Custom Textbooks

A department we work closely with in the Communication A requirement has plans to use a custom textbook this fall for the first time.  The rationale is that they have many sections and the shared readings allow instructors to customize within certain boundaries.  We’ve also had the opportunity to include certain handouts, which is a great way to further our integration into the course.  The other reason for having the custom textbook is that it raises revenue for the program, although I’m not sure how much.

There is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today about the ethics of this practice.  These textbooks are hard to resell, and it’s customary to include required workbook pages that make it necessary to use a new textbook each year.

Some interesting issues for library reserves as well…

Five Things You Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials

A new publication from the ACRL Instruction Section, “Five Things You Should Read about…” debuted this week.   I am very impressed!

Remixes and Mashups Breakout Session

Maddy Covelli and Richie Rathsack moderated a breakout session at the Culture of Sharing Forum.   They agreed to share their presentation, remixes-and-mashups-culture-of-sharing, since there are many excellent examples and we didn’t see all of them at the forum.  They based much of their content on “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User‐Generated Video” by Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, and their presentation is a great synthesis of the issues for our environment.

This is an important area for librarians as we think about how to move into areas of information literacy like understanding copyright, but also as we think about information literacy in the context of web 2.0, where users are creating content.  What support should we provide for students who want to produce content using library resources or resources out there in the world?  How can we get involved in teaching and learning that has students creating these types of products, and what would we like our involvement to be?

Culture of Sharing Forum

I came to work on a Saturday for the Culture of Sharing Forum. The keynote speaker was Nelson Pavlosky from Students for Free Culture. The presentation was really good at getting participants thinking about the issues and possibilities. We had breakouts on topics such as YouTube and Mashups and Open Source Publishing. We had an interesting mix of breakout facilitators and attendees from across campus, including Ken Frazier from the Library, Ron Kraemer the CIO, Kristin Eschenfelder from SLIS, a number of graduate students from SLIS and Journalism, and a few hardy undergrads.

In the closing session, Gavin Baker, a former intern at SPARC, talked about the need for a new model to finance the editorial process that will allow us to share the results of research independent from commercial publishers. Open access — no price barriers to access and no permissions barriers to use — provides a set of solutions to these problems. Open access journals can be funded through author fees, grants, or subsidies from parts of the university. The archives route allows the author post a copy of their article online, for example in Minds@UW. This can also facilitate sharing of data sets and theses/dissertations.  Research shows that open access-published research is more used, and there are increasing numbers of open access journals.

Some of us had lunch at Gino’s Restaurant with Gavin Baker, which was interesting to me not just for the nice conversation, but because I used to work there in the early nineties. Gino remembered me (not so many girl cooks, although he has one again now) but still wasn’t so friendly. Just like old times.

Student Copyright Forum — “Culture of Sharing”

Saturday, April 12th, the library will be sponsoring a copyright forum for students: Culture of Sharing: P2P, YouTube, Open Access, Open Source, copyright and Why it Matters to You!

This is new ground for us in a few ways:

• We want the forum to be about what students can (legally) do, more than about what they can’t do
• We are planning the content to be of interest to students and have done our best to get students engaged in the planning process.
• We want to show that the library has a stake and unique expertise in the important issue of copyright education

We are grappling with the idea of how to advertise to students, so doing a Facebook group and ads, fliers around campus, “chalking” (a UW phenomenon?), and offering free food. We’re learning a lot from these forays (why is our Facebook group so buried? what is the new pricing structure for ads?). Unfortunately, we ended up with the same date as the college Jeopardy tournament, but we are hopeful that people will come and that this will be an event that we can build on in the future.