UCL Press is delighted to be taking part in JISC’s Institution as e-textbook publisher project workshop on Friday 16 June 2017 at Radisson Blu Birmingham. This event is free to attend, and focuses on the four-year institution as e-textbook publisher project which investigates the viability of higher education institutions publishing their own e-textbooks.  Book now to reserve your place.

Projects have been undertaken by UCL Press,  University of Liverpool, University of Nottingham and University of the Highlands and Islands with Edinburgh Napier University. The overall objective is to assess whether the textbooks that have been created provide:

• A more affordable higher education for students
• Better value for money than commercial alternatives
• An improved, more sustainable information environment for all

During the project, participating institutions are creating eight textbooks covering a range of subjects, applying business, licensing and distribution models and reporting back on the impact, value and viability of the models they choose.

Workshop overview

The four project teams will reflect back on the last three years of the project under a number of broad themes:

• Costs: how long did the books take to write, what were the hidden costs?
• Benchmarking: cost benefit analysis and evidence to invest in more e-textbooks
• Technology: the technology used including lessons learned and issues faced
• Licensing: issues encountered including CC licenses, 3rd party copyright issues
• Dissemination, distributions and discovery: concepts and process behind the dissemination, uptake, and wider adoption of the e-textbooks
• Uptake: evidence of usage by students and courses
• Feedback: Would the authors do it again, would they act as champions?
• Implications of implementation: What are the implications for the wider adoption of the e-textbooks at other institutions?

Delegates will be encouraged to make notes on these areas and to contribute thoughts and ideas in relation to their own institutions in the afternoon workshop. This will allow participants to discuss the themes and look at the notes made by others. These ideas will help shape a proposed toolkit for institutions, which will be a major outcome of the project.

The workshop will appeal to potential authors, librarians, learning technologists and senior university staff who may wish to consider publishing their own e-textbooks. Find out more here.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

The London Book Fair is one of the highlights of the year for many publishers from all over the world, and is one of two key annual publisher trade fairs, along with the Frankfurt Book Fair held in October every year. This year, there were 1,577 exhibitors from 57 countries, showing their books and services and meeting with their business partners. For many publishers at the Fair, selling rights to publishers in other countries is the main purpose. UCL Press had a stand this year on the IPG (Independent Publishers’ Guild) collective stand, and all UCL Press staff spent two or three days at the Fair, having meetings and attending seminars.

Altogether we had over 40 meetings over the three days, Lara took part in two panel sessions in The Faculty area (one on the Academic Book of the Future project, and one with Ingenta and Wiley on how to reach readers in a world of overwhelming content), and Press staff attended several seminars relevant to their roles. Our meetings were with existing partners and suppliers, freelance editors and designers, our counterparts at other university presses, as well as potential new suppliers and partners. We also had chance meetings with many others who saw our stand and came to talk to us – booksellers, sales representatives, editors etc. Even before the Fair, a number of meetings had already taken place with people who were in town for the Fair – Jaimee (UCL Press Managing Editor) met up with the Managing Editors and Production Managers of other university presses, a regular twice-yearly meet up for sharing knowledge, and Lara met up with the Association of American University Presses Director who are helping the Press with a number of interesting projects.

At such a critical point in UCL Press’s development, when we are in the process of appointing a North American distributor, developing a new website, expanding to 50 books a year, planning a major conference for university presses in 2018 (University Press Redux 2018), participating in a European OA infrastructure project (OPERAS), developing publishing services for other institutions and reviewing journal publishing models, the Fair was the perfect opportunity to advance all these projects with key people and potential new partners in one intensive block. It also enhances visibility for the Press via the stand, appearances on discussion panels, and articles and interviews by staff links.

We were also very proud to see the UCL Publishing Studies MA students launching the magazine element of their new student journal, Interscript, which is hosted on UCL Press’s OA student journal platform. With plenty of social media promotion, publicity at the Fair and a launch at the Association of Publishing Educators’ stand, it has got off to a very promising start. It’s inspiring to see the publishers of the future in action.

Altogether, the Fair provides a very exciting and collegial environment. As ever after the Fair, I have come away feeling that I have learnt a great deal, forged new relationships and been inspired by the sheer creativity and commitment of my fellow publishers.

Related Articles

• LBF Ahead: University Presses Rally for Trade Shows
• Reaching Readers and keeping their engagement – not currently available online
• Open Access Monographs: Current UK University Press Landscape by Lara Speicher

A few weeks ago I attended the 12^th International Digital Curation Conference (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc17) in Edinburgh along with my colleague Myriam, and members of UCL Research IT Services. The conference takes place annually with international attendees with interests in Digital Curation, Digital Preservation and Research Data Management. This year the theme of the conference was “Upstream, Downstream: embedding digital curation workflows for data science, scholarship and society”. The theme of Data Science is obviously a hot topic but I was pleased to see that sessions were nuanced about the limits to data science methodology and emphasised the importance of data being well managed and presented in order for it to provide useful insights. The attendees of the conference work in a broad range of different institutions, countries and disciplines which were useful for thinking about the different needs and services being offered to support Research Data Management.

In the interest of brevity, I won’t cover all of the sessions I attended. Some of the highlights of the conference included:

“Rich Information: Hides in Missing Data” – Maria Wolters

This session focused on issues associated with missing data. Maria Wolters argued that missing data can potentially be meaningful and useful for research when the reasons for missing data are known.  Examples focused on missing data in health research contexts. Sometimes missing data in this context could reveal problems with the study design or the way in which data was being collected. It could also reveal a change in the health of the patient which was meaningful and predictive of a particular outcome. From the perspective of Research Data Management, the talk highlighted the importance of good documentation around study design and principles. This is especially important for making data reusable for others who may not have the same background information on how information was collected and why some data may be missing.

Next-Generation Data Management Plans: Global, Machine-Actionable, FAIR – Stephanie Simms & Sarah Jones

Data Management Plans were a recurring theme of the conference. Helping researchers write Data Management Plans is a key area in which the Research Data Support Officers in the library work to support researchers. These plans are currently documents which with a bit of luck are updated during the project to reflect changes in data management needs. There is an increasing interest in using these Data Management Plans to interact with other systems and automate aspects of the data management process through ‘Machine-Actionable’ plans. Using ‘Machine-Actionable’ plans may allow for things like automatic storage allocation, initial metadata for the project to be shared across other systems and for researchers to receive more tailored guidance as they write their plans. These plans are being considered in the ongoing development of DMPOnline and online tool that helps researchers write their plans. Currently, we are working on introducing a customised version of DMPOnline for UCL. The potential for integrating DMPOnline with other services and systems within UCL offers presents an exciting opportunity.

Curriculum & Training strand 

The strand of the conference focusing on Research Data Management training was useful for helping develop further ideas about developing and building on the training we are offering in Research Data Management. Of particular interest was the session on researcher training on spreadsheet curation. Spreadsheets form a large part of research data outputs at UCL so developing practical training in best managing spreadsheets could be a useful area for the service to develop in the future.

The conference was a great opportunity to gain ideas through the presentation and workshops but also through discussion with other participants. Over the next year, I hope to turn some of the ideas gained from the conference into new or improved services for the researchers we support at UCL.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

Last week I attended the 5th International Summit of the Book, held this year in Limerick. The Summit of the Book conference was initiated in 2012 by the Library of Congress, Washington, as an ‘annual global meeting to discuss and promote the book as a crucial format for conveying societies’ scholarship and culture’.

Speakers came from HEI and national libraries all over the world and included the Director of the Library of Alexandria, the Chief of Library Services at the UN office in Geneva, the Director of Scholarly and Educational Programs at the Library of Congress, the President of the African Library and Information Association, the Director of the National Library of Ireland, the President of LIBER, the Head of the European Library, and the Chair of IFLA’s Freedom of Access to Information Committee.

Along with many short presentations of case studies of practices and initiatives at libraries around the world, including the use of special collections for teaching, common reader programmes, the possibilities of digitization, and managing university libraries in different languages and cultures, the conference offered a global insight into the changes and challenges for libraries everywhere, some common to all and others particular to a country or circumstance.

I gave a presentation on the open access publishing model adopted by UCL Press, and the growing trend for libraries to set up their own open access publishing service. I described the global reach achieved by the Press’s books and journals since launching in June 2015 (getting on for 80,000 now) and the benefits that can accrue to an institution through making its research freely available to all. I hope that our experience might serve as an inspiration to other institutions of the transformative potential of having an open access press.

CSGUK formed in April 2012, although it was originally called the ‘M25 Customer Services Group’ because it was affiliated with the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries (a group representing member Libraries across the South East). In the summer of 2014 the group was renamed CSGUK and it became independent and national.

CSGUK is not a formal membership organisation but a group supporting professional development, collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst all levels of colleagues providing customer services within Libraries. However, it does have a formal structure for delivering its resources, news and events. There is a steering group and four task groups: Communication, Benchmarking, Events, and Resources. I am a representative on the Communication task group, and Rachel Nelligan is a representative on the Benchmarking task group. Our roles involve meeting up with our groups at least once per term, and working on CSGUK tasks.

UCL recently hosted the Communications task group meeting, where six colleagues from across the UK met up for the day, to overhaul the CSGUK communications. This included devising a communications strategy, focusing on communication channels (including social media and the web page), communicating with all levels of customer service staff working in UK libraries, and communication for the upcoming conference.
Every year the CSGUK organises a Customer Service conference, and this year the theme is ‘Equipping Customer Services staff to provide accessible and inclusive services’. It takes place on Monday 28th November, Woburn House, and is open to all levels of library staff (see below for details).

As UCL Library Services is currently working towards the Customer Service Excellence accreditation, I would encourage Library staff to engage with the CSGUK website for ideas sharing, best practice, bench marking and practical tools, or apply to attend the conference!

CSGUK conference in November 2016:
http://www.customerservicesgroup.co.uk/events

Customer Service Excellence accreditation website:
http://www.customerserviceexcellence.uk.com/

At the beginning of September I visited the University of Liverpool to attend the annual RBSCG conference. The 70-odd attendees were mostly library staff from universities, but there were also representatives of independent and special libraries, as well as colleagues from archives and museums.

Over the course of the conference, we heard sessions on a range of topics relating to diversity, in our collections, among our readers, and within the profession. These ranged from Kay Jones (Museum of Liverpool) giving her keynote address on the benefits and challenges of working with diverse audiences, to Valerie Stevenson (Liverpool John Moores University) discussing the practicalities of exhibiting special collections materials outside the library space. We also heard Yvonne Morris, the CILIP Policy Officer, presenting the initial results of the CILIP workforce mapping survey and how CILIP plans to respond to those results.

The latter was particularly interesting. While there is still a great deal of work to be done analysing and acting on the survey results, the initial findings presented were as follows. First, they estimate that there are around 87,000 people working in the information and knowledge sector, of whom around 69,000 are working in libraries. Around 45% of CILIP members will reach or have reached retirement age by 2026, and 97% of the workforce identify as white. Finally, while women make up 79% of the profession, 47% of the top earners are men. Obviously there are some issues to be addressed here; while full details of how they plan to address diversity issues are yet to be confirmed, CILIP’s action plan for the next few years is now available and highlights these issues.

In addition to the sessions, we were able to visit special collections in institutions around the city. I went to the University of Liverpool’s special collections and to the Anglican Cathedral archives, where I was impressed by the range of documents held, not to mention the incredible work being done by a team of three part-time archivists.

The theme that kept coming up throughout the conference was that of storytelling and voices: how we can use our knowledge of our collections to tell new stories; how we can work with users to make sure our collections reflect their experience and stories; how we can listen to the diverse voices of our profession to provide a better experience for users and for each other.

The Gregynog Colloquium is the annual residential conference of WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum) and HEWIT (Higher Education Wales Information Technology) where Welsh HE librarians and IT specialists gather to share knowledge and ideas and to hear about new initiatives from other institutions. Drawing around 188 colleagues annually from Welsh HE libraries, the Gregynog Colloquium is held in the stunning location of Gregynog Hall in Powys, a 750-acre estate and national nature reserve with a fascinating cultural history, including its own private press. Gregynog is being established as an independent charitable trust to safeguard the important academic and cultural heritage of Gregynog under a University of Wales initiative, with support from the Gwendoline and Margaret Davies Charity, the sisters who owned Gregynog in the 20^th century and established its cultural initiatives. It is used throughout the year for residential courses for students of Welsh universities. I was invited to speak about the work of UCL Press, and about the general increase in new open access university presses being established within libraries, both in the UK and abroad.

The Hall was rebuilt in the 19th century by the Sudeley family who were pioneers in the use of concrete as a building material. The Sudeleys owned the Gregynog Estate at the time but their primary seat was in Toddington in Gloucestershire. The innovative use of concrete can be seen throughout the building. The banisters are a particular achievement: I must admit, I don’t normally pay particular attention banisters, but these are worth a mention. Rather than being a traditional wooden handrail, the banisters at Gregynog are actually a handrail shaped groove in the wall, molded out of concrete.

After several hundred years of private ownership, in 1913 a huge estate sale saw Gregynog’s farms, cottages and woodlands sold off, many to their tenants. Gregynog Hall might have been demolished had not the wealthy Davies sisters acquired it in 1920 to become the headquarters of their enterprise to bring art, music and creative skills to the people of Wales in the aftermath of the First World War. For twenty years the house was full of music, fine furniture and ceramics, hand-printed books from the Gregynog Press and, most extraordinary of all, the sisters’ collection of paintings by artists such as Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh. Leading lights, such as George Bernard Shaw and Gustav Holst visited during these years for musical concerts – or simply to enjoy the beautiful gardens and woodland walks. At the end of the 1950s, after wartime use as a Red Cross convalescent home, Gregynog was bequeathed to the University of Wales as a conference centre. It welcomed its first students in 1963 and they’ve been coming ever since. The Gregynog Press, a private press founded by the sisters, printed the works of many rising stars in the world of illustration during its years of operation, and is still running to this day.

The Hall is still home to stunning artefacts and works of art. One of the original printing presses used by the Gregynog Press is on display in the Hall, as are works by many of the most famous artists who contributed works to the Press in its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s – Agnes Miller Parker, Blair Hughes-Stanton, David Jones and Gertrude Hermes. The Davies sisters’ works of art are on display in their drawing room where the drinks reception was held during the conference. It is a place that feels slightly lost in time, where an Agatha Christie murder mystery would not be out of place. The Davies sisters’ library is still in situ, and contains a collection of books that anyone interested in the arts and humanities would be proud to own – not necessarily because of the rarity of the books in the collection but because of the breadth: classic works of fiction, monographs on significant artists, and works of philosophy, history and classics fill two large rooms and the corridors.

I was only there for the first day of the conference itself, which started with a keynote speech by Chris Banks, Director of Library Services at Imperial College London, who spoke inspiringly about the academic library of the future. This was followed by presentations by Steve Williams of Swansea University, and Paul Jeorett of Wrexham Glyndwr University, the latter talking about the rise and fall of international students from different parts of the world, and the potential of the outcome of the Brexit referendum to change the international student cohort figures significantly (it is hard now to remember a time when Brexit seemed just a remote possibility). He highlighted the important work librarians do to help international students.

I was sorry I couldn’t stay at Gregynog longer. The impressive surroundings and significant cultural associations, the fascinating history, the stunning location, and the association with a long-running private press, made this a memorable occasion. I enjoyed meeting the conference attendees and the staff at Gregynog, who were knowledgeable and passionate about Gregynog and its history.

What was most abundant and welcome, although slightly difficult to get used to, was the silence: there were no sirens, no traffic, there were no TVs in the rooms and no lifts, all the noises one usually hears in a typical urban hotel. All I could hear as the sun rose were the birds and the sheep.

Posted on behalf of Lara Speicher, Publishing Manager, UCL Press

In early June I attended ‘El Pub: The 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing’, hosted by the University of Göttingen. The conference brought together publishers, librarians, archivists and researchers to discuss the current – largely European – landscape of electronic scholarly publishing.

Although the papers varied greatly, open access was the dominant theme across the panels. The ECRs, in particular, spoke of a policy-driven need to make government-funded research available to the public without exception. They also spoke of the well-known predicament ECRs face in deciding where and how to publish. Many have the desire to share their data and reach a wide audience via an open access platform, yet their fear of the data being misappropriated – not necessarily for commercial means but by other researchers who might use it to write ‘better’ papers – is a growing concern.

Furthermore, they expressed frustration that their career progression is dependent upon publishing in subscription journals with high impact factors, which they feel is a system designed to undermine the feasibility of open access. This system can only be broken when open access journals have built up enough traction to compete with the high impact journals, or when a universal method of quality assessment emerges to replace the metric-intensive scale currently employed.

Posted on behalf of Chris Penfold, Commissioning Editor, UCL Press

On 23 May I was invited to speak at the ‘Audio and Audio-Visual Academic Book of the Future’ event, a symposium hosted by the British Library. The event was convened by Steven Dryden, a sound librarian at the BL, and aimed to bring together publishers, librarians and researchers to discuss the use of audio-visual content in scholarly books. I presented alongside two other speakers: Richard Mason, a novelist who showcased his new co-venture, Orson & Co, a platform that publishes audio-visual books, and Rebecca Lyons, who provided an overview of the Academic Book of the Future project, which she co-investigates.

Following the three presentations, the group engaged in an open discussion where all delegates reflected on their experiences of working with AV content in their careers or in their research. One question, which was pertinent to those attending from the BL, was on the issue of archiving: how do we determine which version of a book is the original when it is published simultaneously in different formats? Are ISBNs enough to identify each version, and how realistic is a future in which copyright clearance will be required for multiple e-formats even though print rights are challenging enough for authors to secure?

The floor was offered to a number of the ECRs in attendance who discussed their practice-based research and collectively emphasised a need for broader publishing options. They also raised the issue of attribution and lamented the difficulty of describing their contributions to online platforms and non-traditional forms of publishing. It was agreed that continued collaboration will be required between authors, publishers, librarians, archivists and coders to build a future in which AV content can be welcomed as a critical component of online publishing rather than viewed as an awkward luxury.

Posted on behalf of Chris Penfold, Commissioning Editor, UCL Press

LILAC is an annual conference organised by CILIP’s Information Literacy Group, “aimed at librarians and information professionals who teach information literacy skills, are interested in digital literacies and want to improve the information seeking and evaluation skills of all our library users whoever they may be”. Information Literacy (IL) skills underpin the training I deliver here at the UCL Institute of Neurology, so I’ve been hoping to attend LILAC for quite a while. For 2016, the LILAC team chose not to set any explicit themes for the conference, instead inviting papers covering any aspect of IL but asking authors to emphasise their innovative practice or research – this was particularly attractive to me and I was looking forward to presentations full of practical ideas.

LILAC runs over three days and, to be honest, it offers far too much for one person to take in. It’s very well-organised but, with over 70 parallel sessions, it really is impossible to attend everything and you have to choose the sessions that are closest to your interests and hope for the best, while following the conference hashtag (#lilac16) for an insight into what else is going on. If you decide to check out that twitter hashtag, be warned, it turns out that IL librarians like to tweet, a lot.

Luckily, I’ll be able to catch up on the sessions I missed when the presentations appear on the LILAC website (and it’s worth checking out some of the content from previous years too) but, for now, here’s a brief overview of ‘My LILAC’. If anything here takes your interest, please feel free to ask me for more details.

First, let’s get the three keynotes out of the way, they were all interesting even though I was most keen to hear about the practical stuff, in the parallel sessions. Day 1 saw Nicola Whitton and Alex Moseley talking about the use of games for teaching IL skills. This was hugely entertaining, very noisy and slightly chaotic. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the techniques would work for me, though doubtless they are very useful for anyone who needs to engage large groups of students in a lecture theatre setting. On Day 2, Char Booth was the talk of the coffee queue having inspired everyone with a talk about reflection, generally and in IL teaching – for more information have a look at Char’s slideshare. The keynote for Day 3 was James Clay speaking about Digital Capability which he summarised as “being able to live, work & learn in a digital world” – there is a Jisc project site for this initiative.

The bulk of my time was spent flitting between parallel sessions, many of which were full of practical ideas and some of which enjoyed an excellent view of the O’Brien Centre for Science. The sessions I chose included: a pair of librarians from Colorado who described how they build assessment into their teaching sessions; a librarian from a small health library who uses paper-based tasks to focus students’ attention before getting into hands-on PC work; a librarian from City who is gathering researcher case studies, hoping to map their needs onto the content of IL sessions; a librarian from Sussex who is harnessing the power of 6 second vines to promote IL sessions; a pair of librarians from Coventry who are shifting the focus of their IL sessions by reducing the ‘How to’ elements and building in more conceptual underpinnings; researchers from Brunel & Robert Gordon who are studying researchers’ use of social media and how libraries can help to integrate it into the research workflow; a Manchester-based librarian who detailed his tactics for communicating IL principles to international students; two librarians from Birmingham who deliver IL to distance learners and offered a wealth of do & don’t advice (they also proved they can engage an audience face-to-face by giving us popcorn).

Just a couple of the parallel sessions were not such useful choices, for me. While it was interesting to hear a Canadian librarian describing how her team has applied the ACRL IL framework, it didn’t feel like something I could apply at one small site. A group of librarians from New York described a huge ethnographic study of users’ needs they have been undertaking. To be fair, their findings are still being analysed but their setting seemed too different to mine for me to draw direct lessons. Perhaps UCL needs its own librarian-anthropologist?

As well as the business side of the conference I had chance to explore the University College Dublin campus (www.ucd.ie). I hear that some people find the campus, on the outskirts of Dublin, a bit grim but I loved it – a lake, lots of leafy walkways (perfect for spotting birds while getting lost on the way back to my accommodation) and some strong architecture, old and new (including lots and lots of concrete which, I’m told, is not popular with everyone!). There were a couple of social events in the evenings, with librarians from all over the world getting together at two Dublin landmarks: the Chester Beatty Library and the hugely impressive Royal Hospital Kilmainham.