The Authority File

‘Scholarly’ does not equate to detached, apathetic, or impartial. In some cases, a researcher’s emotional ties to a subject can even give the topic more weight or urgency. Karina Vernon, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, indeed felt a great pull to her subject, Black life and literature in the Canadian prairies.

Dr. Vernon, a Canadian Prairie native whose family originated from Honduras, felt that her collection, The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, though academic, was deeply personal: “I thought that my sister and I and our father were the only Black people to live on the prairies, and that was so deeply incorrect. So I had to research my way into an identity. The archive has become my story.”

In the third episode of this four-part series, Dr. Vernon digs into the process of her archival research, including looking in unexpected places, like memoirs of sports figures, and a few of the surprises—letters from Mildred Ware, the wife of famous cowboy John Ware—she found along the way. Perhaps most importantly, in her hunt she unearthed stories that reflected her own: “I saw myself honestly, and I saw many of us, who went to open up the book of history or literature, only to find ourselves not there.”

It’s a crucial question on educators’ minds: How do I get my students to engage with the material? For a subject as timely and essential as information literacy, interest in the area has only grown as misinformation swells, the political divide deepens, and the public faces a relentless 24-hour news cycle just a tap away on their devices—but how can you make sure these lessons stick?

Roz Tedford at Wake Forest University, Dan Chibnall at Drake University, and Sarah Morris at Emory University Libraries have all taken some creative approaches to info lit. Whether it’s blending popular and scholarly sources or viewing late night specials on replication studies (thanks John Oliver!), each underscores how important it is to drill these lessons into students through practical use.

In this third episode, the guests swap best practices, including how to adjust their teaching styles to accommodate their Generation Z, Internet-fluent learners. Tedford, Chibnall, and Morris all hope to empower their students through lessons in logical fallacies, the scientific method, and the importance of legitimate expertise. Chibnall hopes to instill the mindset that, “if the idea does not have any merit, if it’s baseless … all of a sudden you open this door and it’s just an empty closet; there’s nothing in it.”

Anthologies have the power to not only reshape the past, but also reflect on the current cultural moment. In The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, Karina Vernon, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, grapples with how her collection amends the history of the prairies, while impacting current North American cultural and social politics.

Dr. Vernon explains that when shaping the volume, she wanted to bring to light representations of Black life in the Canadian prairies that hadn’t before been properly acknowledged. In that unearthing, she also had to confront how Black histories on the prairie entangled with indigenous life: “I wanted to think of Black stories, Black literature, and Black life in a way that also made space for indigenous stories and histories.”

In this episode, Dr. Vernon discusses how Black and indigenous histories intersect on the prairie, and how that intersection fits into the current political climate in Canada. She explores the range of voices and texts included in the anthology—”the songs, the gospels, the shouts, the stories, the recitations, the prayers”—and the scholarly possibilities the collection holds for the classroom and beyond.

Though misinformation has long been part of our news and media, the 2016 election galvanized academics, librarians, and researchers into combating the issue with renewed force. Their methods have grown into a multidisciplinary approach that interweaves media literacy, social sciences, and data science through one-shots, workshops, and interactive lesson plans.

Roz Tedford at Wake Forest University, Dan Chibnall at Drake University, and Sarah Morris at Emory University Libraries all saw the need to build information literacy classes that would serve students long after graduation. Tedford states: “It’s almost less critical in terms of their academic research for the four years that they’re at college, and more critical of educating them to be good citizens for the rest of their lives.”

In the second episode of this four-part series, Tedford, Chibnall, and Morris discuss how the 2016 election influenced their information literacy curricula, as well as how their courses have developed in the ensuing years. Mila Steele, Senior Publisher of Social Sciences at SAGE Publishing, joins the conversation to discuss how publishers can develop content that supports faculty and librarians’ digital literacy goals.

Writers like Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell shaped the popular image of the Canadian prairie settler as white, anglophone, and male, and the region’s image as sweeping grasslands broken by farms and small towns. The prairies in fact have a much more diverse history—and collection of writers—than the popular images suggest. We talk with Karina Vernon, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, whose work complicates and expands those images.

In pursuit of sources during her graduate studies, Dr. Vernon stumbled upon an archive that included accounts of Black settlers. This discovery cracked open her perception of her home—the Canadian prairie—and sent her on a years-long hunt for Black writers from the prairies. The result is The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology.

In the first episode of this four-part series, Dr. Vernon explains the process of gathering word-of-mouth or other untraditional sources, the inclusivity of the anthology, and the task of defining a collection that hadn’t before been seen as an archive. She also talks the personal connection she developed to the book’s subject matter: “It changed my research trajectory, but ultimately it really changed my life and my own conception of myself, my history, and my place on the prairies.”

Conspiracy theories. Fake news. Flat Earthers. These buzz words have seeped into our common vernacular. But how does misinformation spread? How does the internet expand its influence? And how can academics keep the next generation of students from falling prey to falsehoods?

In this four-part series, three instructors, each with their own unique backgrounds—Roz Tedford, Director of Research & Instruction at Wake Forest University; Dan Chibnall, STEM Librarian and Assistant Professor of Librarianship at Drake University; and Sarah Morris, Head of Instruction and Engagement at Emory University Libraries—discuss their own approaches to information literacy and the common traps their students fall into.

In this first episode, Tedford, Chibnall, and Morris grapple with how the internet acts as a double-edged sword. While it allows for greater connection across the globe, it can also breed echo chambers that spread false information. Joined by Mila Steele, Senior Publisher of Social Sciences at SAGE Publishing, this episode explores why ‘bad science’ and conspiracy theorists thrive in the digital age, and why an interdisciplinary approach to misinformation can be so powerful.

Publishers, librarians, and scholarly market experts have debated the future of open access publishing for decades now. What have they found? That it’s difficult to enact far-reaching, equitable, and sustainable change across an entire market. However, MIT Press hopes to make waves by creating an OA monograph publishing model usable for all presses, currently in the works thanks to a three-year $850,000 Arcadia grant.

Raym Crow, Senior Consultant at SPARC and researcher on the project, explains that to publish more OA monographs, replicable frameworks need to be introduced. If more institutions successfully adopt these models, “then other presses that have different risk profiles and maybe aren’t as deeply funded also would be willing to try.”

In this final episode, Terry Ehling, Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press, offers background on the press’ commitment to open access, and how OA could affect the dynamic between presses and their institutions. Ehling and Crow also take a bold look ahead at the future of the OA monograph market and the potential change MIT Press’ model could make for other presses.

With a three-year $850,000 Arcadia grant in hand, MIT Press has set to work building an open access publishing model that all presses can use. But what are the benefits of one model over another? What elements are most important to authors and publishers? How do you ensure inclusivity, scalability, and equity across a framework? These are the questions Raym Crow, Senior Consultant at SPARC and researcher on the project, must answer in the press’ quest to find a replicable OA monograph publishing model.

Terry Ehling, Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press, joins Crow to explain the difficulty in aligning the philosophical ideals of open access with the practicalities of the academic publishing market. Crow offers a sobering perspective on why current OA models fail: “people will come in and say yes, even of altruistic basis, say ‘yes, we want to participate in this.’ The problem is that kind of support erodes over time because it’s unsustainable, unscalable, and inequitable.”

In this episode, Crow zeroes in on the criteria needed for MIT’s model—immediate access, inclusivity, replicability, and, of course, “the model has to generate sufficient revenue … and that revenue has to be stable over time, and predictable over time.” Crow and Ehling also compare serial models to collective models, and discuss whether or not MIT Press’ inherent focus on STEM titles will influence the framework’s principles.

Open access monographs are a relatively new product, and the existing distribution infrastructure for print monographs is largely opaque to publishers. That means, when building a financial framework for open monographs, there isn’t much reliable data out there. But MIT Press,

The press hopes its three-year $850,000 grant from the Arcadia Fund will help produce a sustainable business model all presses can adopt to publish OA monographs. As a researcher on the project and a Senior Consultant at SPARC, Raym Crow is quite aware of the lack of useful data on OA monographs. He says that those working on the project are “forced to treat it as a new service” since monograph publishing “doesn’t yield the same kind of market data that you get from subscriptions or other kinds of products and services.”a staunch supporter of open access materials, is working to set a precedent.

In this episode, Crow explains what data they can use, and the risk involved in building a framework for a new service. Terry Ehling, Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press, discusses the press’ background with the Arcadia Fund, its motivation for building this framework, and how the press has used the grant thus far.

In the past twenty years, scholarly monograph sales have sharply declined. As the publishing world moves online, the skills that can’t be robotized—copyediting, designing, marketing—continue to add up. While many hoped digitization would reduce printing costs, therefore paving the way for increased open access materials, Terry Ehling, Director for Strategic Initiatives at MIT Press, explains that it’s actually “replacing some of the nonprint components, those costs, with costs related to technology, so it’s actually escalating.”

Thanks to a three-year $850,000 grant from the Arcadia Fund, MIT Press has the chance to look for a sustainable way to produce open access monographs. While there are divergent OA structures in place around the world, the goal is to build a cohesive financial framework and business model that all presses, small or large, can use to publish OA monographs.

In this first episode, Ehling gives some background into how MIT Press, one of the largest North American university presses, has managed to remain profitable in this difficult publishing environment. Raym Crow, Senior Consultant at SPARC and researcher on the Arcadia-funded project, zooms out to offer perspective on different types of open access monograph practices currently in use.