How Open is Open?
As Char Booth has eloquently demonstrated in her blog, many librarians in the Higher Education (HE) sector are now keen supporters of the Open agenda, and sharing knowledge widely with the world. Barriers to knowledge may be economic (the cost of access), geographical (reaching experts) or cultural (‘information privilege’). The argument that education is a public good and should be accessible to all has helped many in HE to challenge these barriers, and find new ways to overcome them.
Special Collections: barriers and bridges
In the case of Special Collections, often all of these barriers are increased, due to the rarity of the material, the fact that it is physical (so is confined to a particular place) and surrounded by a set of cultural expectations which might discourage people from trying to access it. However, Special Collections can also be an easy ‘way in’ for those beyond the University community: many are interested in its treasures, and the interesting stories the collections can tell. The affordances of digital content (low cost, vast storage, the ability to easily replicate and distribute) have opened up these previously hidden treasures.
The University of Manchester’s Special Collections blog is a good example of apparently open techniques used to share knowledge beyond the traditional scholarly audience, which might otherwise be restricted to researchers and students who can access the physical materials. Using a Wordpress site, the blog is on a stable platform and accessible to anyone with an internet connection and the ability to read English, or to translate it. Its contents are surfaced through search engines such as Google, and frequently link to the University of Manchester Collections site, where high resolution images of Special Collections objects are available under Creative Commons licences for (re)use.
Is it Open?
Most contributors to the blog are members of staff who work with the collections, but some researchers contribute short pieces, often aimed at public audiences, to inform and engage about aspects of the collection. The blog offers the opportunity to reach an interested community beyond the relatively elite University environment, both promoting the collections and those researchers who contribute. The blog supports many of Martin Weller’s advantages of open, with the corporate nature of the blog minimising many of the disadvantages (monitoring, loss of private space and the potential exposure the aggressive behaviour).
However, Weller has also noted that since 2011, people often use the term ‘open’ to mean free or online access to content. Broader uses of ‘open’, for example reuse and remixing (for example to create online text books), have been downplayed to focus on areas such as Open Access publishing. The Special Collections blog similarly tends to offer access to content, but the majority of this content comes from non-specialists, many of whom are not actively researching in their field. While this approach offers engaging and interesting material, there would also be significant benefit in encouraging more active researchers to share their discoveries to reach wider a wide audience through the blog. At present, the blog tends to act as a marketing tool, highlighting interesting areas on which research could be carried out, rather than seeking to expand knowledge and build on research.
Remix, reuse and comments
It is often hard to tell whether these blog posts are currently remixed or reused. There is, for example, little evidence that this content is included in teaching material. One reason for this may be the fact that the blog sits outside traditional scholarly conversation: isn’t peer reviewed. However, the blog has the potential to instigate informed debate: through conversations around these posts, which tend to receive few comments. If readers could develop a dialog with contributors to the blog, it might enable more posts linked to readers’ interests, or their own research. Further, researchers could offer live chat or debates through social media platforms, such as Twitter, or link in with established hashtags such as #LTHEchat.
This could support open teaching and social learning, or simply enable discussions between readers and contributors. Such discussions could lead to the unexpected outcomes considered by Weller, or the interdisciplinary work which Jade Pickering describes. The blog could be used to quickly share and discuss research in its early stages, and still support a traditional publication model at a later stage, if the researcher prefers this route.
Research has shown that even when publishing platforms include functionality to add comments to peer reviewed articles, researchers rarely engage in discussion in this way. However social media platforms, such as Twitter, are being increasingly used by researchers, professionals and others to discuss aspects of learning, research and discovery. Rather than expecting discussions around blog posts to happen purely through the Wordpress site, Special Collections’ other social media platforms could be used to encourage two-way communication and engagement between interested parties with differing expertise. This would put the debate, and the learning out in the open. In addition, use of social media would mean researchers could harness analytics tools to further understand their readers’ interests and needs, and adapt or promote their work accordingly.
The offer of Open
As researchers are increasingly encouraged to provide open access to their work, the Special Collections blog can offer academic researchers both a platform and an audience. Some researchers might dismiss Jenny Kennedy’s approach of publishing short, engaging summaries of research (with links to the full, open access article) as too time consuming and carrying risks like those outlined by Weller. But posting this content to the Special Collections blog would minimise these risks (the blog is managed by the Special Collections team; researchers need not be always ‘on’ to receive comments and updates). Linking the Special Collections blog with other social media platforms would support even wider access to research and the opportunity for further discussion and debate.
Using a blog to promote Special Collections is an excellent first step to supporting the open agenda in HE and research more broadly. If other Special Collections social media platforms can be harnessed more fully to support engagement, then this could broaden the definition of openness beyond simply being available for free online. If researchers use the Special Collections blog as part of their own foray into openness, then the blog can become a window into the world of open, enabling access and engagement with materials and knowledge which might otherwise be locked away behind closed doors.
