Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries » News

Open Education Week March 9-13th, 2015

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Ann

This week is Open Education Week!

What is Open Education? It is an educational movement that is committed to producing teaching resources that can be used and then reused by other educators without formally seeking permission. In this model creators of educational content freely release their materials to the public. Other educators can then deliver the material freely to their students, as long as they attribute the original creator. These resources are most commonly made available under Creative Commons licences. Many MOOCs, open courses, and regular classes now routinely use this kind of content, because there is no need to get copyright clearance and they can be publicly posted on the web.

Open textbooks, like open courses, are created by experts and then made freely available to the public. Projects like the BCCampus OpenEd textbook initiative and the OER Commons give instructors a way to find free-to-share material, and great resources like the Creative Commons search can help anyone find free to use images and music.

Toronto Metropolitan University Library & Archives is hosting a few events this week to celebrate Open Education Week 2015.

Tips for Finding Free Music, Images, and More: Drop-In

Today 12-1 pm, March 9th, Student Learning Centre (SLC) Rm 515

Find free music & images and more to use in your projects – both commercial and school based. This is a drop-in session.

Is there a Free Textbook in Your Future?

12-1 pm, March 10th, 2015, Student Learning Centre (SLC) Rm 514

Can you imagine a world were some of the textbooks that are used to teach courses you take are free? Find out more about the Open Access Textbook movement.

The Affordable Classroom: Open Access Textbooks (LTO and the Library)

12-2pm March 12th, 2015 POD-372

Do you ever worry about the rising cost of textbooks for your students? Are you interested in hearing about possible alternatives to the traditional textbook model, like open access textbooks? In this workshop you will learn about new Canadian-lead open access textbook repositories, and other open access textbook resources that are freely available on the web to use in your teaching. If you are interested in building your own open access textbook to use in your classroom, this workshop will provide you with the necessary building blocks to get started.

Sneakerheads, Birkin bags and the HBR 500

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Jane

If you’ve ever tried to compete for the latest pair of Adidas designed by Kanye, or lusted after a Birkin bag that you’ll never be able to afford, then you are already familiar with the concept of artificial scarcity. Brands market high end goods as limited editions in order to drive up the price and the demand. It creates exclusivity and buzz around a product.

How, then, does this same marketing ploy weave its way through the world of information buying and selling? Isn’t online content as easy as a ‘click’ to access and share? How can a limit be placed on something that isn’t actually tangible? Leave it to the experts – the folks at Harvard Business Review (HBR) have managed to do exactly that.

Ryerson subscribes to HBR both in print and electronically via the EBSCO database, Business Source Elite. EBSCO has exclusive distribution rights for HBR. The HBR 500, as it’s come to be known in the information world, is a collection of the 500 most read HBR articles (as determined by HBR). In 2013, HBR made these articles “read only”, meaning they could no longer be used as course readings unless the library agreed to pay an outrageously priced supplemental fee, on top of existing subscription fees. This fee ranged from $10,000 to as high as $200,000. We chose not to pay. Sure, you can still find those articles via Business Source Elite, but you can’t link to them, download or print them.

Here’s a screenshot of what this actually looks like – a subtle barrier to access, but a barrier nevertheless:

Exclusivity when it comes to scholarly publications is bad for libraries and bad for students. It hinders access when we should be moving toward open access. It drives up prices for artificial reasons and creates further strain on library and university budgets. What works well in the commercial world is not necessarily contributing to the greater good. Altruistic though it may sound, librarians are on guard to monitor these tactics, lest they set precedents for the rest of the publishing sector.

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy Released

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Brian

After some delay, the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications has been released. The policy requires that any peer-reviewed publication(s) arising from grants received from any of the three agencies (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC) be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication. The new policy comes into force for any grants awarded after May 1st, 2015. It’s worth noting that CIHR has had an open access policy since 2008.

Researchers funded by any of these three agencies are required to either:

1) Publish in a journal that allows immediate open access or one that permits open access within 12 months of initial publication; and/or

2) Deposit the final, peer-reviewed author version of your article in an online open access repository, such as RULA’s Digital Repository.

It is important to note that option 2 does not require any payments to publishers, but option 1 might incur an open access article processing fee.

The Ryerson Library maintains deposit accounts, to cover open access charges, with PLoS, Biomed Central, and Hindawi. In addition, we accept applications for funding from other journals, subject to criteria outlined in our Open Access Author Fund policy page.

One Week in the DME!

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Sara

The Library’s Digital Media Experience Lab (the DME) opened on Monday and it’s been full of students ever since.

The DME is a library resource that aims to support student learning both within the classroom and as an extracurricular pursuit through workshops, peer tutoring, and one-on-one instruction. The goal of the DME is to help Ryerson students learn basic and advanced technology skill-sets while exposing them to new and emerging tech.

To introduce students to the DME, the team set up a “tech petting zoo” for the first-week kickoff. A Makey-Makey fruit piano and playable birds, a 3D printer in the midst of being built, and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset drew crowds into the lab’s beautiful space on the 3rd floor of the Student Learning Centre.

Several students have already become DME regulars, lending their enthusiasm and expertise to help build the 3D printer, create new configurations for the Makey-Makeys, and set up new virtual reality experiences by connecting the Oculus Rift to a Leap Motion controller. On Thursday, the students taught Ryerson Chief Librarian Madeleine Lefebvre how to play chess using the system.

As more equipment continues to arrive, we fully expect that the space will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our creative, experimental, dedicated students!

Celebrate Fair Dealing Week!

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Sara

Why are we celebrating this week – especially in Canada?

Fair dealing defines important users rights allowed by Canadian laws. These user rights give Canadian citizens the ability to use fair dealing as an exception to the exclusive rights of copyright holders to control the copying and distributing of their content. This exclusive right means that, other than an insubstantial amount of a work, the work can’t be copied without the permission of the copyright holder. User’s rights in the form of fair dealing mean that some copying is allowed without permission – for certain purposes and for short amounts of a work. Luckily for students and educators some of the copying of works that we do in our learning and teaching are covered by fair dealing. For example fair dealing purposes include private study, research, criticism, review and education. Much of what students and educators do on a daily basis would be really really hard without this user’s right. Student and faculty ability to do effective research, use content in criticism and papers, teach and share information would be seriously inhibited if most uses had to always have permission be granted when someone was only copying a short excerpt. Fair dealing is really important because it allows a freer flow of information to happen in an educational setting – it promotes learning and scholarship. So celebrate Fair Dealing – it is a user’s right that Canadians should use, not lose.

Whither the Canadian dollar … and the library budget

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Jane

As we dove into budget preparations for the next fiscal year, we were confronted with an unforeseen challenge: the dollar totally tanked. That had a lot of us doing this:

The library gets a share of the university budget for base operations. In 2012/2013 (most recent CAUBO data available), this was 3% of the total university budget. Approximately 35% of that operations budget (roughly $4 million) is dedicated to growing our library collection. Since 2009/2010, like all other departments, we have also had to factor in the necessary budget reductions in our annual budget plans, averaging 2%-3% base reductions each year.

Regularly, we struggle with making sure ends meet as we see annual inflationary increases from the publishers to whom we are beholden to provide access to the top tier journals in academia. In 2015, that increase was projected to be 6.1%. In years past, particularly in 2011 and 2012, when the dollar was hovering toward par, we enjoyed increased purchasing power. Despite our piece of the pie shrinking, we managed to keep pace without too much effect on the community (i.e. cancellation of resources, as has been the case elsewhere in the province) through strategic purchasing and use of one-time-only money.

And then … the economy threw us for a loop. Despite our best efforts at planning for a worst case scenario, we didn’t quite expect this. In recent months the Canadian dollar tumbled to a low point of .73 (January 30, 2015). The effect on the library’s collection budget is substantial. The majority (approximately 70-75%) of our electronic resources and our monographs are invoiced in US dollars. The price tag for an already expensive journal just got way more expensive.

We still don’t know what the long term effect of this will be on the library’s bottom line. We were lucky to have paid many of our invoices earlier in this fiscal year when the exchange rate was more favorable. But if we now have $500,000 USD worth of of outstanding invoices at this point in the fiscal calendar, we’ll end up paying over $620,000 CAD!

For now, we are watching and waiting …

Further reading on bundled packages from the major publishers:

The Big Deal: Not Price But a Cost

Library Spend on Journal Big Deals (UK)

Valentine’s Day… by the numbers

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Sara

Did you know that 8.3 million roses were grown for sale in Canada in 2013 – and 11 million dozen more roses (that’s 1,320,000,000!) were imported? Check out Statistics Canada’s Valentine’s Day in Canada for more information about this most romantic of holidays… by the numbers.

For more information about data and statistics resources available at the Library, contact librdata@torontomu.ca or visit the Library’s data pages.

Aboriginal Research Portal Now Available

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Sara

Ryerson Library is pleased to provide subject-specific research help and resources for topics and subjects in indigenous research. With support from the Aboriginal Education Council, the Library has developed a research portal that will assist students and faculty researching Aboriginal social work, health and well-being, politics and status, and traditional knowledge and education. Check out the portal here.

For more information about the portal or Aboriginal research at Toronto Metropolitan University, please contact Kelly Dermody (kdermody@torontomu.ca).

Congratulations to Our Latest Award Recipients!

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Sara

Ryerson Library is thrilled to congratulate four of our staff members who have received 2015 staff and faculty awards from the university. Steven Marsden, Kelly Dermody, Dana Thomas, and Weina Wang have been recognized for a wide variety of achievements, including enhancing accessibility to library content, teaching excellence, new assessment measures, exploring emerging technologies, and many more. Congratulations Steven, Kelly, Dana, and Weina!

From Ryerson’s Recognition & Awards page:

Steven Marsden – Make Your Mark Award

Steven Marsden, Library Systems Analyst, deserves recognition for his outstanding achievement in enhancing library service and fostering a culture of innovation. He was the lead developer of a number of ground breaking apps: Book Finder, an award winning interactive app that helps users retrieve books with ease; RULA Maps, a mobile/web app using geo-location and augmented reality technologies. The latter has been adopted by academic departments, manifesting the interdisciplinary collaboration at Ryerson. Steven is further developing the popular Student Online Room Booking application to extend to the Student Learning Centre. Steven customized an E-Reserve system for Ryerson’s “One Stop Course Readings” copyright management, including an impressive data-driven problem-solving solution to overcome the challenge of real-time statistics. He implemented the Papyrus system to manage accessible readings for students with print disabilities, making the University one step closer to full accessibility.

Kelly Dermody, Dana Thomas, and Weina Wang – Librarians’ Service Awards

Kelly Dermody has been the E-Learning Librarian since 2013. Prior to this she was the Accessibility Services Librarian. In her capacity as E-Learning Librarian, Kelly collaborated with Student Learning Support and drew upon work done at York University to develop the RUSearch Tutorial that is a step by step guide to developing, organizing, researching and writing an essay. Kelly was instrumental in developing five online tutorials on library research for use with the SSH205 students who are learning in a flipped-classroom approach initiated in fall 2014. Faculty feedback echoes that of lead instructor Paul Chafe: “This flipped approach really works, and I can tell you my students really benefited from the tutorials and the one-on-one time during the visit to the library”. Kelly continues to share her knowledge and enthusiasm with colleagues through presentations to staff, at conferences and in publications.

Dana Thomas is the Evaluation and Assessment Librarian and has been instrumental in conducting numerous surveys with the Ryerson community including Summon satisfaction, Ithaka S&R, and LibQual+. All of these surveys provide the Library with the data results that help to inform its strategic directions and operational objectives. She has demonstrated collegiality by providing covers for research and maternity leaves for other Librarians including the responsibility for Electronic Resources and other subject areas. Additionally, Dana hosted the successful and well-attended Canadian Library Assessment Conference here at Ryerson, an event that has continued to generate discussion for assessment best practices at Canadian academic libraries. In 2014 she had a prize-winning poster at an international conference that gave Ryerson broad recognition for its work in library assessment. Dana clearly demonstrates that she sets an example for achievement and success in academic librarianship.

Weina Wang brings strong leadership, customer service and a fresh air in organizational culture to the Ryerson community through her career as a professional librarian. As a leader and technology advocate, she was involved in many library-wide strategic planning initiatives and led staff through a series of changes in the organizational reshape process. She has helped set a new direction for the department based on emerging access service trends, and her proposal of a hybrid EM/RFID gate solution would allow the library to be operational ready for the new Student Learning Centre and any future RFID technological development. Most recently, her effort in the ever-popular laptop loan program and her enthusiasm for mobile learning initiatives have helped enhance the library’s reputation tremendously. Weina is a librarian, a business strategist and innovative technologist that helps build the Ryerson library to be a library of the future.

2011 CensusPlus Now Available via Simply Map Canada

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Dan

Simply Map now offers enhanced Canadian census data!

“Due to changes in methodology, Statistics Canada is not officially releasing dissemination area (DA) data from the 2011 NHS [National Household Survey], which replaced the long-form census. CensusPlus offers enhanced data for the most important NHS themes for all DAs in Canada, fills in missing values and eliminates random rounding in both NHS and Census data. The result is a comprehensive set of demographic variables available for any geographic level — be it standard census and postal geographies or custom client trade areas.” (Environics Analytics, 2014) Read more…

Access Simply Map Canada