Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication Librarian

A version of Aisling’s interview with Louann is available in the DLA Newsletter from November 2020. During her time at Macalester, Louann Terveer has worked on a number of important projects, including open pedagogy, open education resources, Digital Commons@Mac, digital literacy, and much more. 

Open Publishing: In the spring of 2020, I participated in an open publishing project: Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations. This came out of the Rebus Community, a platform that supports open educational resource creators and production. I was only a copy editor, but I saw firsthand how an edited, open publishing project works and I presented as part of a panel of authors, editors and other participants at Open Education Conference 2020. I wanted to have experience with the Rebus Community so that if I recommend it to instructors, I was speaking from experience. I also wanted to be part of the “open community” of sharing (and learning throughout the process) about how instructors are using OER as part of an Open Pedagogy.

Open Education Textbooks: This project got off the ground with library support (riding on the coattails of work that was done before I started here). Open education textbooks are both built and revised during the production process, which is one of the beauties of open resources. They can have this iterative nature and also be adapted by others to speak best to the student users and local context. Open textbooks can address issues such as textbook affordability, and also bring the benefit of flexibility for instructors and learners.

Publishing: The institutional repository, or digital commons, was up and running before I came to Macalester, but we are taking a closer look at our publishing and digital collection decisions, policies, and workflows this year.

Digital Literacy at Mac: A group of individuals from the library and ITS have been thinking about and working together on this project. We’re thinking through questions such as: what are digital literacies and the skills that lead to those competencies? How do we provide a framework for others to understand where they and we, as an institution of learners, fit into this?

What is one of your goals, moving forward?
Tying everything together [for others] – digital scholarship, digital publishing, open access publishing models, copyright, fair use – so that the information is relevant at the point and time needed.