Lightning Round #3

Thursday October 06, 2022

From 2:45pm to 3:30pm

Join us for a series of 10-minute lightning talks!

Taking Student Zines Beyond the Classroom: a Creation of Korean Zine Collection in Open-Access Repository (TSpace) (Jihae Julia Chun)

This presentation demonstrates a collaboration between Korean language professor and Korean studies librarian to implement a zine-making project in advanced Korean language class and create zines collection in TSpace, an open-access research repository established by University of Toronto Libraries.

We developed this project during the pandemic to foster student engagement and collaboration in virtual class, teach essential research skills and composition through a creative zine-making process, and build a unique Korean language collection that will strengthen equity, diversity, and inclusion in the broader university library collections. Overall, our aim was to have students’ research projects live beyond the confines of the classroom and share their work with students and researchers from various disciplines.

Duncombe (2008) defines zine as “noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves” (p.11). We envisioned the zine as the perfect medium for advanced level students to practice writing in Korean and for creative self-expression. We asked students to work in groups for collaborative writing and had them choose a social issue of their interest. Students conducted research, presented their position on the issue and suggested actions that society should take. In this way, we hoped to foster agency and empower students to take ownership of their writing.

In December 2021, student zines were published in TSpace, which ensures digital preservation, barrier-free access, and enhanced discoverability of its content. The project was positively evaluated by the students, who expressed that they became more comfortable with formal writing in Korean.

For the course, the Korean language instructor developed guidelines and procedures for creating the zines; the Korean Studies librarian provided library resources and instructions on research skills, APA citation for the project and created metadata for students’ zines in TSpace.

Duncombe, S. (2008). Notes from underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Microcosm.

Lowry, P., Curtis, A., Lowry, M. (2004). Building a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to improve interdisciplinary research and practice. Journal of Business Communication, 41(1), 66–99.

Storch, N. (2019). Collaborative writing. Language Teaching, 52(1), 40–59.

Thomas, S. (2018). Zines for teaching: A survey of pedagogy and implications for Academic Librarians. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 18(4), 737–758. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0043

Knitting Together a Community with Special Collections (Jacquelyn D'Eall Sundberg, Kristen C. Howard)

Stimulating curiosity and connection are essential in creating a broader community of users for rare, archival, and special collections. With our doors closed due to COVID-19 for much of 2020-22, ROAAr (Rare books, Osler, Art and Archives) at the McGill Library developed a creative outreach program which allowed us to foster community engagement with our rare and unique items, despite limited access. By combining creative methods with more familiar program pieces, like virtual events and interactive workshops, we developed a new model for creative community engagement with primary source collections.

We will discuss three events that exemplify our approach: Knitting 101 with ROAAr, Rare Stitches, and Knitting in Code. Through these events we provided participants glimpses into our collections by showcasing extraordinary items, and created something new by developing knitting patterns inspired by these materials. These events provided users near and far a unique and approachable way of accessing the collections through the lens of historical context. This approach promotes dialogue not only between attendees and ROAAr’s holdings, but also with each other using virtual tools.

In addition to the typical audience for a ROAAr event, these specialized events also reached members of an already-established online crafting community, most of whom were unaffiliated with McGill. In the wake of the pandemic, outreach and community building have never been as important as they are now, and a creative approach allows us to knit together a new community using Special Collections.

Why Progress Requires Friendship (Jessica Webber)

What does it mean to be a friend? How do you best approach repairing a damaged relationship? I live on unceded lands on Treaties of Peace and Friendship. Summarizing Pamela Glode-Desrochers, truth is rarely seen in reconciliation.

During recent research on collections trends, narratives, and Indigenous visibility within several museum collections systems, significant obstacles in providing accurate narratives were highlighted.

Combining this with external research projects brings light to the need for developing both community and stillness to adequately develop the trust to repair relationships if we are to share the truth. In the process of researching the story of a specific historical Indigenous encampment, I faced multiple barriers to accessing information. Searching multiple municipal, and provincial archives, I was only able to find a nearly singular sentence. Exhausting federal records revealed fonds after fonds of inaccessible private data. These issues highlight the issues present in telling and disseminating the truth of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous and other marginalized communities.

These, of course, are points most already know - or at least have long had suspicions about.

This talk is a reflection of these discoveries and the methodologies used, with focus on one very critical concept: If re-approaching how institutions function must be considered, and a desire exists to provide greater accessibility to marginalized voices… How ready are the descendants of white colonial settlers to honestly acknowledge our place in this friendship and what it takes to sit at the table again?

Toward a Vision of Community-Engaged Digital Research Infrastructure: The Canadian HSS Commons and Beyond (Graham Jensen)

This lightning talk will provide an overview of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons (hsscommons.ca) and share highlights from its forthcoming “Vision Document”: a community-informed reflection on best practices and relevant considerations for others interested in setting up large-scale digital research infrastructure in Canada.

The Canadian HSS Commons is an in-development, bilingual community space for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public. Serving as a hub for open social scholarship, it combines elements of social networking sites, tools and platforms for collaboration, and institutional repositories, allowing researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. It is an initiative of the INKE Partnership, with project partners in Canada, Australia, and the United States—including CRKN, the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, CARL, CANARIE, and others.

This talk will conclude with a brief summary of the project’s in-progress Vision Document, which emerged out of the recently completed Launching a Digital Commons for the Humanities and Social Sciences event series. This living document corresponds to the INKE Partnership’s ongoing study into community-engaged, not-for-profit digital research commons. In particular, it examines how networks such as the Canadian HSS Commons can facilitate effective knowledge mobilization by providing tools for open access publication and collaboration that align with established and evolving best practices regarding the governance of digital communities, research data management and discoverability, and the long-term stability and preservation of digital research infrastructure.