Open access materials are academic materials that are legally accessible and distributed online, free of cost. This year’s theme for Open Access week is Climate Justice. This year the focus of the week is to: 

“encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.”

It is vital that Climate Justice research and climate change research be open access so that the public has access to peer-reviewed information that is based on the latest science and research. Open access publishing is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2016.  

We encourage faculty and graduate students to attend open access events and learn more about how open access can improve the knowledge mobilization of TMU research. This week, TMU Libraries in collaboration with Faculty Affairs is hosting an event that shows you how you can post your research outputs to Rshare, TMU’s institutional repository. 

Register: Let’s Talk Series: Learn how to use RShare

Date: Wed., October 26, 2022

Time: 1  p.m.- 2  p.m. EST

Format: Online on Zoom

Learn more about the RShare digital repository including  how to set up your profile, tie it to your ORCID account, and deposit your academic work and data. This workshop will show you how to use the RShare knowledge mobilization platform hosted by the Library.

Presented by Nora Mulvaney and Brian Cameron, TMU University Libraries

 

You can find a full list of Open Access Week events on SPARC’s OA week events page. Highlights include: 

• ·Lowering the Barriers to Climate Research: Climate Change and OA Books (October 25 , 10am – 11am, EST)
• ·Think Global: Act Local – Ensuring an Equitable Transition to Open Science (October 25, 12pm – 1pm, EST)
• ·Celebrate Open Access Week with ORCID (October 25, 2pm – 3pm, EST)
• ·Open for (Climate) Justice – Ouvert pour la justice (climatique) (October 26,  7 pm -8 pm

Climate Justice and Open Research Panel (UBC), (November 4th, 2pm – 3pm, EST)

Date:

Oct. 19 – 21, 2022

Location:

TMU Libraries and online

Register now!

The Jack Layton Chair, Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries, Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Community Services and Toronto Metropolitan University present Crafting Community: A Symposium on Arts Practice & Research.

The symposium brings together artists and scholars to explore intersections of arts practice and academia – how they clash and/or converge. The symposium features hands-on workshops on Oct. 19, hybrid panel discussions on Oct. 20, ending with a roundtable session on Oct. 21 to discuss emerging themes and reflect on the symposium.

Crafting Community reimagines how to engage community arts in/with the humanities and social sciences  to bridge between   community and the university 

The symposium takes a community arts based approach that works to connect the creative and scholarly work of artists, community workers,  students and educators. Through a community arts framework, participants engage with community, research and pedagogy during hands-on interactive workshops and panel discussions. 

Crafting Community: A Symposium on Arts Practice & Research is supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

See all events and register now!

 

 

Overleaf is an online collaborative scientific writing and publishing tool. It is designed to make the process of writing, editing, and producing scientific papers much quicker for authors.

The Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries is providing Overleaf Professional upgrades for all students, faculty, and staff who would like to use a collaborative, online LaTeX/Rich Text editor for their projects. Overleaf Professional upgrades include real-time track changes, unlimited collaborators, and full document history.

Overleaf Professional upgrades provide:

• Real-time collaboration in your browser for working together on a single version of a project, with an unlimited number of authorized users. You can add and remove collaborators at any time throughout the lifecycle of your document.
• Real-time track changes and visible collaborator cursor(s) ease work on collaborative documents.
• Enjoy real-time PDF preview of your document while editing and writing – type on the left and see your typeset document on the right.
• Full history view of your documents – see all changes made for the entire life of the document, with the ability to revert to any older version.
• Integrated, streamlined publishing – allows you to publish easily and directly to a number of integrated submission systems, including dozens of publishing partners.
• Use Overleaf for interactive demonstrations and teaching – https://www.overleaf.com/for/edu
• Two-way sync with Dropbox and GitHub
• Reference manager sync and advanced reference search
• Priority support
• Instructional articles and resources: https://www.overleaf.com/learn
• Free webinars with varying levels and topics (live options and pre-recorded on-demand sessions): https://www.overleaf.com/events/webinars
• Toronto Metropolitan University resource portal available – including easy sign up, templates, FAQs, and resource links.

Claim your Overleaf Professional upgrade by signing up (or signing in) via the Toronto Metropolitan University resource portal.   https://www.overleaf.com/edu/torontomu

As part of the University Renaming process, we have scheduled a change to the Search Everything (Summon) URL from ryerson.summon.serialssolutions.com to torontomu.summon.serialssolutions.com. This change will take place the morning of Wednesday July 13. As a result of this change, saved Search Everything URLs may need to be updated or recreated.

Updating Your Links:

Shortened URLs – Search again

The University Library Special Collections, and The Photographic Historical Society of Canada.

The University Library First Edition Photobook Award launched in 2015, with Alison Skyrme, special collections and liaison librarian and Christopher Manson, image arts instructor leading the awards program. 

The award was initiated in relation to work completed as part of a third year Image Arts course titled: The Photographic Book. For the course, students learn design and composition principles and are required to conceive of, and produce, their own photobook from their own photography. 

“This is the 8th year of the award and I am always impressed with the quality of the work that the photography students produce,” says Skyrme.

Each year student works are submitted for the award and the winning photobooks are selected by panel. 

In addition to the award, the photobooks are purchased by the Library, become part of the Library collection and are displayed at the Archives and Special Collections along other esteemed collections including the Kodak collection. The acquisition of these titles is supported by a donation from The Photographic Historical Society of Canada.

“Every year our collection of student books grows, we have 54 in the collection now, and it becomes a stronger and more impressive record of the creativity and talent of the photography students over time,” says Skyrme.

 

The 2022 First Edition Photobook Award winners, include:

 

The Paper
By Kayla Ward

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back Book
By Pengxiang Zhou

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shrieking Sisterhood
By Kayla Ward

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calm and Chaos
By Kay Nadjiwon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosemary and Thyme
By Katya Lina

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Need Me
By Payton Keeler Cox

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meu Avo
By Andrew Moreno

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring Back Ice to the Lake
By Yixuan Mark Wang

We’re joining the Archives of Ontario in their #ArchivesAtoZ month-long campaign. The aim is to increase the public’s awareness of archives and their collections. University Archives and Special Collections will sharing four blog posts throughout the month showcasing items from our holdings and demystifying archival concepts related to each letter of the alphabet.

Take a look and follow along!

Open Education Week is a global event designed to raise awareness of free and open sharing in education and the benefits they bring to faculty, instructors and students.

The Library, in partnership with the Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching and The Chang School, is hosting two to showcase the Open Education work underway at the University.

Open Education Week events at the University

During Open Education Week , we highlight the work that’s being done at the University in support of open education. This includes the use of open educational practices and open pedagogy in the classroom, and the creation and adoption of open educational resources.

Join us for a series of lightning talks from faculty and instructors who have received grants from eCampusOntario or from the University to develop open educational resources.

Open Education Week Showcase

March 7, 2022, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., the speakers will be:

• David Cramb, Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Science
• Michael Dick, Contract Lecturer, Professional Communication at The Creative School
• Lester Hiraki, Instructor, The Chang School
• Jennifer Lapum, Associate Director, Quality Assurance and Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing
• Sally Wilson, Web Services Librarian, University Library
• Emma Wright, Manager, Global Learning and Engagement, Ryerson International
• Erin Ziegler, Assistant Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing

Open Education Week Showcase

March 10, 2022, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., the speakers will be:

• Sam Andrey, Acting Executive Director & Andre Cote, Acting Director of Policy & Research, Ryerson Leadership Lab
• Kelly Dermody, E-Learning and Accessibility Services Librarian, University Library
• Anthony Francescucci, Associate Professor & Joanne McNeish, Assistant Professor, Ted Rogers School of Business Management 
• Sarena Johnson, Liaison, Student Affairs, Aboriginal Student Services
• Michael Mueller, Contract Lecturer, School of Early Childhood Studies
• Megan Omstead, Program Coordinator, School of Nutrition

Open Education at Ryerson is supported by the University Library, the Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching, and the Chang School of Continuing Education.

 

Other Open Education week events across Canada:

Open Education Symposium

March 7 to 11

With a full week of events, The University of Alberta, Centre for Teaching and Learning is celebrating Open Education Week (March 7 – 11, 2022) by hosting their second Open Education Symposium.

While the symposium sessions are oriented to post-secondary instructors, we invite everyone from the education community to participate—instructors, students, librarians, educational developers, instructional designers and more!

 

Open Education Week 2022 – Open UBC

March 7 to 11

University of British Columbia, Vancouver Campus is hosting a full week of events with highlighted sessions on The 6R’s of Indigenous OER: Re-imagining OER to Honour Indigenous Knowledge and Sovereignty and Teaching with Care: An Introduction to Accessible Courses and Open Educational Resources.

 

The Library is very pleased to be launching the inaugural Virginia Edinger Walker University Library Research Award. This award recognizes student achievement in original research with a special focus on the critical use of library resources and research skills.  Three awards of $2000 each are available and are open to students across all disciplines and areas of study.  Applicants are asked to submit a long-form research paper, a short reflective essay regarding the research process,  and a brief statement of support from the course instructor.  For more information about the 2021/22 academic year application process, students should refer to the AwardSpring platform. 

This award celebrates the legacy of Professor Virginia Edinger Walker, who taught art history at Ryerson for more than 20 years. It has been established by Petros Dratsidis, the love of her life and husband of 50 years, in recognition of her great respect for history, art history, books and libraries. Professor Walker’s dedication to her students exemplified her unflagging passion and commitment to scholarship and research, which Mr. Dratsidis is commemorating through this award to inspire future generations of scholars.

Professor Walker’s Ryerson career was hard earned; her life’s journey to academic distinction was a road constructed around many obstacles and frequent delays. Her Depression-era childhood in a struggling farm family in the U.S. Midwest, described in a brief memoir, is reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It was a hardscrabble existence that delayed her school admission until she was nine years old.

In high school she was placed in a commercial stream rather than college prep as she wanted, a decision she ascribed to her working class roots. As a result, when she decided some years later that she wanted to attend university, she was required to complete a difficult pre-entrance year to prove her worth. She was eventually admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree before moving to Toronto with her family in 1965. It was here, in 1969, that she met Mr. Dratsidis in a seminar while both were pursuing post-graduate studies at the University of Toronto. They were together until her passing in 2019, sharing a life full of passion and travel.

For several years after her arrival in Canada, Professor Walker taught part-time at York University and in the Fashion Department at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, where she designed three courses (History of Art, History of Costume and History of Design). After she was hired full-time at Ryerson in 1980, she organized annual study tours for second-year students, with whom she visited museums, galleries and workplaces in London, Paris, Milan and Florence. Those students she encountered in later years often told Professor Walker of the deep impression those unique experiential learning opportunities  left on their lives. The tours continued until her retirement in 1994. She spent many subsequent years as a docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Professor Walker valued education; it had not come easily to her and she never took it for granted. She loved teaching and took a great interest in her students. To the end of her life, she continued her own education through research and extensive reading, developing an interest in world history in her later years.

It is important to Mr. Dratsidis to commemorate his wife’s legacy and passion for teaching and learning – indeed, for life. In creating this award at the Ryerson Library for original student scholarly, research and creative (SRC) work, it is his desire that Professor Walker’s contributions to the Ryerson University academic community are not forgotten. 

Copies of winning students’ work will be deposited in the University Library’s Digital Repository, an open access digital archive for the University’s research publications and output.

In addition, winning authors will be invited to present their work at an annual University Library event to recognize and celebrate outstanding student SRC achievement.

For more information, contact:

Joanna Beyersbergen

Director of Development, Library

416-979-5084

jbeyersb@torontomu.ca

In Spring 2021, the University Library introduced a pilot Research-in-Residence (LRiR) program designed to foster, enhance and expand its role as a centre of innovative and collaborative interdisciplinary SRC on campus. 

This past fall, Assistant Professor Linda Zhang from the School of Interior Design was selected as the inaugural resident beginning January 10, 2022.

Zhang’s work focuses on innovation in community engagement methods, sustainable material fabrication, and visual data collection through architectural heritage technology (namely virtual reality, augmented reality, video games, 3D scanning and machine learning). 

During her residency, Zhang will be working to further develop and build her research plan for her current projects, and to collaborate with the SRC expertise of librarians and other faculty from across campus.  

“I am humbled and honored to be selected as the inaugural resident researcher,” says Zhang. “The university library has had such a remarkable impact on my career growth and trajectory since my first year at X University. Collaborating with the Library has propelled my research in ways I would have never imagined. I am so grateful to have this opportunity to delve in deeper within such a generative, innovative and experimental environment. I can’t wait to get started.”

Throughout the year, she will be conducting research on two existing projects, developing a research data management plan and providing open access for data collected. 

While the technologies (VR, AR, video games and 3D scanning) she uses in her work have provided opportunities to explore new and more equitable methods for engaging in community research, they create new types of visual and spatial data not traditionally collected or considered in research.

This new type of data presents challenges and opportunities for innovation in research data collection as well as unique open access for datasets. 

The LRiR program gives Zhang an ideal opportunity to further develop solutions for accessing, sharing and managing these types of datasets. Working with librarians and library staff, Zhang will explore the potential for the Library’s new digital repository in expanding access to this type of research, while also utilizing open access publishing tools to create opportunities for sharing more broadly. 

In addition to her work with research data collection and open access, Zhang will utilize the Library’s newly installed 360 Immersion Studio to explore additional methods of working with and understanding data, as well as how to make data more accessible to a wider audience including community researchers.

“The Library’s Researcher in Residence program is an excellent new addition to the Library’s work in SRC innovation and capacity building,” says Chief Librarian, Carol Shepstone. “I am thrilled Linda is our first Researcher-in-Residence and I look forward to seeing what is possible through these kinds of deep research collaborations.”