Open Access Week 2015

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It’s Open Access Week!

Open Access Week International LogoWhat’s Open Access? I’m so glad you asked! Open Access, or OA, is a publishing model  in which information is free to the reader. OA publishing proponents seek to remove the barriers to the distribution of research, allowing scholars to more efficiently build upon each other’s work and providing increased access to scholarship for researchers in non-traditional settings.

The Open Access movement inspires much conversation and debate. It encourages us to question and examine current practices and traditions in higher education, from scholarly publishing models to tenure review and promotion.

“‘Open Access’ to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.” – http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about

Ada Lovelace Day 2015: Science for the Public Good

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!  On October 13, 2015, we’ll celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, an annual event recognizing achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and math.

This year, we’re taking up the challenge issued by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): to celebrate Lovelace through the vast DPLA digital collections available.  Many notable scientists that were graduates or faculty members from Vassar College have materials throughout the United States, and quite a lot of material can be found through DPLA (http://dp.la).  Inspired by Vassar’s mission, we want to use this year’s Ada Lovelace Day to highlight three of the many Vassar scientists that believed strongly in using science for the public good: Ellen Swallow Richards (VC 1873), Marian Elliott Koshland (VC 1942), and Ellen Kovner Silbergeld (VC 1967).

Want to know more about some of the many alumnae/i who chose careers in science?  Our guide to Vassar scientists (http://libguides.vassar.edu/content.php?pid=661952&sid=5482307) provides a wonderful starting point.  The DPLA has links to the personal, scientific, and professional papers of many of these scientists, including computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, astronomer Caroline Furness, and anthropologist Ruth Benedict (whose personal papers are at Vassar College).

Wishing you a happy Ada Lovelace Day and best wishes for a wonderful semester for the arts, sciences, and social sciences alike!

#CharlestonSyllabus at Vassar

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The Vassar Libraries recently added a sampling of titles from the Charleston Syllabus to our Browsing Collection. Below is a personal essay about the difficult public issues related to the South Carolina shootings. The writer, Deb Bucher, is the Assistant Director of the Library for Collection Development and Research Services.

Following the June 17, 2015 murders in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, I began asking myself some questions. What can I do?  What should I have done? Shouldn’t I be more involved in social justice?  Am I wasting my time working at an elite educational institution?  As a white person, I routinely feel bad about the privilege I get based on my skin color, but also completely overwhelmed by the enormity of attempting to rectify the systemic racism that my privilege comes from.  How can I live my life with integrity knowing I’m the beneficiary of unwarranted privilege?  How can I be part of the solution and not the problem?

#CharlestonSyllabus and Libraries

I often turn to books when I have a question that I need answered.  As a child, I went to the library and read biography after biography and learned to appreciate the lives of others and what they faced.  I learned that going to the library encouraged me to think critically about ideas, about my own life and how I live it, and, most especially, how other people experience life.  So my response after Charleston was to do the same.  Fortunately, I have Dr. Chad Williams of Brandeis University to thank for developing the #Charlestonsyllabus, a list of materials directly related to my questions.  After the Charleston murders, he used Twitter to ask for submissions to a list of readings about the history of race relations and racial violence in the United States.  The #Charlestonsyllabus is now a “library” that brings together histories, movies, personal narratives, poetry and other literature that document the lives of African Americans living with and in the systemic racist and violent society we call the United States.

Libraries as Community

But the #Charlestonsyllabus is more than just a library.  As Chad Williams says, “It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation” (http://aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/).   So by reading the books on the syllabus, I will be part of a virtual community of people working to change how we think and act in society.  That’s a start, at least.

If you would like to join the #Charlestonsyllabus community, the Vassar librarians have collected just of a few of the titles on the list and have put them on a shelf in the “Browsing Collection” in the lobby of Main Library.  I invite you look at those titles and take one home.  For the full list, see our guide, http://libguides.vassar.edu/charleston, or the #Charlestonsyllabus website, http://aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/.

I believe that libraries are transformative and radical places; I expect the #Charlestonsyllabus to be that kind of library for me, and I hope it is for you as well.