Join the Collins peer research advisors and a librarian for two nights in November.
Nov. 18, 7:00pm to 10:00pm, in Library 146: Get a head start on research projects and papers before the Thanksgiving break!
Nov. 30, 7:00pm to 10:00pm, in Library 146: Make progress on projects after some time away!
Collins Memorial Library and the Archives & Special Collections will be presenting a pop-up exhibit in the East Reading Room during the week of Veteran’s Day, November 8th-12th. The pop-up exhibit will feature reproductions of articles, documents, scrapbooks and other archival materials that show the history of military service at Puget Sound. The exhibit will also feature images of creative works, including artists’ books, which illustrate veteran’s experiences during wartime. Between 11am-1pm on Wednesday, Nov. 10th and Thursday, Nov. 11th, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian Adriana Flores ‘13 will be displaying original archival materials and answering questions about the items.
Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks,
and Open Pedagogy
November 2021
This year several faculty and staff members are participating in the AAC&U Institute on Open Educational Resources. Jane Carlin (Library), Margot Casson (Educational Technology) Heidi Morton (Education), Melvin Rouse (Psychology), and Ben Tucker (Library) are attending workshops, engaging in conversation and working to understand and improve the landscape at Puget Sound in order to create an environment where our students can best benefit from OER, open textbooks, and open pedagogy.
Collins Memorial Library has been supporting and promoting open educational resources for several years now, and our efforts have continued to gain momentum. A subset of the open access (OA), the open educational resources (OER) movement was largely inspired by the need to share and customize affordable resources for teaching and learning. Per SPARC’s definition, OER are “teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others.”
OER can take many forms: lesson plans, assignments, games, or interactive media, but open textbooks have generated the most interest and publicity. Adopting open textbooks is a proven means of reducing costs to students and improving student performance and retention, especially those with greater economic need.
While OER are extremely powerful instruments of learning, open pedagogy plays an essential role in bridging the gap between content and transformational learning for students. Open pedagogy, also known as open education practices (OEP) invites students to participate in the co-creation of knowledge that is contributed to the commons through open licensing. Instructors can engage students in this creating sustainable assignments including development of texts in a similar fashion to the open source community.
Links
Need Information? Don’t forget the Collins Memorial Library – Library Guides
Questions? Contact your liaison librarian
Comments: Contact Jane Carlin, library director
Remember – Your best search engine is a librarian!
Connect with us!
Over the last few decades, the subscription cost of scholarly serial publications has grown at a rate far outpacing the rate of inflation. Caused largely by the concentration of academic journal publishing residing with a handful of commercial publishers, these price increases and the resulting strain it has caused for subscribing libraries, has become known as the serials crisis. This crisis has resulted in reduced access to scholarly journals for many institutions, and caused a budget shift away from monographs, and other resources, as libraries struggle to maintain access to desired journals.
The commercial publishers’ preferred business model of bundling a large number of journal titles together for a discounted aggregated package further complicates budget decisions for libraries, resulting in subscriptions to unwanted journals in order to access essential ones.
These practices, combined with budget restrictions, often result in impediments to free and open scholarly communication. OA journals, which provide free and unfettered access to their content, act as an alternative model that can alleviate some impediments to scholarly communication.
OA journals use Creative Commons and other open licensing to permit open sharing of scholarly work without making the work public domain. You can read more about Creative Commons Licensing on the library’s Scholarly Communications LibGuide.
Muddying the waters of OA and subscriptions to scholarly journals are a wide spectrum of hybrid options. Some journals allow authors to archive pre- or post-publication versions of articles on institutional or subject repositories after an embargo period. This model is sometimes referred to as green OA, in contrast to fully open OA journals that are referred to as gold OA. Furthermore, other journals use a pay for OA model where a publisher requires payment from the author for an article to be made freely available on the journal’s website. This can help increase access for readers, but often at a steep price for the author or their institution.
Collins Library provides access to many hundreds of OA Journals that are searchable in Primo, our online discovery tool.
Further Reading
Scholarly Communications LibGuide
Directory of Open Access Journals
–By Ben Tucker
Similar to OA journal publishers, OA book publishers provide readers free access to scholarly monographs. Collins Library is a founding member of one such publisher, Lever Press. Supported by a consortium of liberal arts institutions focused on, and renowned for, excellence in both research and teaching, Lever is grounded in three essential commitments:
Lever Press’s model is based on member liberal arts college libraries paying annual dues to the press which cover its operating costs. Lever’s books are then made available at no cost to all readers in a digital format using a Creative Commons License of the author’s choosing.
Lever’s stated values are in alignment with the academic pursuits favored at Puget Sound. Lever Press’s value statement reads:
“As a press aligned with the ethos and mission of liberal arts colleges, we seek out, identify, evaluate, and advocate for transformative scholarship that spurs creative dialogue within and between traditional fields of inquiry, emphasizes disciplinary innovation, draws upon new models of collaborative research, and strives to reach the broadest audience possible. We value:
– leadership and the courage to push existing boundaries
– diverse voices and viewpoints
– the principles of equity and social justice
– building community among our members and beyond
– continuous learning
By living our values we will be responsive to the needs of readers, authors, and member institutions, share our liberal arts focus broadly, and engage globally with others in the exchange of new scholarship.”
In addition to support from Collins Memorial Library, Brett Rogers, Associate Professor and Chair, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, serves on Lever Press’s editorial board. The editorial board reviews proposals at various stages of the publication process, and votes on books to move ahead in the production pipeline. The editorial board also discusses programming that increases awareness of the press and its publications, and issues of institutional membership.
Further Reading
Directory of Open Access Books
– By Ben Tucker
Sound Ideas represents the scholarship and creative works of the faculty, staff and students of the University of Puget Sound. Organized and made accessible by Collins Memorial Library, Sound Ideas demonstrates our institutional commitment to helping enrich the global academic community through sharing and collaboration.
Sound Ideas provides faculty members a venue for posting iterations of their published work, in compliance with their publishers’ license, resulting in increased user access, as well as providing a means of complying with the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act. Faculty members who are unsure about what a publisher’s license permits in relation to posting work on personal websites or institutional repositories can contact their liaison librarian for a consultation.
Faculty members can self-submit their work to Sound Ideas if they’ve retained the required rights. First time users will need to create an account, while returning users can simply login, fill out a form with descriptive information, and upload their work.
Notable scholarly collections:
Some journal publishers allow authors to pay for individual articles to be fully Open Access. Fees vary, but can be significant at times. The University Enrichment Committee facilitates funding opportunities for faculty members seeking Open Access or other publication fees. Details can be found on the Faculty Research Guidelines Document.
Further Reading
-By Ben Tucker
Collins Memorial Library is recognizing Open Access Week Oct 25-31.
Open Access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge to the user and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors. “Introduction to OA” by University of Washington Libraries is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The Open Access movement was birthed from a conference of the Open Society Institute, where attendees drafted the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which was published in early 2002. The initiative called for using new technology to develop an “unprecedented public good” through free exchange of scholarly literature. The document went on to describe this define this as Open Access:
Open Access Explained, a short video from PHD Comic gives a great overview of the context in which Open Access provides important benefits.
Creative Commons
Copyright is the intellectual property law that protects a creative work from theft or misuse. It is the creator’s legal claim to the works that he or she creates. By default, any original creative work is copyrighted to the creator when that work is expressed in a tangible form.
Creative Commons’ easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”
Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.
Collins Library Completes NEH Grant
Resources to Support Teaching & Learning
In June 2020, Collins Library received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) CARES grant to create a suite of digital teaching collections. We transformed some of our most highly requested archival instruction sessions into digital teaching collections that include primary source materials and activities for undergraduate and K-12 students. There are eight digital teaching collections covering a wide variety of subjects. The collections are designed to be used independently or integrated into a class. They serve as great starting points for student research and special projects, as well as opportunity to introduce topics to a class prior to a visit to the Archives & Special Collections.
Kudos to our dedicated team of librarians who worked throughout the last year to create these important digital teaching resources that document Puget Sound collections and history and are also freely accessible to educators throughout the world. Team members included: Peggy Burge, Jane Carlin, Katy Curtis, Laura Edgar, Adriana Flores, Hilary Robbeloth and Angela Weaver, as well as our two Humanities scholars hired with grant funds, Helen Edwards and Brittany Kealy. Each collection consists of:
 Abby Williams Hill: Artist and Advocate This collection focuses on the life and work of landscape painter Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943). |  Accordion Books: Interplay Between Form and Content This collection focuses on accordion books, which are a specific type of artists’ book. |  Artists’ Books: Primary Sources to Foster Creativity and Imagination This collection focuses on the art and form of artists’ books. |
 Bringing Women’s Studies to Puget Sound This collection focuses on the beginning of the Women’s Studies program at the University of Puget Sound. |  A History of Blackface and Minstrel Shows at Puget Sound This collection focuses on a history of black-face and minstrel shows at the University of Puget Sound. |  Japanese American Incarceration during World War II This collection focuses on the experiences of Japanese American students at Puget Sound who were incarcerated during World War II. |
 Systemic Racism in Greek Life at Puget Sound in the 1960s This collection investigates systemic racism in Greek Life at the University of Puget Sound during the 1960s. |  Tourism and Conservation in the National Parks This collection investigates the topics of tourism and conservation in American national parks in the early 20th century. |
Need Information? Don’t forget the Collins Memorial Library – Library Guides
Questions? Contact your liaison librarian
Comments: Contact Jane Carlin, library director
Remember – Your best search engine is a librarian!
Connect with us!
All students, new and returning, are invited to stop by Collins Library before September 10th to participate in our new ‘Discover Collins Library!’ activity. This guided exploration of the library showcases the many helpful resources, friendly staff, and comfy spaces available. New students will enjoy exploring the building and returning students can re-discover what they love about Collins, all while collecting small prizes along the way like stickers and candy. There is no right or wrong way to follow the path; you can navigate to each station in order, or stop by and find one station every day. When you feel like you have finished your journey of library discovery, you are invited to the final station at the library service desk where you can enter the grand prize drawing for a beautiful gift basket or a $100 gift certificate to the campus bookstore. We hope to see you soon!
If you have ever borrowed a book via Summit, found an e-book or watched a streaming video, chances are that many of those services are available due to the collaboration of Collins Memorial Library with the regional library consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance. This vital organization of 37 libraries working together to deliver services and collections enhances your ability to conduct research and support study and learning at Puget Sound.
Collins Librarians play a pivotal role in the Alliance, serving on many committees that impact accessibility, cataloging, purchases and the technical infrastructure. During the last year, the Alliance worked together to increase access to media and full-text resources to provide you with materials to support your study.
We are so fortunate to partner with the community of academic libraries in the region to share resources and expertise and add value to the academic experience.
Read more here: https://www.orbiscascade.org/about/roi-fy2021/
