In addition to YouTube Channel access, digital presentations of the Makino Symposium of 11/11/11 have recently been made available online on Columbia’s Open Access repository, Academic Commons. You can search by presenter name or browse by keywords “Makino Symposium.”
Last week, with our Library Director Jim Cheng, I gave an overview of the Makino Collection and the innovative tools we are using to promote the collection as part of the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) annual meetings held in San Diego, California (March 20, 2013). Part of a larger discussion of Open Access in East Asian Libraries, making the Makino Symposium available through YouTube, Academic Commons, and the website offers a good example of ways we can promote our special collections at Columbia. At Starr Library we take the broad view that the content of Open Access is not just written literature and not just the collections themselves. As Peter Suber wrote in his 2012 book Open Access, “In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software – and to different degrees we already do.” (p. 9) In the case of the Makino Collection symposium, the digital content is the video taken of the symposium presentations. So it is this “digital content” that we are putting “online without price or permission barriers” in Suber’s words. Open Access has offered us a way to both preserve digital scholarship and use it to engage patrons in alternate ways in their discovery of our unique collections. So, while we hope to make parts of the Collection itself available in digital format in the future, for now, we hope you can enjoy the digital presentations.
The Powerpoint from the presentation,
Innovative Discovery of Unique Collections – CEAL 2013
(CEAL panel, “Open Access and Discovery in the Academic Universe: Next Steps for East Asian Studies Research and Library Development.”)