A Look Back at 2019, and Forward to 2020

2019 is almost over; we’ll meet 2020 in just a couple of days. The library will be closed tomorrow, Dec. 31, and the day after, Jan. 1, which gives us all a moment to look back on the year.

Here in the library, we saw Open Educational Resources catching fire, not only here at the GC but all over the CUNY system and, indeed, in colleges and universities worldwide. We’re proud to have organized the 2019 Open Pedagogy Fellowships (and will do so again in 2020), in which we were able to support a number of CUNY’s graduate students as they explored teaching with open-access, zero-cost materials. We also hosted our first Open Pedagogy Symposium, “Breaking Open,” in May. That, too, will have a 2020 sequel, with “Towards an Open Future” in April.

We were also thrilled to be able to facilitate the work of Sadie Rain Hope-Gund, who was our Repository Project Curator during the fall semester. She pioneered a project helping CUNY faculty get their work uploaded for international open access on CUNY Academic Works, and has labored to make the CLAGS archive available.

Our Dissertation Research Librarian, Roxanne Shirazi, provides a yearly roundup of the scholarship that engenders CUNY’s newly minted PhDs and master’s degrees. She examined the themes, methods, and fields covered in the dissertations and theses submitted for 2018–19. A new crop will be deposited by January 28th (our fall graduates) and another by April 30, so we can look forward to another peek at CUNY scholarship in the spring.

2019 saw the GC join the academic resource access network SHARES, expanding our students’ and faculty’s ability to use libraries around the world. GC librarians shared their expertise on digital archiving, the work involved in open access, the warning signs of a predatory journal, our electronic resources, and the troubling power of knowledge organization.

Looking forward into the new year, we anticipate the opening of the Center for Digital Scholarship on our concourse level. Here’s to breaking new ground in the new year!

 

PHOTO: Fireworks over Lake Toya by Yolanda Sun, shared under CC0 license via Unsplash

About the Author

Katherine Pradt is the Adjunct Reference and Digital Outreach Librarian at the Graduate Center.