Building on our popular “Open Access 101” events, SPARC is pleased to announce a new series, Collections & Open Access: Resourcing Open Scholarship, that will dive deeper into topics at the intersection of library collections and Open Access. This series will examine how collections librarians are navigating major changes, including funder public access requirements and evolving publisher business models, and consider what these changes mean for the future of libraries. The series will explore broader trends in the evolution of collections work, the practical realities of how different libraries are approaching these changes, and what lessons other institutions might draw from their experience.
Resourcing Open Access is a three-part webinar series designed for collections-focused librarians and others engaged in this work. Together, we will move from foundational concepts to implementation to critical reflection—exploring not only how this work gets done, but why it matters and for whom. The series will use an educate-implement-complicate structure, similar to our last OA 101 series.
This third session, Power, Equity, and the Future of Open, will take place on September 1 from 2-3:30pm ET and examine the tensions within open access work, including questions of equity, labor, sustainability, and power. Speakers for the third session will include AJ Boston (Murray State University), Kerry Creelman (University of Houston), Lauren Di Monte (Yale University), and Sharla Lair (Lyrasis). Please register here.
Across all three sessions, participants will engage with peers, reflect on their own institutional contexts, and leave with a clearer sense of how to navigate and shape collections work in an open landscape. All sessions are intended as friendly opportunities for discussion as well as “no bad questions” spaces. Sessions will be highly interactive and designed to help participants arrive at a practical understanding that they can immediately apply in their own contexts.
Resourcing Open Access is open to those working within libraries and is being developed with an emphasis on supporting those doing collections work. This series is created in partnership with Maria Bonn (University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne), Will Cross (North Carolina State University), and Josh Bolick (University of Kansas) as well as Lindsay Cronk (Tulane University) and in collaboration with the speakers featured in each session. Recordings of the presentation portion of each session will be posted publicly afterward. Q&A and discussion will not be recorded.