A DIY Sandbox: Hosted Publishing Services in the University of Illinois Library
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| Number of Parts | 36 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/51325 (DOI) | |
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00:00
Lecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
Hi, my name is Janet Swacchino and I'm the digital publishing specialist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. And I'm here to talk about Publishing Without Walls, which is our startup publishing initiative. And specifically what I thought went with the theme of this conference, which is authors
00:22
taking back ownership, is I wanted to talk about our sandbox workspace where we have our scholars experiment with different open source software. And it's part of our larger effort to ensure usability and meaningful user engagement with our authors.
00:40
And I'll also talk a little bit about some of the challenges we've encountered. I'm presenting on behalf of my department, which includes Harriet Green, who's the head of scholarly communication, and Chris Madden, who you'll know because he participated remotely in the PKP sprint. And real quickly, I wanted to talk about some of our values.
01:03
Publishing Without Walls is a library publishing initiative, and we're actually a partnership between the iSchool, the Department of African American Studies, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. And we have three different arms. We have a research arm, a publication and production arm, and an outreach and education
01:22
arm. And the last two, the outreach and the publication, is really what's relevant here. So when we meet one-on-one with scholars and when we conduct workshops, we try to encourage collaboration. So that's things like over-the-shoulder learning and small group discussion, playfulness
01:42
and tinkering, as well as the idea of pedagogy as play. We try to focus on the process and building through providing a lot of unstructured time to dive into different open source tools. These are some of the tools that we offer.
02:01
A lot of big publishing projects, especially other projects that are funded by the Mellon Foundation, focus on tool building. But what we wanted to do was take tools that already existed and try to stitch them together and have them work together better in a publishing ecosystem.
02:21
And this is a simplified version of our workflows. The sandbox is kind of what I'm interested in here, because it's where we send people before we actually move them into the production phase, and it's where we have participants work when we do workshops.
02:41
It's been really helpful because it's allowed us to do relatively large workshops where lots of people are experimenting and testing different software at the same time. It's also helped us to develop and test new functionalities in these softwares. It's also been really helpful for us to find bugs before we actually move the authors
03:04
into the production phase. Let's see. And then I just wanted to talk about some of the challenges. One of them is, of course, like I touched on in the previous slide, is we tend to find bugs during workshops.
03:21
So we'll have a lot of people who will encounter the same problem at the same time, and that can be slightly stressful. And you can see this is a screenshot of our Slack channel where our research programmer is trying to address login issues in real time during a workshop remotely, which can be challenging.
03:43
We've also... Well, a lot of what I've had to do is manage people, authors' expectations when they're in the workshops and moving from the sandbox to the production phase. And then finally, all of this takes staff and resources, and right now we're funded
04:03
for three years by the Mellon Foundation, but in order to continue to be as responsive as we are right now, we're going to need sustainable continued funding from the library and our other partners. So that's it. Thanks. Thanks.