Category: Impact

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It’s Not Just Always About You: Thinking about Preservation and Academic Works 

This morning, I walked past City Tech’s showcase for faculty work. The showcase is located in a stairwell that many students and faculty use to go from the main entrance to the first floor. Most of the time, the showcase features a faculty book with a reproduction of the cover and a press release featuring a photo of the author. 

Today, the display featured our student/faculty journal TECHNE. Published by our Architectural Technology department, TECHNE is a high quality, open access publication. It is common for schools of architecture to publish journals that features essays by students and faculty. TECHNE, like its counterparts at Yale, MIT, and other architecture programs, also highlights current student/faculty projects. For example, City Tech successfully competed in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon as Team DURA.  TECHNE, as a formal publication, helps to document Team DURA’s accomplishments.  

So, what does TECHNE and Team DURA have to do with scholarly communications and Open Access? TECHNE is open access. Anyone can read it. Team DURA has a beautiful, comprehensive website. All wonderful but will readers be able to find, let alone access, TECHNE decades or even nearer in the future? The answer to this question is where librarians and Academic Works come in. 

Ting Chin, one of the editors of TECHNE, reached out to the library in June 2016 about using Academic Works to disseminate the journal. After further discussion with Ting and a consultation with Megan Wacha, CUNY’s Scholarly Communications librarian, we decided to create a designated archives area for TECHNE within Academic Works. This ensures that the journal gets a wider readership: each issue has metadata to make it more findable. More importantly, TECHNE is now preserved.

We do not talk enough about preservation and the institutional repository. Why? Most non-library faculty are far more concerned with increasing their dissemination and related citation rate through making their articles open access. When I promote Academic Works, I keep the message focused on the immediate and short-term benefit to faculty. The profound importance of long-term preservation, however, does not usually come up in conversation unless I sense that my colleague is concerned about broader issues of information equity.

 Preservation, which provides for long-term findability and maintenance of our scholarly, creative, other works, is a core librarian and archivist value. For any librarian working with institutional repositories, preservation is also a core concern. When Megan came on board with CUNY, she shared Clifford Lynch’s still important article from 2003, “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age.” Lynch’s words are still so powerful:  

an institutional repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form, and that a primary responsibility of our universities is to exercise stewardship over these riches: both to make them available and to preserve them. (1)

Academic Works and other institutional repositories differ from other open access platforms specifically because institutional repositories are committed to long-term preservation. So many of our works are born-digital and lack the important metadata that makes these works findable. That further strengthens the need for preservation and the need for sharing your work in Academic Works.   

Yes, it’s not always about you. As we have moved away from print, we have not sufficiently thought about how future generations will have access to our creations. When you share your work in Academic Works and advocate for institutional repositories, you are making a major contribution to a sustainable scholarly future.  


(1) Lynch, Clifford A. “Institutional repositories: essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 3.2 (2003): 327-336.

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Event Announcement: “Publish Don’t Perish: Authors’ Rights When Authors Write”

Your research is central to your career and the advancement of knowledge in your field, but do you know your rights to what you write? Join librarians Liz Jardine (LaGuardia) and Megan Wacha (CUNY OLS) as they discuss how faculty can publish in the journals they want to publish in and still keep their rights. Topics will include: how to find and evaluate a journal to publish your work, reading and negotiating contracts, and how to distribute your work so it can have maximum impact.

When: 10 – 11:30AM on Thursday, May 12th
Where: Library Classroom, E101-B (campus map)

This event is open to all CUNY Faculty. To RSVP (or for more information), please contact Catherine Stern castern@lagcc.cuny.edu or Liz Jardine ejardine@lagcc.cuny.edu

Sponsors: LaGuardia Library Workshop Planning Committee & CUNY Office of Library Services

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Public scholarship for the public good – but who is the Public?

Open access advocates, myself included, often talk about public scholarship for the public good. Open access advances the pace of scientific progress, promotes interdisciplinary research and collaborations, and allows researchers to share their work with those who don’t otherwise have access to it. We’ve all had the experience of hitting a paywall, and it’s not hard to believe that members of our local and global communities do too.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative, regarded as one of three declarations that defined and shaped the movement, establishes the public good as the foundation for open access:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will . . . lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

But who is the Public? How do open access repositories like CUNY Academic Works benefit them? We want to know!

The Office of Library Services at the CUNY Central Office recently set-up a new feature in Academic Works: a feedback form. PDF cover pages in select series now include a question: “How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!” Readers that click the hyperlink are directed to a feedback form that asks for some basic information as well as permission to publicly share their comments.

Before rolling it out across the repository, this feature was tested on a collection of dissertations at the Graduate Center. Monthly usage reports let us know this content gets a lot of attention, but who is downloading and reading it? How does it contribute to the public good? I can’t tell you about each download, but I can now tell you how open, public access to “The Contributions of Earl “Bud” Powell to the Modern Jazz Style” benefit one person:

I am a 52 year old engineer who has been playing jazz piano since the age of 10. I am delighted to find this thesis about one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century. It includes the *incredible* transcription of “Strictly Confidential,” an amazing piano piece by legendary jazz pianist Bud Powell. I have been looking for a transcription for this piece my entire life, as it is far too complicated for me to hear with my basic ears…

This is the first of what I expect to be many stories that demonstrate the benefits of open access to the public. Future feedback will be posted to this blog when permissions allow.