State of New York University at Geneseo
Faculty librarians Brandon West and Michelle Costello (with Kim Hoffman, University of Rochester) have recently published an edited volume with the Association of College and Research Libraries titled Creative Instructional Design: Practical Applications for Librarians. Continue reading “Milne Faculty Librarians, Published”
Open SUNY Textbooks announces the release of its latest project, A Concise Introduction to Logic. Author Craig DeLancey is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Oswego. View and download the text here for free.
The textbook is an “introduction to formal logic suitable for undergraduates taking a general education course in logic or critical thinking, and is accessible and useful to any interested in gaining a basic understanding of logic. This text takes the unique approach of teaching logic through intellectual history; the author uses examples from important and celebrated arguments in philosophy to illustrate logical principles.”
The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic-friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses. We are dedicated to improving student learning outcomes and addressing the affordability of course materials.
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
The pilot launched in 2012, providing an editorial framework and service to authors, students and faculty, and establishing a community of practice among libraries. The first pilot is publishing 15 titles, with a second pilot to follow that will add more textbooks and participating libraries.
Participating libraries in the 2012-2013 pilot include SUNY Geneseo, College at Brockport, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, SUNY Fredonia, Upstate Medical University, and University at Buffalo, with support from other SUNY libraries and SUNY Press. The 2013-2014 pilot will add more titles, and includes new participating libraries; SUNY Oswego, Monroe Community College, and more soon.
In 2013, Milne Library published an essay by SUNY Geneseo Professor Emeritus Eugene Stelzig titled “Bob Dylan’s Career as a Blakean Visionary and Romantic.”
Upon the occasion of Dylan’s being awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, this might well be worth another look. Free PDF and ePub versions are available, and you can buy a print version from Amazon.com.
“Bob Dylan’s Career as a Blakean Visionary and Romantic” was completed in 1976 as an invited contribution to a volume of academic and scholarly essays on Dylan to be published by the Popular Press and edited by Patrick Morrow. After the volume was accepted and the publication contract was signed, the Popular Press reneged on the agreement, apparently because it felt the volume would fall between the cracks: Dylan’s popular fan base would not be interested in a book of academic articles, and academics would not be interested in a pop culture idol. Obviously things have changed considerably in the intervening decades!
This discussion—written almost four decades ago—of the deep affinities between Dylan’s song poetry and the Romantics, especially William Blake, is one of the early “scholarly” as opposed to popular appreciations of Dylan’s art and his oeuvre from his first album up to and including Desire (1976).
According to Stelzig,
“The piece has led a sort of underground life for decades in the wake of Robert Shelton listing it in the bibliography of his biography of Dylan, so I’m delighted that Milne Library is making it available and easily accessible to anyone.”
We previously announced this publication in the Open Access resources via SUNY Open Textbooks.
Please join me in congratulating Amy Guptill on her publication of Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence, the newest Open SUNY Textbook!
Many high school students have mastered writing conventions but still struggle to understand and meet the expectations at the college level. Other students, perhaps out of school for a number of years, are getting reacquainted with academic writing while working to meet college-level challenges. Writing in College demystifies college-level expectations, helping students see the purpose behind the varied writing assignments they face.
Guptill skillfully positions specific and applicable advice about college writing within the larger framework of transitioning to the culture of the academy and college-level expectations. In addition, chapters can be read independently and assigned separately, and each is accompanied by further resources, suggested exercises, and advice from other student writers.
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence
Available as ebook and PDF downloads, as well as online, at: textbooks.opensuny.org/
About the Textbook
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence is designed for students who have largely mastered the conventions of high-school level writing and are now rising to meet more the advanced expectations of college. Students will find in Writing in College a warm invitation to think of themselves as full, self-motivated members of the academic community. With concise explanations, clear multi-disciplinary examples and empathy for the challenges of student life, this short textbook both explains the purposes behind college-level writing and offers indispensable advice for organization and expression.
About the Author
Amy Guptill is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, SUNY where she has a joint appointment with the Delta College Program, an alternative interdisciplinary General Education option. Her research focuses on spatial and structural shifts in agriculture and food systems with recent work on innovative agricultural marketing. She teaches courses in the sociology of food, development and globalization, community and social change, social statistics and college writing. In addition to Writing In College: From Competence to Excellence, she is the coauthor of a recent college textbook entitled Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).
Value of Open Access Textbooks
The author is thrilled to offer this book as an open textbook. The cost of commercial textbooks is an urgent and growing problem, and all students should have easy access to advice about how to get the most out of the hundreds of pages of writing they’ll do over the course of a four-year degree.
Licensed for reuse and remix, the Open SUNY Textbooks are a valuable addition to the open access textbook community. Freely available, the open access content is peer reviewed by fellow instructors and scholars for quality and then copy-edited before publication. Open textbooks are just one component of the open educational resources movement (OER) and provide high quality, reusable material for course instructors to create cost savings for students and institutions.
About Open SUNY Textbooks
The SUNY Textbook program is a creative means to improving access to educational materials while fostering a community of resources that spans disciplines and encourages interdisciplinary study. SUNY Libraries and faculty are leading SUNY’s open textbook publishing initiative and have already saved thousands of dollars for SUNY students. Having published 12 free online textbooks, with 14 more planned in the next 18 months, this innovative multi-institutional program is lowering the cost of textbooks for students in New York and beyond.
Open textbooks are available to everyone free of charge. Over 50,000 downloads of Open SUNY Textbooks occurred between February 1, 2015-December 14, 2015, with visitors and readers from all over the world. For program details, please visit http://textbooks.opensuny.org
It’s official — Allison Brown is Milne library’s new Digital Publishing Services Manager. Allison was the successful candidate in last summer’s nationwide search to fill the newly-created position, bringing with her a proven track record of working with authors, navigating the publishing landscape, and producing a variety of publications.
Before you scratch your head too vigorously, wondering “But hasn’t Allison been here, doing that, long before this past summer?” — yes, she had been functioning as the digital publishing coordinator here in a temporary capacity for several years, and was instrumental in helping Milne build its publishing services from the ground up. The early projects, going back to 2012, include the Genesee Valley Historical Reprints Series (33 titles); Stuart Symington’s memoir, Tagging Along; and the first Proceedings of GREAT Day.
Since then, Allison has continued to produce more from Milne’s “press,” working closely with student groups, faculty, and emeriti at Geneseo and throughout SUNY. Among the current and ongoing projects she’s involved in is Open SUNY Textbooks, for which she is project manager — working closely with authors and coordinating peer review, editing, and 
publishing. She also continues to assist with production of the Proceedings of GREAT Day as well as advise for and coordinate publication of Gandy Dancer, the Geneseo-based, SUNY-wide student literary magazine edited by SUNY Geneseo students. With Gandy Dancer, Allison works closely with English professor Rachel Hall’s Editing & Production Workshop classes, both in and out of the classroom.
As Digital Publishing Services Manager, Allison manages to offer both publication assistance (production, project management, software training, etc.) to authors and experiential learning to the interns with whom she regularly works. She expects both areas to grow as more authors explore alternative publishing options, including open access (OA) publications and digital projects, and more students seek help with producing and managing their publications.
Allison earned a B.A. in English from Houghton College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston. Prior to coming to Milne Library, she worked at Boston College’s library as a circulation desk assistant. Allison is an avid consumer of audio books since, she says, she seems to spend a lot of time in her car (much of it driving between her home in Rochester and work in Geneseo), and listening is a good way to use that time.
You can find Allison in her office (Milne 108) on the Library’s lower level, or contact her at [email protected] or 585-245-6020.
The English Department and Milne Library are proud to host a reading by Eugene Stelzig, a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo. Stelzig will be reading from his new poetry collection, Assorted Selfscriptings, next Tuesday, November 3rd, at 4:15pm in Milne Library.
Stelzig has taught at Geneseo since 1972, and has published 5 books and many articles, as well as one other volume of poetry, Fool’s Gold. His book, Henry Crabb Robinson in Germany, received the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize for the year’s best book in Romanticism studies. In 2013, Stelzig published a short study on Bob Dylan with Milne Library
Throughout his academic career, Stelzig has been a lifelong poet. This volume, also published by Milne Library, spans two decades of reflective writing, chronicling the poet’s journeys and observations from Cambridge Massachusetts, to Cambridge University in the UK, to country life in Western New York.
Among many praises from colleagues and readers, Stephen Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at University of Nebraska, Lincoln writes of Assorted Selfscriptings, “A record of warmth and wisdom, informed by sly wit, passionate compassion, and a sure ear for the music of language and the voice of the spirit—this is the poetry of Eugene Stelzig”
Other publications by Milne Library most recently have included a 2nd edition of Christopher Leary’s A Friendly Introduction to Mathematical Logic. Milne Library will also be hosting a celebration of Geneseo faculty, student and staff authors to highlight and celebrate all publications from the past year. The Geneseo Author’s celebration will take place in Milne 213 at 4pm on Wednesday, November 18. Faculty, students, and staff are encouraged to share news of any article or book published in the last 12 months, scholarly or not, as well as major digital projects–email Sue Ann Brainard at [email protected] or contact any of the librarians at Milne with citation information to contribute to the impressive list of Geneseo publications.
~ Allison Brown, author.
Instruction in Functional Assessment by Marcie Desrochers and Moira Fallon is the latest publication of Open SUNY Textbooks. Open textbooks help reduce the cost of textbooks and higher education, and Open SUNY Textbooks is an innovative program led by SUNY Libraries and Faculty.
Instruction in Functional Assessment provides students and instructors a foundational understanding of functional assessment procedures. This text includes case studies, role-plays, and assignments to support hands-on application of the material, and resources for instructors in evaluating students’ performance. Available open & free on opensuny.org as an interactive PDF and EPUB ebook.
Dr. Marcie Desrochers is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. Desrochers has conducted research on teaching functional assessment and evaluating the effectiveness of a computer simulation program called Simulations in Developmental Disabilities. She also has extensive experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and supervising students and practitioners in the field.
Dr. Moira Fallon is a Professor in the Department of Education and Human Development at The College at Brockport, State University of New York and has over thirty years of experience in the field of special education in public schools. She holds certifications from several states in learning disabilities, behavior disabilities, early intervention, and assistive technology. Dr. Fallon has published widely in issues of inclusion and advocacy for individuals with disabilities, and has been a leader in developing learning communities, promoting school leaders for continuous improvement, and identifying research-based, supportive resources for improving professional skills.
Milne Library is proud to support this new Open Textbook! Be sure to check out the list of forthcoming titles scheduled for publication in 2015. Students, ask your professor if they will consider adopting an open textbook!
Many other organizations are also developing open textbooks. If your subject area is not covered in the Open SUNY Textbooks catalog, check out:
Come celebrate the publication of Gandy Dancer, Volume 2, Issue 1 with a brunch buffet and readings by contributors. Print copies, cool T-shirts, and mugs will be available for $10-12.
Thursday, December 12th
10 am-noon
Harding Lounge (Welles 111)
Gandy Dancer is the SUNY-wide online literary journal edited by students in English 288/Editing and Production Workshop. Our new issue includes work from Binghamton, Geneseo, Old Westbury, Oneonta, New Paltz, Potsdam and Stony Brook.
For more information, check us out at gandydancer.org or contact Rachel Hall, faculty advisor at [email protected]
Birth of an Online Literary Journal
by Paul Schacht
In Walden, nineteenth-century American author, philosopher, and activist Henry David Thoreau wrote that he went to the woods because he wished to “live deliberately.” In the same work, he also wrote that “Books must be read as deliberately as they were written.”
Digital Thoreau is a joint initiative of SUNY Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project aimed at promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau in ways that illuminate his creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his work.
The projects that comprise the initiative are open in a variety of ways.
Digital Thoreau’s main scholarly project is a “fluid text” edition of Walden. Thoreau revised the manuscript of Walden seven times between 1846, when he began working on it while still living at the pond, and 1854, when the first edition was published. Our fluid text Walden makes it possible for readers to follow the manuscript revisions across the seven versions, comparing any version with any other and with the Princeton University Press edition of the finished work.
The project would not have been possible without the cooperation of Thoreau scholar Ronald E. Clapper, who freely shared with us his 1967 dissertation identifying all the manuscript variants. Nor could it have happened without the Versioning Machine: the open-source platform for displaying text-versions that we’ve adopted to display the variants on-screen.
In turn, we’re openly sharing the XML-TEI code that’s the back end of that Versioning Machine display — code written right here at SUNY Geneseo by Milne Library faculty and staff. Other digital humanists have already downloaded the code to see how the variants display on another versioning platform, Juxta.
Walden: A Fluid Text Edition also incorporates the scholarly notes that SUNY Distinguished Professor and former SUNY Geneseo English department member Walter Harding wrote for his Walden: An Annotated Edition (1995). This addition was made possible because the notes were freely shared with us by the Harding family.
Another of our projects at Digital Thoreau, funded by a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant, is a text of Walden designed to invite conversation both in the text’s margins and in discussion forums. Readers can participate in this conversation individually or in groups. The Readers’ Thoreau brings together two open-source plugins from the open-source blogging platform WordPress — Commons In A Box and CommentPress — to create a “social reading” experience that has the fundamental features of a social network. Readers can comment on any paragraph of Walden, add labels to comments, search other readers’ comments by label, follow the comment activity of friends in the network, join forums, and continue conversations that begin inside the text in other ways. They can filter comments so that they only see the ones that interest them. Two or more groups can decide to read Walden with each other. They can “like” the comments they find most valuable and recommend comments to friends.
We think of The Readers’ Thoreau as a tool for reading deliberately by reading deliberatively. You could also think of it as space for open conversation about one of literature’s greatest works.
Open access is the means by which Digital Thoreau’s projects have come into being; it’s also the end they serve.
Or, A Story With a Happy EndingStarting a literary journal at Geneseo had proved difficult for a number of reasons, foremost the cost of producing an attractive and substantive print journal. Another obstacle was maintaining student interest throughout the semester. Students loved the idea of putting together a journal, but with the demands of courses competing for their time and energy, interest invariably flagged, and the many tasks of creating a literary journal were abandoned.
Timing, as they say, is everything. The English department has been, for the last three years, engaged in revising our major to reflect the changes in the discipline. We were rethinking both our notions about what an English major should know and what skills they would need entering a changing workforce. Meanwhile, publishing was undergoing change too. Several of the prestigious literary journals I’d long admired were moving online, while others were upping their online presence with websites and blogs. Some like the Kenyon Review, established by the critic John Crowe Ransom in 1939, for instance, run online editions in addition to their gorgeous print journal. As these journals proliferated, more writers sought online homes for their poems and stories and essays. And for many writers, the benefits of online publication outweighed any perceived stigma.
If I wanted to prepare Geneseo students for careers in publishing, it seemed essential to provide some hands-on experience with the technology they would need to know. Around this time I visited the Creative Writing Program at SUNY Purchase, and noted with envy their student-led journal, Italics Mine. Perfect bound, visually appealing, and full of compelling student writing and art, Italics Mine, is created by students enrolled in a semester-long editing class, an elective within the Creative Writing major. Here was a model that would work at Geneseo and particularly so with our new curriculum in English. I proposed a class, an editing and production workshop, with the intention of starting an online literary journal called Gandy Dancer.
But how was I to do this? Me, who still hand writes her first drafts, who continues to call this blog post an article? Enter, Joe Easterly, or as the founding editors of Gandy Dancer fondly called him, Library Joe. In numerous meetings in and outside of class, Joe listened to what we wanted, asked thoughtful questions about our ideas and suggested various approaches. He taught us how to use OJS and WordPress. He led us through CSS coding and worked to help the students design our journal and our website. This semester, we continue to revise and polish the look and we’ve been thrilled with the work Leah Root and Corey Ha have done to tailor OJS to better suit Gandy Dancer. Without this expertise and support, Gandy Dancer would not exist.
If I was initially dismissive of online publications, the students never shared that bias. They have enthusiastically embraced the medium and are eager to explore the possibilities it provides. One such possibility was our ability to reach readers and writers outside of Geneseo. We decided to make Gandy Dancer a SUNY-wide literary journal, accepting work from the 60+ SUNY campuses, something that OJS makes easy. We’ve received warm support and encouragement from faculty and students at other SUNY campuses and we hope to continue building these connections. Our journal’s name reflects this desire: Gandy dancer is old railroad slang for the workers who tended the tracks, lifting and leveling the railroad ties after a train passed. We like to think we, like the gandy dancers, are helping to take people to new places.
Rachel Hall is a professor of English and the director of the Creative Writing Program at SUNY Geneseo. Believe it or not, her two most recent publications—a short story and an essay–are in online journals. Read them at south85journal.com and soon at lunchticket.org.