United Kingdom

From a cross industry perspective, drawing on her work with content and service providers to improve digital accessibility, Lettie Conrad will discuss how publishers can move beyond a view of compliance as &quot;nice to have,&quot; to a place where accessibility is an industry standard cornerstone. Providing an overview of web accessibility protocols, content quality guidelines, and publishing standards, Conrad will review how accessibility conformance is a growing legal concern, among other factors. We have seen this with the UN SDG 4, The Americans with Disabilities Act and EU Web Accessibility Directive. Luckily, accessible publishing is not only achievable, but affordable -- with advanced technical systems and formats, such as EPUB. It has never been easier to embed accessibility standards into business-as-usual content products and workflows. This presentation will explore the current state of content accessibility standards and what steps publishers and technology providers are taking to fully embrace a truly inclusive and accessible content for all.

UKSG Annual Conference 2021

Accessibility moving the (stuck) dial

equity

inclusion

accessibility

Welcome! This event, hosted by UC Online, is an all-campus virtual conference. We are convening UC faculty, students, staff, administrators, and other stakeholders throughout the system to explore innovations, advancements, and transformations in digital learning environments.
 
 The conference will focus on emerging tools, technology, accessibility, and teaching and learning methodologies at UC, in alignment with equity and inclusion. Keynote speeches, panel discussions, demonstrations, live-interactive sessions along with opportunities for socializing will provide multiple opportunities for attendees. The sessions will highlight past, present, and future accomplishments and challenges in online and digital environments. 
 
 Thank you, in advance, for your interest in and continued support of UC Online.
 
 We look forward to sharing two days with you.
 
 
 Best, 
 Ellen Osmundson, Ph.D.
 Program Director
 UC Online 


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Registration for this event is required. To access the content, Please go here 
https://uconline2021registration.paperform.co/

Digital Transformation of UC: The Next Chapter

UC Online will host a virtual conference to convene UC faculty, students, staff, administrators and other stakeholders throughout the system to explore innovations, advancements and transformations in digital environments.

From a cross industry perspective, drawing on her work with content and service providers to improve digital accessibility, Lettie Conrad will discuss how publishers can move beyond a view of compliance as "nice to have," to a place where accessibility is an industry standard cornerstone. Providing an overview of web accessibility protocols, content quality guidelines, and publishing standards, Conrad will review how accessibility conformance is a growing legal concern, among other factors. We have seen this with the UN SDG 4, The Americans with Disabilities Act and EU Web Accessibility Directive. Luckily, accessible publishing is not only achievable, but affordable -- with advanced technical systems and formats, such as EPUB. It has never been easier to embed accessibility standards into business-as-usual content products and workflows. This presentation will explore the current state of content accessibility standards and what steps publishers and technology providers are taking to fully embrace a truly inclusive and accessible content for all.

technical paper

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition 2021 will be held online for the first time. The event is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with virtual social events and a major online trade exhibition.



 UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. 

Publication by publication, university libraries are pivotal to making open access (OA) happen. They are hubs of expertise within their institutions, managing repositories and gold OA funds and offering untiring advocacy and training. However, libraries are service providers. Their researcher clients may not be as immersed in the web of OA options and policy and tools, but librarians have to serve their scholarly communications enterprise, not vice versa. OA cannot flourish as a crusade just of libraries. 

This paper uses UKRI’s 2020 policy consultation as a lens to examine the relationship between library and research communities in a Russell Group university choosing between future OA trajectories. The choice to take a researcher-led approach revealed the current reality of OA in the institution. Few academic authors can avoid OA altogether now, but many still limit their attention to overcoming local obstacles to publishing specific outputs. How to distil legitimate and coherent feedback when researcher voices diverge, or manifest surface-level or one-sided engagement with a tangle of intricate challenges? What agency should opinions of library staff exert in this process? Should our institution lead or follow, and who decides?

Who speaks for the University on open access?

The COVID19 pandemic accelerated the move of many aspects of library provision online across the UK (and elsewhere). Libraries already offered a high proportion of resources in digital formats and both took advantage of free access to ebooks, as well as investing in increased digital content through a variety of packages and solutions. Many individual libraries explored large scale eTextbook provision (with the support of Jisc and SCONUL who sought feedback on the acceptability of publisher and aggregator models). In this session I will reflect on large scale etextbook provision (based on my experience at two institutions which have run this type of scheme) with consideration to questions of: 
- student and academic staff perspectives and the use of analytics 
- relevance of textbook for all subjects and alternatives 
- changing models of pricing and provision 
- emerging issues and potential future directions

Learning from eTextbooks: looking back and thinking forwards

A case study is presented of efforts to coordinate a university-wide approach to etextbooks including library guidance for academics, a tool for keeping track of etextbooks in use across the university and some examples of best practise. These include working with procurement, academic support unit managers and other key stakeholders to ensure that a joined-up approach is taken, etextbook value for money is properly assessed and alternatives to etextbook provision are given due consideration.

Etextbooks: coordinating a university-wide approach with no additional budget

In 2019 the University of Leicester library developed a new leisure reading collection. It was important to collection was representative of the incredible range of diverse voices of students, staff and the local population. In order to include more works by underrepresented voices, the library launched the ‘Represent’ campaign and asked users to recommend titles from underrepresented voices for the library to purchase and add to their collections. The ‘Represent’ campaign has since developed to work with student volunteers to look at diversity within subject reading lists as well as creating opportunities to discuss issues around representation more broadly.

Represent: Building diverse library collections in collaboration with library users

This presentation will reflect on how we managed library services at the University of York during the covid-19 pandemic. It will focus on how our culture and approach enabled us to not only survive but thrive during this time and go on to discuss four areas of strategic focus and positioning before finally sharing some thoughts as to what the future might hold.


Surviving (and thriving) during and after a pandemic

Throughout 2020 instructors had to redesign courses to fit online as well as in-person environments. Libraries are a central hub for resources and support in this endeavour. Using real-world examples, this talk examines one area where this partnership is essential: teaching using historical documents. An activity that often happens in the classroom and archive is particularly challenging to move online, but digitised primary source collections offer the opportunity to include archival documents in newly formatted classes and assignments. We will see how traditional humanities scholarship and innovative pedagogical approaches can come together through integrating digitised primary sources into undergraduate teaching.

Teaching with primary sources in the virtual classroom

Over the last 20 years or so, universities have made considerable investments in library centric discovery services. Nevertheless, for some students, especially undergraduates, discovery has become largely irrelevant. They simply log on to their learning management system to find ready prepared links to the print and electronic resources they need that week for their course or module. This is typically because the learning system is linked to a library managed reading/resource list solution. Reading/resource list solutions are essentially ‘curation’ tools. By curation I mean selecting, refining and arranging to add value. The content of a reading list is curated primarily by academics who select the best resources and list them.

The next step is helping students engage with the content. This has become increasingly important in a ‘flipped classroom’ environment where COVID has accelerated the trend to an online learning environment. We are now seeing the rise of specific solutions to better enable engagement with content. They typically encourage group ‘community’ interaction with students who are asked to analyse the content and engage with the reading itself.

This UKSG presentation will describe and analyse this important trend towards the better curation of, and engagement with content. It will encourage librarians to work more closely with university teaching and learning staff and technologists to adopt approaches and solutions that help students better engage with content which, in turn will lead to better learning outcomes

Farewell discovery, hello curation and engagement

In the absence of funds for 'gold' open access, publishers may allow universities to share the author's accepted manuscript on a 'green' basis, with or without an embargo. The former means the work can be openly accessed typically after a period of 12-24 months. Such time gives publishers opportunity to build revenue, but creates inequalities. Firstly, there is a division between those who can afford a fee or can access a library subscription to benefit from the research and those who cannot; but there is also a divide between universities that have funds to pay publishing charges and less research-intensive institutions that have no such fund. 

This case study considers journal articles published by Edge Hill University in 2019. Originally a teacher training college, the University received taught degree-awarding powers its university title in 2006, followed by Research Degree Awarding Powers in 2008. A key finding is that embargoes mean certain kinds of research articles can be 'locked down' for longer. For instance, educational research articles were found to be held back from public access for more than twice the time when compared with health research. This divide is driven by disseminating research through publishers which make extensive use of embargoes.

As a result, the consumers of Edge Hill's education research (e.g. schools, teachers) may need to wait longer to use it. This can potentially affect their ability to use research to innovate, enhance practice, or respond to societal challenges.

Pay now or wait a year: Embargoes as a selective barrier to access)

It is no unknown statement to say that the coronavirus pandemic has and continues to impact many - mentally, physically, emotionally and economically. The research community has not been immune to this crisis. Beyond the impact on research output, the sector has and continues to see the sharp end of what is predicted to be a long term economic and financial change for universities and other higher education establishments. Yet while we continue to think on the ‘what can we do right now to help,’ we also need to reframe that focus to look at ‘how can we help going forward’ with a long term view of the new challenges that the research community will face. However, beyond a general collective understanding that university budgets are likely to be significantly affected, the impact of reduced budgets on the research enterprise is not as easily seen. Drawing on findings from research commissioned by Springer Nature and conducted by Roger Schonfeld from Ithaka S+R, Rob Johnson from Research Consulting and Jason Owen-Smith this session will address issues such as:Impacts on how research is conducted
- the knock-on implications and uneven impact this could have on researchers
- ability to attract the funding for critical research programs.
- And how the landscape of research disciplines could and may change
Aimed at all across the research enterprise workflow, the goal of this session is to be interactive using an evidence base to discuss appropriate next steps forwards and recommendations for stakeholders within the research enterprise.

The impact of COVID on the research enterprise: A research study

"Lancaster University is a global university with an innovative approach to digital transformation. At the heart of the discussions in early 2020 were what it meant to be a truly global research intensive university while maintaining the campus experience that Lancaster is know for. Allied to this, the Library, following the recruitment of a new Library Director, was in the process of creating a new library vision to support the university in its endeavours to ensure it worked as partner not just service provider. Then the pandemic hit.

Led by Professor Simon Guy, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global and by Andrew Barker, Library Director, this session will present a portrait of our ambitions for the future of the Lancaster University and its library post-pandemic, how we ensure that we have a transformative impact in the communities in which we operate while being a truly global research intensive university ."

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