Category Archives: E Books

Maximizing UVic Libraries eBooks for Students

eTextbooks for Students (2022-2023)

We are continuing with UVic Libraries pilot project, started in fall 2021, to track the use of library licensed electronic books assigned in courses for the spring 2022-23 academic term. The eTextbooks project supports access and affordability efforts that are important to student success. The website lists the ebooks by title, Course number, term, and Instructors’ last name.

This project complements the Libraries’ advocacy efforts around open education resources (OER) and aligns with its Strategic Directions. Our OER initiative includes an annual offering of OER grants, cross-campus collaborations with Learning Teaching Support & Innovation, the Bookstore, and the Undergraduate Student Union (UVSS). The project gave us the opportunity to scan the university landscape to determine the extent to which the Libraries’ licensed resources were being used at all levels of course work. The Libraries’ expanded ebook collection allows instructors to assign quality course materials, while providing affordable solutions for students.

With the assistance of our Young Canada Works intern, Liam McParland, we identified 280 total titles used in 394 courses during the fall and spring terms. We searched the University Bookstore’s textbook catalog to identify titles adopted by instructors. In adopting the Libraries licensed resources for their courses, we believe instructors saved UVic students a total of $794,469 and in doing so created high impact for students’ access and affordability to a quality education. These savings improve students’ access to affordable, quality education and is closely aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals #4.

CALL TO ACTION:

FACULTY: Lets us know if you are using an open textbook or a UVic Libraries licensed resources for you course this academic year.

STUDENTS: Let us know if you are accessing an open textbook or library licensed resources for your course!

Beyond BPCs – MIT Press: Direct To Open (D2O)

For anyone wishing to publish open access (OA) scholarly monograph, the book processing charges (BPCs) typically raised by publishers can be an obstacle. This blog series will provide an overview of alternative publishing funding models (Subscribe to Open) for open access monographs in which UVic Libraries participate. The range of innovative approaches to sustainable funding of OA books highlighted here all has in common that authors are relieved of paying costly publication fees.

Direct to Open logo

MIT Press is a renowned academic publisher with strong advocacy for publishing Open Access. Beginning in 2022, all new monographs and edited volumes published by MIT Press will be made freely available through the Direct To Open program.

The D2O funding model focuses on libraries, not authors. Participating libraries collectively raise a certain amount to cover the cost of making the books available in open access. Bundled into themed packages, participating institutions can decide which content they would like to support.

By default, all D2O titles are published under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, but authors are free to choose another Creative Commons license. All books are listed on MIT Press’ own e-book platform, MIT Press Direct, in major discovery indexes, and in established OA inventories, like the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). Parallel print editions will be available in bookstores. By distributing each D2O title through multiple channels, they receive the widest possible visibility and dissemination.

UVic Libraries is participating in the program, thanks to which over 30 titles have already been made openly accessible in 2022.

If you have any questions related to the program, please contact the Office of Scholarly Communication.

Maximizing UVic Libraries eBooks for Students

eTextbooks for Students (2021-2022)

Today we’d like to share a story about UVic Libraries pilot project to track the use of library licensed electronic books assigned in courses for fall 2021 and spring 2022 terms. This project was modeled after a similar program developed at Florida State University, Arizona State University, Penn State University, and other libraries. The eTextbooks project supports access and affordability efforts that are important to student success. The new “eTextbooks for Students” website lists the ebooks by title, Course number, term, and Instructors’ last name.

A selection of ebook titles by course number, title and instructor

Sample set of required ebooks for courses (by terms, course, and instructor) available through UVic Libraries.

In conducting the project we identified 327 total titles used in 270 courses during the fall and spring terms. We searched the University Bookstore’s textbook catalog and titles adopted through the Libraries Course Reserves service to identify titles adopted by instructors. In adopting the Libraries licensed resources for their courses, we believe instructors saved UVic students a total of $625,521.91 and in doing so created high impact for students’ access and affordability to a quality education.

Challenges

We were not able to gather together all library licensed ebook titles adopted by instructors who may have posted a link through Brightspace, the university’s course management system, in course outlines, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no one place where all this data is gathered. In addition, we were not able to pull together the title list early enough that students could be informed about their availability. The Bookstore informed students, via the textbook catalogue, when ebook alternative were available via the Libraries ebook collection, but they weren’t able to easily provide direct URLs to each title.

Next Steps

For the next phase of the project, we hope to disseminate information about the project and the resulting cost savings for students. We hope to create momentum, through our marketing efforts, to continue to expand the adoption of the Libraries ebook collection in courses. We also plan to strategize ways in which we can collate a title list to expand the program and get the information to students as early as possible.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank our Young Canada Works Intern, Mary Macleod, for her work on this project.

Open textbook: Global Corruption 4th edition

Created as part of the UNODC’s Anti-Corruption Academic Initiative (ACAD), Global corruption: Its regulation under international conventions, US, UK and Canadian law and practice is a key resource for lawyers, public officials, and business persons of tomorrow on anti-corruption laws and strategies. Gerry Ferguson of the University of Victoria Law Faculty has put together a model set of course materials for international use.

This open textbook has been specifically created to make it easier for professors to offer a law school course on global corruption. It is also designed as a resource tool for all persons working in the anti-corruption field. The book is issued under a creative commons license and can be used for free in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes.

The first chapter sets out the general context of global corruption: its nature and extent, and some views on its historical, social, economic and political dimensions. Each subsequent chapter sets out international standards and requirements in respect to combatting corruption – mainly in the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) and the OECD Bribery of Foreign Officials Convention (OECD Convention). The laws of the United States and United Kingdom are then set out as examples of how those Convention standards and requirements are met in two influential jurisdictions. Finally, the law of Canada is set out. Thus, a professor from Africa, Australia, New Zealand or English speaking countries in Asia and Europe has a nearly complete coursebook – for example, that professor can delete the Canadian sections of this book and insert the law and practices of his or her home country in their place. While primarily directed to a law school course on global corruption, this book will be of interest and use to professors teaching courses on corruption from other academic disciplines and to lawyers and other anti-corruption practitioners.

About the Author

Gerry Ferguson is a University of Victoria Distinguished Professor of Law who specializes in criminal law. He is also a senior associate with the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy in Vancouver. Professor Ferguson is a member of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Anti-Corruption Academic Development Initiative (ACAD) devoted to the creation of anti-corruption academic materials and the teaching of university courses on global corruption. He is co-editor and co-author (with Douglas Johnston) of Asia-Pacific Legal Development (UBC Press, 1998), was a co-leader of the CIDA-funded Canada-Vietnamese Legislative Drafting and Management Program, 1994-95, and a team member of the CIDA-funded Canada-China Procuratoracy Project, 2003-2008, under the direction of the ICCLR. He is the co-author, with Justice Dambrot and Professor Michelle Lawrence, of the annually updated two-volume book, Canadian Criminal Jury Instructions. Professor Ferguson has taught criminal law as a Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Auckland, Monash University, the University of Malaya and the University of Airlangga in Indonesia. He has given guest lectures at various law schools in South Africa, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Europe. Professor Ferguson is a former member of the National Advisory Council of the Law Commission of Canada and an active participant in the Canadian Bar Association, Law Society, and Continuing Legal Education Society activities. His teaching and scholarly interests include transnational and comparative criminal law and procedure, sentencing and mental health law. Professor Ferguson may be contacted at gferguso@uvic.ca.

New Title: Cultivating Feminist Choices

Cultivating Feminist Choices: A FEminiSTSCHRIFT in Honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres edited by Brigetta M. Abel, Nicole Grewling, Beth Ann Muellner, and Helga Thorson is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021 or purchased from the UVic bookstore: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586794

This book is a Festschrift in honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, written by several former graduate students, whom she supervised over her years as professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota, and some of her colleagues and collaborators. The book pays tribute to Joeres’s influence on the German Studies profession as well as to her influence on the contributors’ lives and the feminist choices they have made. Dr. Joeres is known for her feminist scholarly contributions to women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including her book Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (U of Chicago Press, 1998), and her collaborative feminist editing practices as editor of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the Women in German Yearbook.”Together with Angelika Bammer, she edited a volume On the Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) that navigates the terrain of academic writing practices and calls for a focus not only on what scholars write but on how they write it. Because of her critical interventions in the realm of academia in general and feminist studies and German studies, in particular, as well as her influence on the lives of the next generations, this book will be of interest beyond those who know her personally.

Editors

Brigetta (Britt) Abel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Writing at Macalester College (St Paul, MN). She is a lead author and co-project director of Grenzenlos Deutsch, an open-access, collaboratively produced online curriculum for beginning German, which is funded in part through a digital humanities advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nicole Grewling is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Washington College (Chestertown, Maryland), where she has taught language, literature, and culture courses since 2011. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, portrayals of America in German literature, travel literature, and the exotic. Her work focuses particularly on German colonial fantasies and German relationships to their others, especially their love for Native Americans.

Beth Ann Muellner is a Professor of German Studies in the German and Russian Studies Department at the College of Wooster, where she has taught language and culture courses
since 2004. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical writing, photography studies, museum studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature.

Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen peoples. Her
research focuses on a diverse range of topics, including modernist German and Austrian literature and culture, Scandinavian studies, gender studies, history of medicine, foreign language pedagogy, and Holocaust studies.

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia

December 17, 2019

Narratives of Memory, Migration, and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada is the distinct culmination of an intensive cross-cultural academic endeavour that explores how memories of the past are intricately intertwined with present-day realities and future aspirations. The book is based on a range of experiences that stem from a summer field school focusing on landscapes of memory in Hungary, Germany, France, and Canada, in the context of migration and xenophobia. Contributors include Canadian and European academics; directors, researchers, and educators working at various European memorial sites; as well as graduate students from a wide range of disciplines. This cross-disciplinary investigation is based on a symposium as well as a series of concert performances in Europe and Canada highlighting the complex and multi-layered narratives of memory. The ultimate goal of this scholarly undertaking is to understand how agents of memory — including the music we listen to, the (his)stories that we tell, and the political and social actions that we engage in — create narratives of the past that allow us to make sense of ourselves in the present and to critically contest and challenge xenophobic and nationalistic renderings of political possibilities.

Editors

Dr. Helga K. Hallgrímsdóttir is an Associate Professor in Public Administration and a Research Associate in the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are primarily in historical sociology, comparative political sociology with a focus on grassroots mobilization and social movements claimsmaking. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight grant as Principal Investigator on the link between austerity policies, economic downturn, and the rise of nationalism in Europe; and the principal investigator on a Jean Monnet Erasmus+ grant and SSHRC Connections grant on memory politics in Canada and Europe.

Dr. Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the Co- Director of the I-witness Field School, a 4- week course on Holocaust memorialization in Europe, which she ran for the first time in 2011. In addition, she is the co-founder of “The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism and Homophobia through Memory Work” research collective and one of the co-organizers of the group’s first conference at Central European University in Budapest in 2014, followed by a second international conference at the University of Victoria in 2015. Dr. Thorson has received numerous teaching awards including the Faculty of Humanities Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Victoria in 2012; the Excellence in Teaching for Experiential Learning Award at the University of Victoria in 2017; and most recently a 2019 3M National Teaching Award.

Free Download: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/11314

Purchase a Copy: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586503

Technical Writing Essentials – New Open Textbook

Technical Writing Essentials: Introduction to Professional Communications in the Technical Fields by Suzan Last is an open textbook designed to introduce readers to the basics of technical communication: audience and task analysis in workplace contexts, clear and concise communications style, effective document design, teamwork and collaboration, and fundamental research skills.

Read it online here: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/technicalwriting/

Suzan Last has taught in many capacities during her time at UVic, including three years of teaching ESL in Japan and a brief stint teaching high school English. She has been teaching at UVic since 2003, when she was a SSHRC doctoral fellow in the English department. She since discovered that she had a greater passion for teaching than for dissertation-writing, and decided to pursue teaching full time. She has published articles and given conference papers on a wide range of topics, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eliza Haywood, and John Fowles. Her area specialties include Academic and Technical Writing, Curriculum development, Renaissance literature, and postmodern fiction, particularly as it incorporates forms of game and play.

2019 AATE Research Award – Web of Performance

WINNER! 2019 American Alliance for Theatre Education Research Award

This award honors scholars whose research contributes significantly to the field of drama/theatre with or for young people.

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Download the book for free: http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/9426.
Buy a hard copy from the UVic Bookstore: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/draref/9781550586220
Published under a CC BY-NC-SA license

The field of performance studies involves much more than actors on a stage. It is based on the idea that nearly everything we do is related to performing. We’ve called this book The Web of Performance because, like a spider’s web, performance connects at multiple points to everything around it. Once you begin to understand how it all works—how performance is connected to all aspects of our lives.

For Students
If you love being involved in theatre and you’re also searching for opportunities to make a positive difference in your community, this workbook was written for you. You may think that theatre and all the other things you are passionate about represent different directions in your life, but they don’t have to be separate. They can converge in performance studies, a category of theatre based on the idea that nearly everything we do is related to performing. Once you begin to understand how performance is connected to all aspects of our lives, you can use that knowledge to invent, create, and build performance based activities that you can integrate into all the other interests that define who you are and what you want to do in your life.

For Educators
This workbook has been designed and written for students in high school and university who may be interested in how performance works. The chapters cover broad topics drawn from the field of performance studies, an academic field developed out of theatre studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Web of Performance covers key topics in performance studies: Performance as a form of Play, Ritual, Healing, Education, Power, Identity and Everyday Life. Each of these topics works like a web, inviting students to explore in multiple directions, across many threads.

Dr, Prendergast
Dr. Monica Prendergast, Professor of Drama/Theatre Education, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Victoria. Her research interests are varied and include drama-based curriculum and pedagogy, drama/theatre in community contexts, and arts-based qualitative research methods. Dr. Prendergast’s books include Applied Theatre and Applied Drama (both with Juliana Saxton), Teaching Spectatorship, Poetic Inquiry, Staging the Not-yet, Drama, Theatre and Performance Education in Canada and Poetic Inquiry II. Her CV includes over 50 peer reviewed journal contributions, numerous chapters, book reviews and professional contributions. Monica also reviews theatre for CBC Radio Canada and writes a column on theatre for Focus Magazine.

Dr. Will Weigler
Dr. Will Weigler is an award-winning theatre director, playwright and producer based in Victoria, British Columbia. He often works in collaboration with communities to co-create plays about the issues that matter to them. He received training in physical theatre, circus arts, and character mask at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts; Dell ‘Arte International; Odin Teatret; and Jared Sakren, among others. Will is a graduate of both the National Theatre Institute in the US, and Oberlin College. He holds a PhD in Applied Theatre from the University of Victoria. Will is also the author of several books on theatre, including The Alchemy of Astonishment: Engaging the Power of Theatre (University of Victoria, 2016); Strategies for Playbuilding:Helping Groups Translate Issues into Theatre (Heinemann, 2001); From the Heart: How 100 Canadians Createdan Unconventional Theatre Performance aboutReconciliation (VIDEA, 2015); Laughing Allowed! —A How-to Guide for Making a Physical Comedy Show toBuild Neighbourhood Resilience [co-author] (Building Resilient Neighbourhoods, 2016); and, Web of Performance: An Ensemble Workbook [co-editor/co-author] (University of Victoria, 2018).