Evernote: my Online Tickler File

I've not been on any courses or attended any conferences recently, but I thought I would share my experience with something I've been working on for several months now: my online Tickler File, courtesy of Evernote.

If you've not come across the term before, a Tickler File is just one of the many methods of being organised in the office. A typical system has a folder for each month, then a folder for each day, so 43 folders in all. Scheduled events for the current month are slotted into their daily folders. Each day you tackle the events in the folder, then refile into when they're next due. So January 1st, you do the tasks, and shift the '1' folder to February, adding any daily tasks due then to that folder once they're completed. Have I confused you? There are better descriptions elsewhere, just look.

Apparently there's lots of software available to do this, but a lot is proprietary, or costs, or works on a calendar. I think it's LifeHack or WikiHow that suggested Evernote, and I gave it a go. Basic Evernote is free (Evernote Premium costs), and the most important factor for me to choose it over a physical file cabinet is that it is immediately accessible when I sit down at my desk. I keep nearly all my tabs on my browser on all the time, and Evernote has duly been added.

Evernote has 'notebooks' and 'notes' rather than folders and files, but they amount to the same thing. What I've done is create a notebook for each month, then within these create a new note for each day. Repeated tasks are done that day, then cut and pasted to the next day they're due, while non-repeated tasks are just added to the relevant date then removed once completed.

June 1st, after tasks have been completed and next year's added.

I started in May, so I'm quite impressed that I've kept it going this long. It's a bit trickier when I'm away for any length of time because weekly tasks don't get done, and it's bad enough being behind in the tasks, but it's definitely made worse by seeing how far back I have to go on Evernote to catch up. It's also in some ways a little demotivating to delete something rather than satisfyingly crossing it through, and you can't use it as a record of what you've done that year, unless you keep done tasks somewhere else, and I think for me that just adds an unnecessary layer of admin on an already insane workload.

Where it's been useful though is for the infrequent but regular tasks I have to do - annual statistics can be gathered together in the days before the annual report is compiled, book order chases are done often enough to keep on top of them, but not so often that the vendors get annoyed, and you can see in advance what are going to be task-filled days and work around them when necessary. The fact that it isn't hard copy was the absolute deal-sealer for me - I need it handy but not in the way, and my desk is far too cluttered with stuff to want a diary or something that needs referring to regularly without it ending up on top of a pile of unpaid invoices.

My desk, looking a bit less cluttered than usual, but still woefully cluttered.

TeachMeet East: Tools and Tips for Teaching

TeachMeet East: Tools and Tips for Teaching, held Saturday 9^th July 2016, Anglia Ruskin, Chelmsford Campus

I was in the middle of recovering from a rather severe bout of tonsillitis when I attended, so I had really debated whether or not I was really up to going. In the end I figured I wasn’t going to have to participate in anything too strenuous, and the alternative was staying at home entertaining the 15-month old, so I waved goodbye to her and her daddy at Rhyme Time and headed over to Chelmsford.

It was a lovely drive through very pleasant countryside, passing through a few quaint villages on the way. I got a bit het up when I couldn’t find exactly the place I needed to get to, nor whether it was okay to park, but those minor points navigated, I eventually arrived to discover I was about the fifth person to arrive. A quick refresh, then a spot of relaxed networking until everyone was there.

So if you’ve never done a TeachMeet before, the structure is very fluid. There were a few things planned for the day, but the order in which we tackled them – and in fact, if we tackled them at all – was up to us. Ideas were submitted, and people shouted out what they wanted to learn. In fact, the whole process was done on one of the tools being demonstrated: Padlet.

I’d come across Padlet before – I can’t really remember where, but it wasn’t exactly new to me, but the use of it in this way was really good. Once we were all up online (this took a little faffing, because only a few of us had Eduroam, and most had to be signed in individually as guests through email, which you couldn’t access without internet, but you couldn’t get access to internet without the email – yeah, a definite complication!), anyway, once we were all online and able to edit the Padlet, it was a fun, dynamic way for us all to add notes.

We could be anonymous, as it was a public board, so suggestions came in, popping up from everywhere, as well as comments like “toilets?”. As it was real time, it was very quick from brain storm to pinboard, so we could get going straightaway. I don’t think I’d seen Padlet used in this way before, and once the teething problems of logging everyone in and being able to find the website were resolved, it was easy to get involved.

Ultimately yes, you could just use a white board, a couple of volunteers and get everyone to shout out suggestions, but Padlet offered a couple of advantages over that:

1.      It overcomes the problem of being too shy to speak up in front of others

2.      It can be more flexible than simple text: URLs, images, videos all work (I think) so instead of saying a random non-word, you can actually direct everyone to the app you’re talking about

3.      It stores each board at a unique place so you have a permanent (-ish) record of what you covered – without you having to take a photo!

Check out our board at https://padlet.com/wall/koa2z6sulpra!

So once we’d done that, we started on the first activity, which was games to get people moving. We were divided into teams and first did a “what’s in the box?” game, where we all had to search for clues around the room, put together the clues we had and guess what was in the box. The second was a jar of tasks, some mental, some creative, some physical (“do a roly-poly”, “figure out this anagram”, “find someone left-handed”…). In our teams we got a point for each one we completed, and it was a race to complete the most.

It was fun, and got us moving, but if it was meant to be an ice-breaker, I don’t think it worked as such – you get so caught up in doing the activities, you don’t really pay attention to the people around you! It does scale up though, apparently, if there are lots of teams you can give yourselves team names and #teamname your answer.

The second thing we looked at was Kahoot! which was a fun way to do a quiz. I am definitely going to use this somehow in the next year; it was a lot of fun and adrenaline-fuelled (although I think I came pretty near the bottom in the results) – great if you’re competitive, and again, you can be entirely anonymous while playing, if you pick a non-identifying username. It relies on pretty good wifi/reception/network, but it will work even if a player goes missing halfway through. Also, crucially, it has a feedback page which is really quick and easy to fill in once you’ve finished the quiz, so hopefully you can get instant feedback, which is downloadable and then you’ve got a record of it for the future.

I was surprised when at the time this was being played with, Google Forms was also thrown into the mix as a viable alternative for surveys – I mean, yes, it’s fine, but it’s ages old, and nothing like so much fun to play with!

After that someone asked about the Cephalonian Method, which I’ve not thought about since (and I had to check my blog for this!) 2011! It sounds very different from what I thought it was at the time though. Originally I thought it involved getting the students to ask questions, then you answering the questions but offering more information beyond what they’d asked. (“Do you have a photocopier?” “Yes, it does colour, it’s available [here], at [these times], and you need [this] to operate it.”). Turns out I’d misunderstood completely and Cephalonian is lots of cards, colour-coded, with questions written on, which you hand to your audience. They read out the card and you answer, with the idea being that:

1.      You don’t have to remember to cover everything; it’s done by the cards

2.      It keeps it fresh for you because it’s not in the same order every time – you’re less likely to forget things

3.      Because they speak up once, they’re more likely to ask further questions

People discussing it did say they have had variable success with it (though the answer to that was usually external motivators, ie sweets), and it really seems more of a benefit to use for the presenter, rather than the audience. Oh well. It was good to review this, because it wasn’t what I was expecting, and because it’s been around a while, nearly everyone’s tried it and could share successes and failures.

During the break I got chatting with people and lots of ideas came bouncing around out of this as well. I wasn’t able to write down everything, but I made a few scribbles afterwards while I remembered what I could.

1.      Snap game: matching questions to answers. Give everyone a card and they have to find their pair. E.g. Q: When does the library open? A: Mon-Fri, 9-5. To make it easier you could have author names on the backs so people can use these to confirm the correct pairs

2.      Standing in Dewey order: give everyone a card with a Dewey number on, get them to line themselves up in classmark order – apparently kids (and 6^th formers) love this!

3.      Standing in referencing order – e.g. in groups of 4, one has a title, one has an author, one has a date and one has a location. They have to arrange themselves in order, and lean over if they’re supposed to be in italics – a really kinaesthetic way of remembering where the italics come in referencing!

4.      Matching books: everyone is given a book, and has to find something they have in common with someone else. The nice thing about this is that they don’t have to have read the book if they’re a weak reader, e.g. “my book is blue and so is so-and-so’s”.

5.      Conscience alley: this sounded pretty dramatic, and might be difficult with large groups. A dilemma is presented, and people line up on two sides. One side is “for” and one is “against”, and the person with the dilemma has to walk between the lines, and as they pass each person, they offer their reason “for” or “against”. I can see this being a really interesting way to debate a work in English, as it reminds me of one of my earliest English classes at high school, where we read a passage from Oliver Twist when he meets Fagin and his pickpockets. The question we were asked was “is it a good thing that Oliver has met these people?” I’d written “yes, he’s been offered a roof over his head, they have food, warmth, etc”, and the teacher had decided that the correct answer was “no, they’re obviously criminals”.

6.      Doctors and patients: strong readers pair up with weaker readers to try and explore the reasons why the weaker readers aren’t reading, and offer solutions.

A lot of people strongly recommended the School LibrariansNetwork, a Yahoo group, for more ideas, downloadable content and support.

The next “formal” topic was The Unbelievable Truth of Medical History!, a brilliant evidence game from the Royal College of Nursing. In groups we had to arrange cards with statements on into three groups:

1.      Current model

2.      Disproved theory/practice

3.      Entirely fictional

We were presented with the answers, and would have been asked to find the evidence to support our answers of the first (and second) group. There were some surprises, and much hilarity, and then we had to reflect: why should we care about outdated theories? How do we ensure that what we do know is up to date and reliable? It was a fun game, with a great message behind it, and it really trains people to evaluate.

On the back of this one of the attendees offered one of her own games as a former teacher. In a class, divide into 3-4 groups, and each group is given some pieces of “evidence”. From this, they have to piece together a timeline in their groups, then show it to the rest of the class. Some evidence would be deliberately misleading or conflicting, some would narrow it down one way but not another, etc, and she said it was really interesting how the first group would say “here is The Timeline,” then the next group would say “no, it can’t be because this,” then they’d slot their timeline in, juggling the first group’s evidence, and the first group would be affronted, then the third group would enter and eventually the idea is that they all realise that timelines are only guesswork and subjectivity, interspersed with very few bits of concrete evidence. This sounded absolutely brilliant, but I’m sure it would have been a lot of work to put together.

Other good evaluating tools – particularly with school-level info literacy – are the fake or grossly biased websites. Some mentioned include the online pregnancy test, tree octopus, dog island, bonsai kittens and martinlutherking(dot)org, though care should be taken when accessing really unpleasant sites like the last one.

The next thing we looked at was RoboBraille, which is an amazing accessibility tool which has actually been around for over a decade. We uploaded a document and supplied an email address, and it sent back a text-to-speech version of the same document. Brilliant if you’ve got lots of resources but they’re not accessible – much quicker than recording yourself – much less excruciating to listen to too!

Another tool which was discussed was Aurasma. This is an augmented reality tool, which one of the presenters had used. She said it took a lot of time to prepare something which ultimately only lasted a few minutes and could be cheated, so she didn’t seem very enthusiastic, but it might be a case of finding the right thing to use it for.

By now we were all feeling a little information overloaded, so we decided to finish up by lounging around on the new beanbags (brilliant!) and just discussing whatever took our fancy. We covered all sorts of areas, from Accelerated Reader and Active Learn to the flipped classroom and team-based learning, from nesting habits of students in exam term (a sore point at the moment!) to library pets and stress relief. One thing a couple of people had tried was golden tickets – these would be hidden in places throughout the library, and if you found one, it would be to redeem a coffee at the campus café etc – a way of getting students out of the library and forcing them to take breaks!

We rounded off the day with a tour of the Cheltenham Campus library, several floors of books built around an atrium (honestly, architects, why do you insist on atrium-style libraries? They’re the absolute worst!).

It was a good afternoon, filled with some really great ideas about making information literacy lots of fun. One thing I loved was that there was a really good mix of academic libraries, school libraries and public libraries, and it was pleasurable to escape the Cambridge bubble for a while! There was a lot of chat, a lot of problem solving and idea sharing, which is the whole point of this sort of thing. It was small enough that everyone got involved in everything, and a lot of fun.

One thing that really came out of it though was the fact that everyone felt not enough is done to support information literacy in schools. We’re given induction time, but it’s just not enough. Many of the teachers seem not to understand its importance, and then when it does become important (e.g. when it’s worth 10% of your grade in an assignment at uni – true story, bro), the students simply don’t have the skills. Some teachers even consider their librarians to be on a par with the unskilled staff at the schools and don’t seem interested in what they can offer, which is incredibly discouraging. I’m not sure how we solve this.

Still, a great event, amazing value for money (free!), and a great opportunity to meet colleagues from a variety of backgrounds. Thoroughly recommended.

Libraries: making them accessible to disabled people

On Monday 18th April I made the long trip across Trumpington Street to the Disability Resource Centre to participate in this workshop, along with about a dozen or so other library staff from across Cambridge.
I'll be honest, I was expecting it to be a bit worthy, a bit sermonising, maybe even dull, but I have never done anything about accessibility in this library, and knew that it was going to be a good opportunity to find out what I could usefully do to be a bit more proactive in catering for disabilities. Being open to all, and not having a core readership in quite the same way as a college or faculty library, I can't easily anticipate what disabilities my readers will have. Occasionally I'm forewarned - for example one reader asked if there were steps, because he's on crutches, and I was able to say no, we're ground level, plus we could offer a wheelchair (the museum has several on hand for just such an occasion). But - and particularly in the case of unseen disabilities - generally I'm not going to know in advance of a visit, so I can only respond, not prepare, so it would be useful to know if there were things I could have ready for the more common accessibility issues.
There was a nice mix of UL, college and faculty library staff, plus me. One of the plus points about this workshop was it had relevance to all of us. I've been on other courses run within the university, where it's been of practical use to colleges and faculties, but not my library, which rather sits out on a limb and provides a very special service to a very different population than the ones served by colleges and faculties. This rather takes the wind out of my sails, when I get back and think "well, that was great, except it just doesn't work in my situation" - like the OA one, where our researchers are all academic-related, not academic. And while I learned about Student Support Documents, and saw how college and faculty libraries made use of them, there was still lots of advice I could take away and use here.
We started (after the mandatory icebreaker) with a Disability equality quiz, first filling it in on our own, then discussing in pairs, then finally sharing with the group. It was really interesting to see what assumptions we were bringing to the table - one of the questions asked us to list disabilities in order of how many students at Cambridge were affected. I put social/communication impairment (eg Aspergers) much higher than I should have, and longstanding illness/health condition (eg cancer) much lower than I should have, I suppose because autism is a lot more obvious when communicating with someone affected, than say, diabetes. We learned a little about disclosure of disabilities, and how not every student with a disability will disclose it. It was interesting to find out that students are given a second opportunity to disclose a disability after being offered a place, and that around 60-70 students will disclose who previously hadn't, of which the majority disclose a mental health disability such as depression, which shows the stigma that still surrounds mental health impairment in society.
After a break we got into small groups and were given several case studies to discuss (for example: "Tom is studying for a PhD and needs to use the library... He has a disclosed mental health difficulty which primarily impacts in terms of anxiety and depression"). We had to identify the barriers each student would face in using the library, and how we could overcome these and make the library more accessible. To be honest, I spent more time asking the college library staff in my group about the Student Support Documents, which I'd never come across until this workshop (see what I mean when I say our situation is different?!). The SSD goes to everyone that the student says it's okay to, so there's full, partial, or zero disclosure, and because they've okayed it, it's fine once a library knows about an SSD to contact the student in advance and say "Hi, I understand you have an SSD. What can we do to help when you come to the library?"
A lot of the practical methods to improve accessibility tended to be things like book-fetching, being more generous and flexible in borrowing terms, reserving desk space, and better signage, but there were other things I'd not even thought of, which even I could implement, such as having coloured paper available to lower contrast between text and page, thereby reducing visual stress. The DRC staff strongly recommended getting a scanner, if nothing else, and I'll be contacting them again to ask if there's anything more I can do for the potential reader without having to break the budget on expensive equipment that may never get used!
So overall, this turned out to be a lot of fun, very interactive, and full of practical advice for every library, not just college and faculty ones. I was really pleased I went along, and I'm going to try and make sure we implement everything we can to make our library more accessible.

Train the Trainer

On Monday 7th March I attended a one-day hands-on course designed to equip delegates with essential training skills, and knowledge of how to train and to interact when training. It was organised by the University of Cambridge Museums and delivered by Cambridge Regional College, and covered a wide range of content.

It was a small group - 8 in total, mostly from the Fitz, but with one person from the Whipple, which meant many of us knew each other at least by sight, if not by name. The positions represented were quite diverse, which was nice - HR, libraries, conservation, technician, visitor services. And it was interesting that it was an all-female group - the only man who was going to attend couldn't make it in the end. I'm not sure it would have made any difference, I just thought it was worth remarking on!

We began with an icebreaker, and immediately followed it up with "Why do we have icebreakers?". This pretty much set the tone of the day - it was an incredibly practical session, filled with "Why do we do this? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? What should we be doing?" Throughout the day, we were being encouraged to confront our behaviours, question our methods and see what could be improved, which was different for each person there.

So what did we cover? All of this:

• How to adapt training to suit different learning styles and environments
• How to maintain interaction whilst delivering sessions
• Room layout and resources
• Communication styles, mannerisms and non-verbal communication
• Learning and learning styles
• Training needs analysis
• Instructional techniques and job instruction
• Presentations - audience analysis, preparing the setting, delivery, visual aids
• Effective questioning techniques
• Evaluation

I won't go through everything we did for it all - in a lot of cases we did just discuss and answer questions, for example giving the advantages and disadvantages of different room layouts, or examples of positive and negative body language, or just sharing real-life experiences with the group. But there were lots of interesting things we did, and points I think worth noting.

1. Before we begin training, we must first establish what is already known. It seems obvious, but that just means it's more imperative that we don't overlook it!
2. We have to take into account the needs of a) the trainer, b) the trainee and c) what's being taught.
3. The trainer has 3 goals when delivering training. It has to be: a) informative, b) enjoyable and c) memorable.
4. Feedback. We need it to learn/change, and don't do it nearly enough.
5. Evaluation should be fair, objective and consistent, no matter who you're dealing with.
6. Problems: Share the issues. Involve the learner. Document what you've done and what you're going to do.
7. Documentation. Generally we don't do this nearly enough either.

We all took the Honey & Mumford 80-question test to discover whether we were Activists, Reflectors, Theorists or Pragmatists (with suitable disclaimers that it only works for that moment in time and we'll change depending on situation, or mood, or what happened earlier that day etc). I had a feeling I would be an Activist, and came out pretty strongly as Activist, with a lot of Pragmatist, a little Theorist and practically no Reflector. Most people felt the results accurately reflected them, but there were a few surprising outcomes.

When giving feedback, the trainer recommended the Pendleton (1984) model:

1. Clarify facts.
2. Learner discusses what went well.
3. Trainer discusses what went well.
4. Learner describes what could have been done better and suggests changes.
5. Trainer identifies what could have been done better and suggests changes.

By getting the learner to talk first, it encourages them to take ownership of their training.

The trainer asked about when and where to give feedback. For example, is it okay to give feedback in passing in a corridor? I thought yes if quick and positive ("you handled that difficult situation just now really well") but no if it was going to need discussion, or was negative.

Still talking about feedback, the trainer talked about how important it was to be non-judgemental in giving feedback: descriptive (not evaluative), specific (not generalised), relating to behaviour (not personality) and offering choices (not dictating what to do).

We covered how to design training, and learned about the classic SMART outcomes:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-based

We then had to design effectively a lesson plan to teach the course leader how to make a sandwich. It was interested seeing how the different people responded and how they covered it. My very Activist approach was no-frills and straightforward. The reflectors spent a lot of time covering the background of the scenario, while others designed a YouTube video series with a specific audience in mind, with a demonstration.

After this we learned about the four stages of learning, exemplified by learning to drive:
1. Unconscious incompetence ("I don't know I can't drive.")
2. Conscious incompetence ("I know I can't drive.")
3. Conscious competence ("I have to think about my driving, but I can drive.")
4. Unconscious competence ("I don't have to think, I can just drive.")
If someone can't get to stage 4, no matter how well they've been trained, it might be a case for performance review (see number 6 above).

After all this, we finished with a group activity where we were split into two teams. We were to complete a jigsaw, but before that, we had to write a plan detailing how we would tackle it. I found it interesting that we had made a plan and didn't stick to it that well. We had started looking for edges and corners, and had decided which orientation the jigsaw would be as we built it, but after that it was carnage! This really brought home the need for understanding the way you work when planning. We were so competitive that instead of working through the plan methodically, we went at everything all in one go. Plans to focus on turning over all pieces to face up while looking for edges went out the window, so I concentrated on that, and I began handing pieces to others to insert in their portions of jigsaw. I was told I was bossy when I applied to do my PGCE (by the interviewer!!), and I could see my "dominant leadership skills" ;) steering the group.

Overall this was a really useful course, as it highlighted the areas where I'm weak (planning, evaluating) and where I'm strong (delivering training), and gave a lot of information about how to tackle the areas where I need improvement. Hopefully when I take on the training of the reference library intern (starting in a couple of weeks!), I'll be a bit more prepared.

Blatant self-promotion

I am absolutely delighted to share a link to a blogpost that I wrote for the IAML (UK & Ireland) blog. I had submitted my "third"* year dissertation to their ET Bryant Memorial Prize one year, and was really surprised that my work came joint-first with another. The blogpost shares the more unexpected and tangential outcomes of my work - the bits that didn't make it into the results pages of the dissertation when I submitted it to Aberystwyth.

* I was possibly their second-slowest continuous student *ever*, starting in April 2008 and actually graduating in May 2014.

British Library Labs Project Showcase and Ideas Lab

This was a workshop organised by British Library Labs and Cambridge Digital Humanities as part of a wider roadshow advertising the Labs and promoting the competitions currently being run. Essentially, teams from the British Library came and said "Look, we've got all this stuff, and we've been able to pull all this sort of data out and mash it up and produce something else. What ideas have you got to do the same?" There were a few short presentations about the teams, and what they did, and what resources they had to offer, before we all sat down in groups to look at the datasets the BL Labs had available, and try to come up with an innovative way of using that data. The team that won suggested a kareoke booth which took Victorian music hall songs from the collection, and people could be filmed performing them and the results put on YouTube.

Excuse me while I photoshop top hats, monocles and moustaches onto this lot.

There were a lot of librarians at the workshop, but it felt it was pitched towards researchers (not saying that librarians can't be researchers, just that there are many researchers in the university who could have made use of this opportunity and didn't!). Nonetheless, I shall take a moment to have a think about a better pitch than the one my team came up with (using sheet music titles to chart naval history and developments in the military - interesting academically, but not very sexy, which I think is what they were looking for). There is a competition to see what new things can be come up with (details here) and an award scheme to reward the best use of currently available datasets (details here).

I say cataloguing, you say metadata - let's sort the whole thing out

This was a talk and demonstration organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) and the Open Access team, presented by Danny Kingsley (Head of Scholarly Communication), Sarah Middle and Philippa Grimstone (Repository Assistant).
Sarah Middle discussed the changes taking place in the institutional repository. Presently known as Dspace, the repository is going to be upgraded and renamed Apollo.

The repository structure is based around communities, which is a coverall term to describe all the departments, faculties and other institutions within the university. Within each community there may be sub-communities (for example for specific groups within a department), and three collections: scholarly works, research data, and theses. Currently the repository is browsable, and searchable by authors and titles, and better subject keyword searching is something being worked on, but it is also well-indexed by Google.
At the moment, it is compulsory for students to provide a print copy of their PhD thesis, but an electronic copy is optional (unless stated otherwise by funder of the PhD). An electronic copy can be self-deposited or done through the OSC.

There are sometimes issues preventing an author from submitting an electronic copy, such as licence agreements and 3rd party copyrights (e.g. in having used images or quotes). However, it is possible to put an embargo of up to 2 years delay on open access which allows time to sort these issues out.
Sarah outlined some projects and future plans for the repository. These include:
‘Unlocking Theses’
When someone requests a digital copy of a thesis, they pay for a copy which can be held in ‘dark space’ in the repository until the author approves it to be made available online (35% positive response rate).
‘Hero Theses’
The OA Team are proactively digitising the theses of famous alumni of the university and holding them in dark space until the author approves its availability (49% positive response rate) – the intention is to encourage people to follow in their heroes’ footsteps and make their theses available online.
Future plans:

• Creating a “Request a Copy” button
• Providing a facility for author to claim works and consent to make available online
• E-theses pilot (taking place in selected departments only)

Philippa Grimstone began with a description of what was meant by ‘Open Access’, and the types of Open Access that exist.

	Green OA	Gold OA	Hybrid OA
Access through	Institutional Repository	Publishers' websites	Both IR and publisher
Cost	Free	Not free	Not free
Limits	Embargos (delays) and restrictions	Available immediately in final published form	May be embargos or restrictions applying

Journals can be fully open access, partial open access, or completely closed access.

In order for research to be eligible for the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework, it must comply with the policy of whichever group funded the research in the first place. HEFCE is the biggest funder, and say that peer-reviewed articles must be deposited in an IR within 3 months of its acceptance by a journal. There are other funders too, such as RCUK, COAF and Wellcome Trust, all with different policies.
Philippa then took the audience through the process of depositing in the IR, which is made up of 4 simple steps:

1. Submit author’s accepted article to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk
2. Zendesk® ticket is generated
3. OA team picks up the ticket and deals with the submission
4. A record is created of the article within the IR

1. Submission
Which version of an article is acceptable?
Pre-print >> Goes for peer review >> Accepted for publication >> Final version is published
An article can't be accepted until it has reached the third stage (accepted for publication).
2. Ticket generation
Zendesk is the management software used by the OA team, which can be used for communication, will store information, and can generate reports.
3. Processing submission
The OA team deal with answering questions like:

• what is the funder’s policy on OA?
• what is the publisher’s policy on OA?
• what type of OA is used?
• will fees apply?
• is this the correct version of the article?

4. Repository record creation
This is done by the OA team based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are still problems to iron out regarding author authority headings. In the future it is hoped that Dspace will be able to create automatic citations too.
Once the record is created, it is uploaded to a collection/community and granted a cc-by licence (the default, though others may apply). The author is then informed that their work is available.

Datasets can also be uploaded like articles, but there are more issues inherent:

• datasets aren’t published like articles, so may be unclear/incomplete
• there is no standard format for datasets or for metadata
• there may be proprietary software involved
• they may be large files (there is a fee for files larger than 1GB)
• they may be zipped files
• how much data constitutes ‘enough’? (e.g. hundreds of hours of viedo footage, or several samples?)
• there may be ethical concerns with making data available

Danny Kingsley rounded off the session with a a Q&A. She mentioned that there are lots of rumours and worries amongst researchers who may be reluctant to put their work online, but perhaps the majority of this is misinformation which can be dispelled by encouraging researchers to talk to the OSC.
Q. Are articles placed in the ‘dark space’ OA-compliant?
A. Yes. While not presently OA, there is a record within the IR of that article.
Q. Are there exceptions to this seemingly straightforward process?
A. Yes, and the OA team do their best to account for everything in each case.
Q. Will the approved manuscript (pre-publication) be retained in the IR even if the final version becomes available?
A. Yes, as this is the version owned by the university, but when the final version comes in, it will be appended as ‘additional information’ to the record of the final version rather than being a separate record.
Q. How do we find out if something is being made available on Open Access?
A. We need to be logged out of the university domain, then try to access the article.
Q. Why can’t we use our archive, why do we have to use the IR? (Faculties with own repositories)
A. You can still, at the moment, and the OSC is looking at ways of porting the data across, before ultimately supplanting the faculty repositories.
Q. How much does Open Access cost?
A. Millions. Gold OA can often cost £1500-£5000, with some major publishers charging £7000. This is in addition to the subscription cost (this is known as ‘double-dipping’, where the publishers charge the university twice – once to publish, once to access) and it is estimated that publishers like Elsevier and Wiley are scalping an extra £2m each out of the university in this way.
What next?
Having attended this talk, I looked at what the museum had deposited in the university IR: two newsletters. I’m sure there must be lots being published, as the staff here are incredibly scholarly and constantly researching things, so the next step is to find out what is happening to this research, and whether it can be shared with the university and beyond.

Update:

I reported back to my line manager and discussed the workshop, and found out some additional things to think about. The first is that museum staff are academic-related, not academic, therefore not subject to the same terms as academics when it comes to things like REF. This also probably has knock-on effects for things like funding, which doesn't pay for specific research so policies for OA may not come into play the same way. The other thing was that a lot of staff publish on academia.edu (not linked here), which is a venture-capital for-profit organisation, and they need to be aware that the data is mined for commercial purposes. It also doesn't count as OA for compliance purposes because it's behind a membership wall.