The Authority File

In this episode, Lorraine Estelle of COUNTER, Stuart Maxwell of Scholarly IQ, and Iris Hanney of Unlimited Priorities discuss COUNTER credentialing and how the COUNTER standards allow libraries and publishers to assess value. They discuss the underlying logic of digital standards, and how consistency, credibility, and comparability are key to the development of standards in general.

This week Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE; Barbara Kline Pope, Director of Johns Hopkins University Press; Dean Smith, Director of Cornell University Press; and Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries offer their thoughts on the future of open publication and the tension between the ideology behind open publication and the practical considerations that must go into any business decision. They talk about the ways ideology and practicality can complement each other and how publishers, aggregators, and libraries need to work together to reduce the need for redundant deposit. They also discuss how—especially in the humanities and social sciences—educating authors about the reach and access open publication provides is part of an ongoing process that’s only just beginning.

Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries details the collaboration between the library, JHU Press, MUSE Open, and the Black Press Research Collective. Together they are producing a “new aggregation” that connects primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship across multiple platforms. Learn how that collaboration came about and why bringing in researchers’ voices was so important to shaping the publication strategy.

Black Press in America represents a collaborative strategy for publishing that respects the needs of researchers and leverages the strengths of libraries, university presses and aggregators. Learn about it and how similar projects may shape open publication.

Open access publication in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is well established, though still a marginal percentage of the market, while in the humanities and social sciences, open publication is still in its infancy, without a firmly planted business model. Hear how Dean Smith, the publisher of Cornell University Press, navigates the sometimes fraught and binary positions of librarians, publishers, and authors when talking about open access, and how Cornell University Press is working to develop sustainable open business models through experimentation with grants and workflows.

This episode explores grant funding for open books, partnerships with services like MUSE Open, discovery, and metrics, and highlights one university press’s efforts to open up its catalog and the ways those efforts are paying dividends of greater use and increased visibility.

Publishing open access used to mean posting the full text or a .pdf of a work online, but the world of open academic book publishing is growing new forms and containers as well as new business models. In episode 34, Wendy Queen, Director of Project MUSE, and Barbara Kline Pope, Director of Johns Hopkins University Press, weigh in on the promise of open academic books, the experiments shaking up traditional book publication, and the connections that MUSE Open will bring to open access books when it launches this summer.

We’re in the early days of and evolving market. Publishers and platforms are working toward greater discoverability, integration, and reach. Learn about their hopes, strategies, and ideas in this week’s episode.

This week, explore some of the tensions that spring from expanding the classroom beyond its physical confines and opening it up to anyone willing to put in the time and effort through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Does the amount of time instructors have to put into these classes match the educational outcomes for the participants? How far can the mission of an institution extend before financial realities begin to kick in? What happens when students bear more and responsibility for their own learning? This episode explores these questions and offers insights from SAGE’s recent white paper, Assessing the Impact of Educational Video on Student Engagement, Critical Thinking and Learning: The Current State of Play.

What is cognitive load, and how does it affect student learning? Does video use increase or decrease the cognitive load on the part of the viewer? This week, Michael Carmichael of SAGE Publishing and Dr. Jeffrey Karpicke of Purdue University discuss the ways student behaviors and the environments in which they learn are shaping how they learn. They also discuss how presenting content through video may impact cognitive load. They also dive into the results of their experiment and what they demonstrate about graphics, cognitive load, and student engagement with video.

From how-tos and brief explainers that break down complex concepts into bite-sized chunks of information to long-form documentaries and feature films, video has found its way into almost every corner of higher education. But what makes for a successful educational video, and how would we judge that success? This week Michael Carmichael, Video Publisher at SAGE, and Dr. Jeffrey Karpicke of Purdue University think through these questions and talk about how their recent study, reported in the white paper Assessing the Impact of Educational Video on Student Engagement, Critical Thinking and Learning: The Current State of Play, examines the role of graphics—everything from clip art to custom animations—in enhancing student engagement, critical thinking, and information retention.

What do we know about students’ learning comprehension and video use? What do students say about their desire to interact with video in different types of learning environments? How are learners—from kindergarten students all the way up through adults—actually learning from videos, and how might video producers increase engagement with the videos being used in varied learning environments? These are some of the questions this week’s guests tackle. They also define the flipped classroom and blended learning, and discuss how video fits into these new instructional models. If you are interested in how video impacts student learning, then this week’s episode provides a great introduction to the subject and offers insights from SAGE’s recent white paper, Assessing the Impact of Educational Video on Student Engagement, Critical Thinking and Learning: The Current State of Play.

What do academics and librarians get wrong about financial evaluation and assessment? Is there a difference? What is a book’s unit cost within the library, and why does it matter? How do a library’s public relation efforts dovetail with its finances? In this week’s episode Bill wraps up his conversation on library finances with University of West Florida Dean of Libraries, Robert Dugan, co-author of the new book from ACRL, Financial Management in Academic Libraries: Data-Driven Planning and Budgeting. They talk through the uses and limitations of library metrics and offer an example of best practices that can be drawn from peer comparison, and they touch on the difference between expenditures and costs. Give this week’s episode a listen for an insightful look at how responsible libraries can manage their finances to meet the needs of their community.