Author: Megan Wacha

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Why submit to CUNY Academic Works? John Jay’s Jeffrey Kroessler shares his story.

This guest post originally appeared as “CUNY Academic Works: Get your work out there!” in the Fall 2015 Newsletter of the Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

In 2014 I published “Bombing for Justice: Urban Terrorism in New York City from the 1960s through the 1980s” in Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement Annual: Global Perspectives, a volume edited by Chief Librarian Larry Sullivan. How can you find this article? The answer is: you cannot. It exists only as a chapter in that book and is not indexed in any databases. Only a half dozen libraries have it on their shelves. Unless it is there you won’t know to search for it. How frustrating! All that research, inaccessible.

Enter CUNY Academic Works. I created an account and uploaded the piece. Now, entering the search terms terrorism, New York, and FALN in Google brings up the article. What had been locked away is now findable and citable, and the work can now join the scholarly discussion already in progress. Furthermore, everything entered into Academic Works can be accessed through OneSearch, the Library’s new search tool.

We assume that all our publications are captured by digital searches, but that is not the case. For American history, the primary database is America History and Life. If an article is not indexed there, it may as well not exist. My 2011 article in the Long Island History Journal, “Brooklyn’s Thirst, Long Island’s Water: Consolidation, Local Control, and the Aquifer,” is not in that database. Uploading it to Academic Works will greatly enhance the likelihood that researchers will find it. In addition, I uploaded a PowerPoint presentation to Academic Works on the same topic.

To reach a wider audience, faculty should submit their book chapters, research in progress, and presentations to this institutional repository. After all, publishing is pointless unless it finds readers.

Jeffrey Kroessler

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Open Access @ CUNY IT Conference 2015

The City University of New York’s 14th Annual IT Conference is happening tomorrow and Friday, and I couldn’t be more excited to attend and participate. While many of the sessions are of interest to open access advocates, I thought it’d be helpful to identify those sessions that specifically focus on open access here at CUNY — and there are a lot of them! (Did I miss one? Add it in the comments!) Check out the conference website for descriptions of all the great sessions happening over the next two days.

Thursday, December 3rd, 2:15P

Digital Preservation: You Built It, But Can We Preserve It?
Despite the ease of creation, the web is ephemeral. The fleeting nature of websites present a challenge to repositories when a record needs to be preserved. The Graduate Center Library was recently presented with this challenge with the increase of submissions of online components to dissertations. This session will focus on the need to capture a snapshot, the limitations of current normative practices and some alternative approaches.

Friday, December 4th, 9:30A

Technical and Conceptual Challenges of Developing the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA)
This roundtable explores the process of creating a democratically produced digital archive on CUNY’s rich history. Presenters will describe the CDHA’s evolution and the decision to customize the Omeka web tool for the archive’s backend and online display. The presenters, which includes historical contributors, the Omeka programmer, lead scholar, archivist and project director, will demonstrate CDHA online collections and discuss the technical and conceptual challenges involved in archiving CUNY’s history.

From Blog Posts to a Peer-Reviewed Journal: Art History Pedagogy and Practice
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a peer-supported CUNY faculty initiative, is developing Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP), an e-journal devoted to scholarship of teaching and learning in art history that responds to the lack of pedagogical research in the discipline. This session will outline the process of building an open-access platform to advance, collect, disseminate and foster academic consideration of pedagogical practice and its scholarly value.

Friday, December 4th, 1:00P

Merging the Digital and the Experiential in Science Forward
In Science Forward, a CUNY-built scientific literacy course, students experience projects and digital materials that build community and contextualize the place of science in their lives. Presenters will highlight both field work and digital tools that make Science Forward a unique, accessible and necessary innovation. Presenters will give hands-on demonstrations of tools, examples of projects and discuss how other disciplines can develop opportunities that meld experiential learning and digital platforms.

Lowering Costs, Increasing Engagement: Open Source Online Readers in History
The History Department at Bronx Community College developed an in-house, open-access online primary source reader for its World History course. We edited nearly 100 sources and created an ePortfolio website for them. The website improves student learning by reducing barriers of access to documents and making documents portable. It continues to evolve to suit faculty who use it to increase student participation and to develop new metacognitive strategies.

Building and Crowdsourcing Faculty Resources with Open Educational Resources (OERs)
It can be difficult to efficiently convey expectations for a course to new teachers – especially adjuncts who often only have a few weeks (or days) to get acquainted with a syllabus before their first class. This session will discuss the benefits of using a simple, well-organized website to provide course material, how to strike a balance between standardization and academic freedom and opportunities for collaboration and crowdsourcing.

Friday, December 4th, 2:15P

Opening CUNY: Academic Works at Work
Academic Works, CUNY’s new open access institutional repository, collects and provides public access to the scholarly and creative works produced by CUNY faculty, students and staff. This program will show how opening content to the world impacts CUNY, as each speaker addresses collections at their institution: dissertations at The Graduate Center, Open Educational Resources at Brooklyn College, the “Save Hostos” archival collection at Hostos Community College and faculty research from across CUNY.

City Tech’s OpenLab: Community Innovation and Integration
This panel showcases recent OpenLab community-building innovations: faculty-generated repositories for General Education assignments and Open Educational Resources; First-Year Learning Communities’ shared spaces for interaction among faculty, students and peer mentors; The Buzz student blog for discussion and community building among students; and a usability study that surveys faculty engagement and recommends best practices. Presenters will highlight the OpenLab’s new mobile-friendly design and future initiatives, including cohort-based projects and collaborations across CUNY.

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Open Trails

Back in November of 2011, the CUNY University Faculty Senate passed a Statement and Resolution on Open Access – a resolution which supported the establishment of a CUNY-wide open access institutional repository and which has been a guiding document in the development of that repository, from its collections policies to its mission and goals:

CUNY Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship and creative work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.

CUNY Academic Works aims to:

  • Provide centralized, public access to the scholarly and creative output of the students, faculty, and staff of the City University of New York.
  • Promote research and collaboration within and between the twenty-four campuses that make up the City University of New York, as well as the larger public.
  • Preserve the history and development of the City University of New York.

While the mission and goals of Academic Works are clearly stated, it’s understandable that the first steps to meeting them can feel a little uncertain. Therefore, in order to support the Libraries as we embark on the trail to a more open CUNY, the Office of Library Services communicated three actionable goals for our first 18 months:

  • In 6 months, 50% of institutions will have at least one collection in the repository
  • In 12 months, 100% of institutions will have at least one collection in the repository
  • In 18 months, CUNY Academic Works will have 15,000 items representing diverse content types and disciplines

Sound familiar? OLS has been busy getting the word out about Academic Works since the kick-off this March, and, less than four months later, CUNY Libraries has met its first goal. In fact, we passed it. Thanks to the commitment and hard work of CUNY librarians, eighteen (count ’em, 18!) of twenty-four institutions have their first collections in the repository within four months. And these initial collections have us well on our way to meeting the 18 month goal; they include 2,500+ items spanning from traditional journal publications and monographs to data sets, student work, open educational resources, and archival collections that capture the history of the University.

CUNY enters the scholarly communication landscape at an exciting time. It’s a time that some find reminiscent of the wild west (and it certainly has its good, its bad, and its ugly), but it’s also a time in which CUNY has the opportunity to pioneer the way.

CUNY Libraries prepare to enter the wild west of academic publishing.
CUNY Libraries prepare to enter the wild west of academic publishing. Eighteen of the campus libraries are trained and ready to go, with more on the way soon!

This post originally appeared on What’s New @ OLS57, which provides CUNY Libraries with news and updates from the Systems group at the CUNY Office of Library Services.