1 Coffee Pot, Many Disciplines: Session Recap

In March 2013, Bonnie Cain-Wood attended a session on how work spaces impact collaboration. Her notes, take aways and follow-up questions are below.

Session Brief: The Allen Curve, a theory developed by MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Tom Allen in the 1970s, asserts that the physical distance between individuals directly affects their levels of collaboration. This belief has begun to revolutionize space planning around the world—especially the institution where the theory was developed. Whether it is open office space, specially designed labs connecting typically bifurcated groups, or the consolidation and co-location of related but fragmented activities and programs, MIT is taking a revolutionary approach to driving innovation and entrepreneurship through the creation of work spaces that promote and enhance collaboration.

Take Aways:

·         Making a place look "status" hinders innovation. (Think corporate conference rooms)

·         Old model: break up space, send people to work, bring them together to share. Works well for efficiency, but not for innovation. 

·         The coffee pot is a real and symbolic center that brings people together.

·         Communal Offices-sharing offices, when someone is out, someone else uses the office.

Library Applications:

·         Co-working: Could we have flexible working space that employees could move in and out of so you work with different people and in a different place? Can we do a pop-up co-work space to experiment with this concept? As we begin to embed librarians, would co-working space within the Library be a more efficient use of space?

·         Enablers: do we have something, someone, someplace that encourages interdepartment collaboration? What can we do to create this?

·         If the coffee pot is a real and symbolic center that brings people together, what is our "coffee pot"?

         

      To explore this topic more, visit:
http://twitter.com/#MITspace

If you would like to share your notes on conference sessions relevant to the Library Future Series contact lib-pub@okstate.edu.

 

Environmental Scan Presentation

Library employees may find the slides used for the Environmental Scan work group presentation on May 7 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

The work group also recommends the following links: 
Research Games (Texas A&M): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-hmcx99Kks 
University of Arizona Video Contest: http://www.library.arizona.edu/video-contest 
My Hunt Library Photos (NCSU): http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/myhuntlibrary

Follow Up Notes-Spires of Excellence

Library employees may find the notes from the follow up session for the Spires of Excellence work group presentation on April 10 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet.

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

Spires of Excellence Presentation

Library employees may find the slides used for the Spires of Excellence work group presentation on April 8 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

Staff Notes from March 6

Library employees may find the notes taken during the follow up conversation on March 6 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day Two

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Near the end of the conference we heard from the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, Lorraine Harricombe. She shared the process on the KU campus for creating a campus-wide open access policy and adoption of the institutional repository. Over two years the library worked closely with the Provost’s office and faculty council to write and adopt an open access policy that encourages authors to maintain at least some of their copyright and deposit their work into the institutional repository at KU, known as KU ScholarWorks.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion made up of Kevin Droegemeier, the OU VP of Research, and Jerry Malayer from the OSU Center for Veterinary Health Sciences. The discussion ranged across all the topics covered in the conference, but focused largely on bringing OU and OSU together to work on addressing the need for more robust and fully supported institutional repositories as well as open access policies for our campuses and better support for our researchers and authors when they want to use or publish open access resources.

The conference was wonderful and the conversation has only started. Many questions still need to be answered. If you are interested in Nicole’s notes from the conference she would be glad to share them. Just let her know.

What opportunities do you see for collaboration across the state? What does OSU have to offer that is unique?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day One Continues

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Continued from “Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome & Opening Remarks
The other speakers were wonderful too. We heard from Jennifer Lin from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). She talked about Article Level Metric or ALMs which allow authors to see (at varying degrees of granularity)

• how often their article is viewed and/or downloaded,
• which countries the readers are from,
• comments, tweets,
• citations, referring URLs
• and more.

ALMs are a great way to convince faculty of the benefits of OA in terms of widening their audience. These sentiments were echoed by University of Kansas Professor, Marc Greenburg.

Some speakers touched on the idea of copyright in the world of Open Access. Michael Carroll, American University Law Professor, evangelized on the necessity of authors maintaining at least some of their rights to the articles they write. Publishers often ask authors to give all of their copyright to the publisher. By holding on to some of their rights authors can share their work freely and deposit their work in the university’s institutional repository.

Carroll also talked about the Creative Commons license which allows the original author to maintain their copyright but gives others permission to repost and use their work as long as the author receives credit or attribution.

Mark Morvant from OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence talked about open access course materials. Open Education Resources or OERs give faculty the freedom to customize their curriculum, because they aren’t dependent on a textbook. Additionally students are spared the punishing costs charged by some textbook publishers. Because using OERs is more work for faculty the Center for Teaching Excellence at OU is offering support and education for faculty who want to use open access materials for their classes.

How can the library help faculty adopt open access and protect their copyright?