BCcampus Open Textbook Summit 2015
May 29th was a busy day in Vancouver. Bif Naked played the Rickshaw Theatre, the FIFA Women’s Cup Trophy Tour arrived in Vancouver, and the Gastown Women’s TEDx hosted its Fearless event. If this wasn’t enough to quench everyone’s thirst, the Vancouver Craft Beer Week made an early start before its June opening. In other words, it was a day for gender equity, women’s rights, women’s sports, and a deep ethical question of which event would be the most appropriate to attend, in all likelihood with each of them followed by craft beer…
Miraculously, however, the BCcampus Open Textbook Summit soldiered on and even drew in a record number of attendees. MVP and Open Modernisms were prominent in the proceedings, which means its panel was right before lunch when late risers are sure to jump into sessions (and then eat lunch guilt and gluten free). The responses show that beyond BCcampus, the Open Modernisms anthology builder is going to find traction across Western Canada. James Gifford presented a paper co-authored with Stephen Ross and Matt Huculak on the major innovations coming to BC as Open Modernisms prepares to launch its Phase 1 with a custom Islandora build for preparing modernist texts that are in the public domain in Canada. With its “core” and “module” system, Islandora will allow users to upload PDF page images of documents with metadata, OCR them automatically, hand-correct the OCR, and queue it for moderation.
As a first step, this places Open Modernisms at the ready for Fall 2015 modernist anthologies for classroom use across the country. The key, however, is copyright… Read more