No Post on Sundays: PEI Postcard’s #TranscribeTuesday ExperimentMark Cousins & Meghan Landry, Robertson Library, UPEI
In early 2016 the Robertson Library received a donation of Prince Edward Island vintage postcards from the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation. The aim of the project was to digitize and host the postcards on one of the Library’s virtual research environments. Public History students completed the digitization process and a Library student worked on ingesting content to UPEI’s CAIRN (CAUL/CBUA Atlantic Islandora Repository Network) VRE over the summer of 2016. Once completed, we began to inspect the metadata to ensure quality and to transcribe inscriptions on the postcards. During the course of transcription many postcards proved more difficult to decipher than others. The option of online crowdsourcing was brought forth to harvest the knowledge of PEI history and genealogy enthusiasts. We first began an experimental activity of “#transcribetuesday” in which we tweeted from the Library’s Twitter account. After a few weeks of modest response on Twitter, we transitioned to using Reddit: a platform that allows us to choose the forum or audience of viewers. Under the subreddit r/PEI, we were able to interact directly with Redditors interested in PEI news, history, and culture. After Reddit, we decided to reach out to a Facebook page called “Historic PEI” with almost 10,000 followers. They agreed to undertake a future collaborative project with the Library to create daily posts of postcards in an attempt to gain momentum and interest among its viewers. In future, these postcards will be migrated to the Library’s Island Archives to enhance and preserve PEI history. This project is currently active and therefore it could be either a poster as we have noted or a lightning talk depending on the feedback and participation on Facebook.
Researcher Response to the Tri-Agency Policy on Open Access Publications Heidi Hlubina, Brian Lesser, Tyler Lightfoot, Lisa Nardecchia, Margaret Vail, Dalhousie University
In 2015, the Tri-Council Agencies (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [CIHR], the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC], and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC]) launched the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, which requires that all peer-reviewed articles resulting from research funded by their agencies after May 1, 2015 be made available in an Open Access (OA) repository within 12 months of publication. This study concentrated on Tri-Council Agencies grant recipients to identify the following: their awareness of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications; their plans to comply (or not) with the OA requirement; where they deposited, or will deposit an OA copy of their research; and their reasons for selecting one option over another. The issue of mandating grant recipients to publish in OA remains a provocative one. The results of this study will provide beneficial information for those institutions looking to increase IR deposits by identifying the barriers that researchers face, and considerations that researchers must make to meet the OA mandates of their funding agencies.
Mysteries of Compact Shelving Revealed! Ann Barrett and Jan Pelley, Dalhousie University
The Kellogg Library underwent an complete renovation in 2015-16 and the new space allowed for significantly less square footage for shelving. The decision was made to move the entire monograph and serials collection into public access compact shelving. With no previous experience of compact shelving, a series of site visits to other libraries with self-serve units in public spaces were undertaken and a literature search performed. Both proved useful but did not prepare us for a number of unanticipated eventualities. Our experience may offer advice to others who are facing similar space changes as library repurposed traditional shelving footprints for new and innovative uses.
