March 28, 2024
Reflections in Transition: Planting the Seeds for Renewal
By Aloma AntaoEducopia is 18 years old—a milestone year. At this milestone, we’re taking a moment to pause in our journey and survey our landscape and the seeds we have planted, i.e., the communities, initiatives, and opportunities that we have nurtured and stewarded for close to two decades. In that time, we have contributed to transformational, systems-level change in the knowledge landscape. One thing has remained constant: organizational health and organizational learning are inseparable.
BitCurator Consortium is Fusing Technical Concerns with Broader Field of Born-Digital Archiving
The BitCurator Consortium initially formed in 2014 around an Open Source Software environment that supports the acquisition and initial curation of born-digital collections in libraries, archives, and museums. It has grown into a burgeoning community of practice that fuses these ...
Building Community and Capacity in the Software Preservation Network
In January 2019, the Software Preservation Network (SPN) launched a two-year seed funded effort to secure SPN as a sustainable, community-owned organization. As part of this process, institutions were asked to invest—not just financially, but also in a series of ...
Making Community Spaces Safer: Articulating and Living Our Values
Over the course of 2020-2021, members of the Educopia staff will be contributing blog posts to the “Making Community Spaces Safer” series. Each post will explore one of our organizational values and describe our efforts to live into that value, including ...
Educopia partners with Curtin University-led alliance to increase the impact of university-based research
A new alliance of researchers led by Curtin University in partnership with Educopia Institute will work together to improve the way research is shared, charting new pathways for the future of universities around the world. Fresh strategies to reform the ...
Next Generation Library Publishing partnership awarded $2.2M from Arcadia to improve scholarly publishing infrastructures
Educopia Institute is pleased to announce an award in the amount of $2,200,000 from Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—in support of the “Next Generation Library Publishing” project. Through this project, Educopia and its partner institutions—California Digital ...
Why Are So Many Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Providers Running a Red Queen’s Race?
A few weeks ago, we at Educopia published the first project deliverable for the “Mapping Scholarly Communication Infrastructure” project, which we’re working on with Middlebury College and TrueBearing Consulting. The deliverable is a report and a set of data visualizations ...
Educopia and LPC awarded IMLS Grant to study journal publishing workflows
We are very excited to report that Educopia Institute, the Library Publishing Coalition, and twelve partner libraries (Atlanta University Center, California Digital Library, Claremont Colleges, Columbia University, Illinois Wesleyan University, Pacific University, University of Alberta, University of Michigan, University of ...
Educopia Releases “Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape – 2019 Census” Report and Data Visualizations
We are pleased to announce a new report released by Educopia Publications: “Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape - 2019 Census.” The paper, authored by Katherine Skinner (Educopia) and edited by David Lewis, Mike Roy, and Melanie Schlosser, is the product ...
Community Transition
Digital preservation is, by definition, a long-term commitment. Libraries, archives, and museums engaging in this crucial work must actively plan to maintain digital assets through decades, centuries, and millennia. As such, these organizations must both anticipate and welcome change. When ...
Community Acceleration
The question of when to tackle formal strategic planning is a tricky one for any community. Strategic plans can be powerful instruments for communities that are ready for them, but at some stages of community development, a labor-intensive planning process ...
Making Community Spaces Safer…
We deserve a better organization. We deserve a better profession. What happened to me and what happens to so many others cannot be allowed to continue. - April Hathcock “ALAMW: What Happened, and What Should Happen Next” All of us ...
Community Validation
After a community has formed and coalesced around a central set of ideas, the next step on the path to maturity is to test the community's validity. In this crucial "validation" stage, communities often need to strike a careful balance ...
Grassroots Formation
In 2014, my colleague Zach Vowell and I proposed a consortial model for long-term access to software and software-dependent data - we called it the “Software Preservation Network” (SPN). A year later, our institutions, California Polytechnic State University and the ...
Community Cultivation, Revisited
I actually tried to stand in the way of Educopia's founding! I’m the first to admit it. A dozen years ago, I was the naysayer. I really didn’t think we could sustain a nonprofit organization centered on the science of ...
Library Publishing Curriculum: Pilot Experiences
The Library Publishing Curriculum has been created in 2018 as part of the "Developing a Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing" project, generously funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In 2018-2019, we are piloting this open, freely available curriculum in ...
Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values: Call for Community Feedback
The digital preservation landscape is one of a multitude of choices that vary widely in terms of purpose, scale, cost, and complexity. Over the past year a group of collaborating organizations united in the commitment to digital preservation have come ...
Celebrating the origins and growth of SouthernSpaces.org
There are few things I've accomplished in my career that I'm as proud of as the work I did to help found SouthernSpaces.org. Today, our roundtable interview about its origins and early growth has been published--it provides a window into ...
Promote Your Collections, Promote Our Collective Histories
We know that our choices as archivists, librarians, and curators matter. The historical record is largely shaped by what we gather, what we provide access to, and whose voices we preserve. In this moment, we want to ignite the power ...
Educopia and UNC-SILS receive IMLS funding to study OSS implementation to improve workflows for born-digital materials
The Educopia Institute and the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) have been awarded a grant worth over $681,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for OSSArcFlow, a project to investigate and support the adoption ...
Educopia’s ETDplus Toolkit is now live!
The IMLS-funded ETDplus Toolkit is an approach to improving student and faculty research output management. Focusing on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) as a mile-marker in a student’s research trajectory, it provides in-time advice to students and faculty about avoiding common ...