[2] The session topic emerged from the radically changing availability, beginning in March 2020, of digital and audio versions of previously restricted research materials (textbooks; academic journal articles; texts from academic presses). Amid ongoing discussions of how access orients research, we address pre-and post-pandemic alternative access to research materials and concurrently discuss how these alternative formats can and do alter the researcher’s access to various aspects of the texts.
Although many postsecondary faculty and graduate students requested library materials in different formats for the first time when libraries closed in 2020, some of our panelists were already involved in pre-pandemic accommodation processes, either as provider or user. For some, accessing research materials in alternative formats pre-pandemic was an often frustrating and time-consuming process. The sudden availability of materials and remote options were certainly welcome, but they made clear the shortcomings of postsecondary institutions’ accommodations procedures and digital lending practices. For librarians, shifts to online access made more acute the need for wholesale, online pedagogy training, inventions in the academic knowledge economy to push back against cost- and status-restrictive measures that control digital lending; and to re-envision how to teach research skills to students entering the academy for the first time remotely.
[3] Our session topic relates to recent scholarship in Critical Disability Studies (implementing UDL in online teaching/training; but also the demands of academic work on the body and the eyes in particular); Library and Information Studies; Digital Humanities; Critical Media Studies; and Memory Studies. Specifically, this discussion intervenes in emerging discussions about how re-opening physical library spaces will need to consider the ways physical access reproduces inequities.
This session will consider intersectionality, that is, how some learners and educators might not actually have access to “open access content,” and how some content has historically been made accessible at different frequencies than others. This session is a timely reminder that more equitable practices need to be used in order for academic research to truly “open up.”
[4] The session will be introduced in five-minutes. We will then allot forty minutes for presentations. Two co-presenters will begin by presenting a loosely scripted interview conversation on the session topic. Each of the other speakers will then present. This timing leaves thirty minutes for unstructured discussion.
[Brief description of each presentation] The session will begin with a loosely scripted conversation between two researchers who were already encountering research texts in alternative formats pre-pandemic, Anna Veprinska and Sarah Jensen. Their conversation, titled “Audiobooks, Ability, and Experiential Translation: In Conversation,” will address medium-specific accessibility issues that, while becoming more apparent during library closures, have been understudied. In particular, Veprinska and Jensen speak to the limits of digitization and audiotization by exploring how multimodal, intermedial, and/or poetic texts “resist” easy translations into different formats. These limits can and will continue to shape research. More specifically, Veprinska will speak about the tensions inherent in experiential translation from book to audiobook, poetry’s oral roots and its audiobook scarcity, and (dis)ability in the encounter with audiobooks. Drawing on examples from recent Canadian fiction, Jensen will address intersectionality, intermediality, and un-translatability, arguing that alternative research access reveals and can produce certain excesses and voids. Following this, Associate Librarian Camille Cooper will deliver a presentation, “The Pandemic, Academics, and the (Not-So) New Knowledge Economy,” on how, going forward, we can and should reconsider the resources academics use, produce, and are judged by, paying particular attention to the cost-restrictive practices of controlling digital content. In, “An Academic Library Addresses Needs During Remote Teaching in a Pandemic,” Susie Kopecky will detail the process that a single, mid-sized rural community college library went through to support online teaching during 2020. Illustrating similar processes taking place in libraries around the world during pandemic closures, Kopecky points to two substantial issues: the difficult process of providing a library without a physical space, and the lack of time, resources, and training available to educators suddenly providing online instruction.