A snapshot of CUNY Academic Works

September not only marked the start of a new academic year, but the launch of a new monthly series in the OLS@57 blog: the CUNY Academic Works Monthly Report. This series will provide a quick snapshot of statistics and stories from the previous month.

In September, CUNY Academic Works grew by 224 new items, and received 27,568 new downloads by users in 168 countries. In fact, 54% of downloads were international!

The five most downloaded works include:

1. “Training a New Trick Using No-Reward Markers: Effects on Dogs’ Performance and Stress Behaviors”
   Series: School of Arts & Sciences Theses at Hunter College
2. “My Math GPS: Elementary Algebra Guided Problem Solving”
   Series: Open Educational Resources at Queensborough Community College
3. “Resettling the City? Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Land in Winnipeg, Canada”
   Series: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects at the Graduate Center
4. “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences”
   Series: Publications and Research at John Jay
5. “Reframing School Dropout as a Public Health Issue”
   Series: Publications and Research at Hunter College

Stay tuned for future reports, and if there’s anything you’d like to see here, just let us know!

The Office of Library Services is pleased to announce the publication of the CUNY Academic Works Collections Policy. A collaborative effort between the Scholarly Communications Librarian and the OLS Scholarly Communications Committee, this policy formally outlines the collection parameters and priorities for CUNY’s institutional repository and provides guidelines for administrations of those collections. All Academic Works coordinators were asked to contribute to the online draft of the document, as well as participate in an in-person forum held this August. The campuses were well represented by 14 attendees, and the final draft was approved on August 31, 2016. The full text of the policy is available via the CUNY Academic Works Librarian Toolkit.

Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), in partnership with the Office of Library Services, is excited to announce the launch of Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP) on Academic Works’ Digital Commons platform. Published by AHTR, a practitioner-led open educational resource for educators who address art history, visual, and material culture, AHPP is the first academic journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH). The result of a two year initiative, AHPP responds to a long-standing need to advance, collect, disseminate, and demonstrate pedagogical research specific to the discipline. The CFP  for the inaugural issue, forthcoming in Fall 2016, is available on the AHTR website.

SoTL in Art History

AHPP results from a two year initiative that sought to examine the ways in which art historians devote time, effort, and energy to classroom teaching, curriculum development, and student engagement. Generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, AHTR began preliminary research in 2015, which included a field-wide survey conducted by Randi Korn and Associates and a literature review assessing existing pedagogical scholarship in art history. These findings were synthesized in a White Paper  that demonstrated the need for SoTL-AH to be acknowledged as a legitimate area of intellectual inquiry by the institutions and communities encompassing academic art history. As a peer-reviewed journal devoted to SoTL-AH, AHPP will facilitate this process by providing scholars a forum to share research on pedagogical topics, and by encouraging further academic investigation and discourse around teaching and learning in art history

AHTR

AHPP builds on the success of AHTR as a platform to exchange ideas related to pedagogy in art history.  Founded on dual goals to raise the value of the academic labor of teaching and to provide peer support across ranks of tenured, tenure-track, and contingent instructors, AHTR began as a collaboration between Michelle Millar Fisher at the Graduate Center and Karen Shelby at Baruch College in 2011. Fisher, then a Graduate Teaching Fellow with a background in museum education, and Shelby, then an Assistant Professor of Art History, organized meetings where colleagues shared teaching materials and experiences. These gatherings suggested potential for a digital forum to connect a wider community of practitioners, and gave rise to the arthistoryteachingresources.org website, which launched publicly in 2013.  Since that time, the site has had more than 400,000 hits from over 91,000 educators in K-12, post-secondary institutions, and art museums, and from academic support staff including reference librarians and curriculum designers. AHTR’s administration has similarly expanded to a leadership collective of art historians, ranging in experience from early career scholars to those well established in the field, and an advisory network assembled for expertise and leadership in art history, museum education, and digital humanities, and united by their interest in advancing pedagogical research. The unique relationship between AHPP and AHTR will allow scholars access to diverse resources about teaching and learning, including lesson plans and the AHTR Weekly on the OER, and peer-reviewed articles published in the journal.

AHPP in Digital Commons

In choosing the Digital Commons platform, AHPP is enthusiastic to extend the relationship with CUNY that was first established when AHTR was born out of the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab with support from Baruch Learning and Technology Grants.  In keeping with the site’s origins, AHTR also contracted CHIPS, a New York web development studio known for innovative work with cultural institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History and 82nd and Fifth, who had redesigned the AHTR website in 2014 to create AHPP’s logo and site design.

The editors, editorial collective, and advisory board of AHPP are excited to join the Office of Library Services in the broader open access movement and for the ways in which contributions to the journal will be utilized in the fields of SoTL, art history, and beyond. AHPP worked closely with librarians at the Office of Library Services to develop editorial policies and guidelines that are transparent to authors and readers.

Open access advocates, myself included, often talk about public scholarship for the public good. Open access advances the pace of scientific progress, promotes interdisciplinary research and collaborations, and allows researchers to share their work with those who don’t otherwise have access to it. We’ve all had the experience of hitting a paywall, and it’s not hard to believe that members of our local and global communities do too.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative, regarded as one of three declarations that defined and shaped the movement, establishes the public good as the foundation for open access:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will . . . lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

But who is the Public? How does CUNY Academic Works benefit them? We want to know!

Working with the team at Digital Commons, the Office of Library Services set-up a new feature in Academic Works: a feedback form. PDF cover pages in select series now include a question: “How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!” Readers that click the hyperlink are directed to a feedback form that asks for some basic information as well as permission to publicly share their comments.

Before rolling it out across the repository, this feature was tested on a collection of dissertations at the Graduate Center. Monthly usage reports let us know this content gets a lot of attention, but who is downloading and reading it? How does it contribute to the public good? I can’t tell you about each download, but I can now tell you how open, public access to “The Contributions of Earl “Bud” Powell to the Modern Jazz Style”  benefit one person:

I am a 52 year old engineer who has been playing jazz piano since the age of 10. I am delighted to find this thesis about one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century. It includes the *incredible* transcription of “Strictly Confidential,” an amazing piano piece by legendary jazz pianist Bud Powell. I have been looking for a transcription for this piece my entire life, as it is far too complicated for me to hear with my basic ears…

This is the first of what I expect to be many stories that demonstrate the benefits of open access to the public. Future feedback will be  relayed to campus repository administrators and posted to Open Access @ CUNY when permissions allow.