Biography
Graeme Slaght is the Scholarly Communications & Copyright Outreach Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL). In this role, he coordinates UTL’s course reserves and copyright outreach services, and has led projects that have addressed and assessed the impact of affordable access to course materials to students. He supports copyright and scholarly communications literacy at the university by providing policy guidance, workshops, and educational materials to faculty, students and staff.
Leadership Portfolio
As a SPARC Open Leadership Fellow, Graeme was focused on increasing the library’s role in leading open education initiatives at the University of Toronto while building on successful existing initiatives across its three campuses. Graeme’s capstone was focused on the planning of two events for Open Education Week 2019, a colloquium focused on exploring the results of open education projects at U of T (video of event here), and a training event for faculty that introduced Pressbooks as a tool for open textbook publishing.
The goals of the project were: 1) to successfully engage a cohort of OER-curious faculty and others, and to, along the way, 2) build stronger relationships with campus stakeholders, including library colleagues, faculty, educational technologists, and others, and 3) to better align Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office activities with the support of open education more broadly.
Over the course of the program, Graeme has develop open resources to support faculty interested in creating or working with open resources, and wrote about how innovation in the public interest often comes from places you don’t expect. At end of his time in the program, Graeme launched the UTL OER Adaptation Grant program and anticipates that OE activities will continue to grow in their scope at UTL over the coming years.