighting control signals, and creating the video documentation of the performance space itself. Glenn’s website is a testament to his own stellar efforts to capture and document these features of the work, but as many archivists and conservators will attest, this level of artist-provided documentation is often not the case (Rinehart & Ippolito, Chapters 1-2, 2014). With this kind of complex digital scholarship, DRS can develop models along a spectrum, either directly with researchers on developing documentation plans and schemas from the ground-up (see examples of such work from The Daniel Langlois Foundation and Matters in Media Art) or serving as a conduit for depositing these digital objects into FSU’s scholarship repository, DigiNole, to ensure their long-term accessibility.

Of course, the other side of the coin is the maintenance, compatibility, and sustainability of such platforms and repositories at the University. DigiNole, built on the Islandora open-source software framework, is the crown jewel of FSU’s digital collections. It serves as the access point to the digital collections of FSU libraries as well as the University’s research repository and green OA platform for works created by faculty, staff, and students. An incredibly valuable and integral part of the library’s mission, Diginole has the advantage being built on an extensible, open-source platform that can be expanded to accommodate a wide variety of digital objects (not to mention that it is also maintained by talented and dedicated librarians, developers, and administrators).

As such, DigiNole can play an equally integral role in data management and documentation projects as a repository of complex, multifaceted digital objects. The challenge will be normalizing data into formats that retain the necessary information or “essence” of the original data while also ensuring compatibility with the Islandora framework. Based on my conversation with FSU’s Digital Archivist, Krystal Thomas, another, more long-term, goal to enhance the digital preservation infrastructure of the library will be implementing a local instance of Archivematica, another open-source software framework that is specifically designed to address the unique challenges of long-term digital preservation of complex media. Another step the University can potentially take in increasing this infrastructure across campus is to seek out a trusted data repository certification. For those of us working in digital scholarship centers, these kinds of aspirations will always be moving targets, as is the nature of the technological landscape. But having a strongest possible grasp on the local needs and conditions of the scholastic community we work with will allow both librarians and administration to channel resources and energy into initiatives that have the highest and most palpable impacts and benefits.

Ultimately, the kind of infrastructure DRS or any other academic unit wishes to build should be in response to the needs of its scholars and foster solutions that have cross-disciplinary applications and implications. Whether generating data management plans, developing scholarly interfaces, or building out our homegrown digital repositories, an R1 institution like Florida State University needs systems that account for the wide variety of scholarship happening both on-campus and at its many satellite and auxiliary facilities. Looking towards the future, we can glimpse the kind of fruitful digital scholarship happening at FSU in the work of undergraduates like Suzanne Raybuck. Her contributions to Kris Harper and Ron Doel’s Exploring Greenland project and whose fascinating personal research on the construction of digital narratives in video games represent promising digital scholarship that bridges archival, humanities, and pedagogical research. Hopefully DRS and its partner organizations can keep pace with such advancements and continue to improve its services and scope of partnerships.

Acknowledgments

Enormous thank you to the entire staff of FSU’s Office of Digital Research and Scholarship for allowing me the space to pursue this research over the past year, namely Sarah Stanley, Micah Vandegrift, Matt Hunter, Devin Soper, Rachel Smart, and Associate Dean Jean Phillips. Thanks to Professor Tim Glenn and Assistant Professor Hannah Schwadron in the School of Dance, Assistant Professors Rob Duarte and Clint Sleeper in the College of Fine Arts, Assistant Professor Sarah Eyerly in the College of Music, doctoral candidate Mark Sciuchetti in the Department of Geography, Krystal Thomas, Digital Archivist at Special Collections & Archives, and Presidential/UROP Scholar Suzanne Raybuck for your time, contributions, and conversations that helped shape this research.

WORKS CITED

Bonds, E. L. (2018) “First Things First: Conducting an Environmental Scan.” dh+lib, “Features.” Retrieved from: http://acrl.ala.org/dh/2018/01/31/first-things-first-conducting-an-environmental-scan/

Kamposiori, C. (2017) The role of Research Libraries in the creation, archiving, curation, and preservation of tools for the Digital Humanities. Research Libraries UK. Retrieved from http://www.rluk.ac.uk/news/rluk-report-the-role-of-research-libraries-in-the-creation-archiving-curation-and-preservation-of-tools-for-the-digital-humanities/

Lippincott, J., Hemmasi, H. & Vivian Lewis (2014) “Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers.” EDUCAUSE Review. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2014/6/trends-in-digital-scholarship-centers

Rinehart, R. & Ippolito, J. (2014) Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Automagical Repository Harvesting

Over the last couple of years, FSU Libraries dedicated librarians and staff to in-house development of an institutional repository platform that is open-source, flexible, and modular. I was hired as the full-time repository specialist for the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship recently and I quickly realized the strategic importance of the institutional repository concept: its purposes, benefits, and potential future impact intersects with the key issues surrounding libraries, technology, scholarly communications, and digital scholarship today.

One of my early tasks focused automating metadata harvesting from other repositories. Figuring out a time- and cost-efficient way to tackle the tracking and depositing of new publications is a key challenge in the field of scholarly communication today. Aside from the issue of how much time this takes per scholarly object, this framework lends itself to human error and, as a result for researchers, decreased scholarship discoverability, accessibility, and validity, which at times can be in tension with the overall goals and purposes of an institutional repository. Publicly accessible APIs provided by public repositories offer the chance to eliminate or greatly reduce the time it takes to process a deposit and the risk that bibliographic information will be inaccurately transferred from one system to another.

In response to this challenge, I have developed two tools to increase the efficiency of repository ingest. PMC Grabber is a PHP-based tool that uses PubMed Central’s APIs to programmatically search the PubMed Central database, pull metadata from the database, and transform the metadata for ingestion into FSU’s institutional repository. With this framework, the Libraries can run constructed searches every six or twelve months and stay on top of new publications from FSU researchers posted in PubMed without a hassle. While the tool does not fully automate the ingestion workflow from harvest to deposit, it significantly mitigates the time-intensive task of manually discovering and creating ingest records for individual articles.

PMC Grabber Workflow Diagram showing distinct steps, database table layout, and outcomes.
SQLite database management menu after using PMC Grabber.
SQLite database embargo table populated after a search using PMC Grabber.

The other tool, codenamed WOS (Web of Science) Grabber, combines a workflow using different tools and applications as well as the core concept of PMC Grabber. The goal is to capture all FSU-affiliated publications appearing in Web of Science with minimal participation necessary on the part of authors. Using a combination of Web of Science searches, Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO API calls in Google Sheets, and OpenRefine, thousands of publications can be identified and staged for ingest. The end result of the workflow  is a set of publications that can be filtered to discover different sub-sets of articles: (1) those that can be deposited into an institutional repository as publisher versions with no author intervention; (2) those that can be deposited into an institutional repository as accepted manuscripts/final drafts; and (3) those that only allow pre-print versions to be deposited into institutional repositories. Using WOS Grabber I was able to quickly and easily identify over 2,000 articles published in 2016 affiliated with FSU. 500 of these articles (a good 25% of all Web of Science indexed scholarship from FSU!) were open access and were immediately added to our ingestion queue, and a little more than 1500 of the articles were identified as allowing final draft deposit into a repository.

Overall, my involvement with this projects has been positive and signals a promising future for repository managers looking to leverage emerging technologies and centralized repositories. My experiences suggest that through the use of new tools and technologies, what is still being described as an unmanageable goal is quickly becoming a feasible solution for institutional repositories. Libraries with sufficient resources (in terms of skilled personnel and funding) should continue to push the envelope in this area and discover different ways to improve repository workflow efficiency and, ultimately, user access to scholarship. If my experiences are any indication, an investment in and a focus on this kind of work will have great returns for everyone involved.