Biography
Janet Swatscheno is the Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries. She provides project management and production workflow support as part of the Library’s effort to offer high-quality, open access publishing services. She also leads efforts to support adoption and creation of open educational resources (OER) in the Library. Before joining the University of Illinois, she worked as a Digital Metadata Assistant at DePaul University and was a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her research over the past two years has been in service of Publishing Without Walls, a four-year, one-million-dollar project awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a library-based digital scholarly publishing initiative.
Leadership Portfolio
Janet was selected to participate in the 2017-18 pilot of the Open Education Leadership Program. As a digital publishing specialist, Janet’s interests centered on challenges for publishing open educational resources. Janet’s capstone project is a library guide on marketing and getting the word out about newly published OER.
Commercial publishers have the money and personnel to do significant outreach and marketing in order to sell their textbooks and corresponding products. This type of marketing and outreach costs a lot of money and typically libraries and individual authors do not have the time or resources to market their publications in this way. Libraries and open content producers often must rely on inexpensive methods for getting the word out like word of mouth and social media. This library guide is meant to provide librarians, library publishers, and self-publishing authors a simple guide to promoting recently published open textbooks and OER.