Due to the new regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), library publishers are responsible for making their publications—both the content and their platforms—accessible. This roundtable discussion will have representatives from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Penn State University, and University of Minnesota discuss the unique challenges of creating accessible content. These challenges include working with different publishing platforms, publication types, and accessibility tools; applying best practices and creating workflows; and working with publication outputs, namely PDFs. Panelists will also discuss how changes in publishing and accessibility technologies have changed their approaches to remediation work (e.g., updates to screen readers) as well as specific remediation challenges, like writing and placing long descriptions for complex images and tagging tables. This presentation will address best practices and challenges creating accessible content, from the source file or platform export to the final tagged PDF. Panelists will also discuss the unique needs and use cases of scholarly publications and their experiences communicating those needs to their universities.
Academic journals are foundational infrastructure for emerging scholarly fields, yet launching and sustaining one within a library publishing context presents unique operational, staffing, and governance challenges. This session presents a detailed case study of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE), tracing its evolution from a three-person passion project to a structured, values-guided publishing initiative with a robust editorial and production ecosystem. In this session, we outline the processes and scaffolding that have supported JOERHE’s growth, including: establishing governance roles and workflows; recruiting and training editorial and production staff; defining quality assurance checkpoints; implementing publication platforms and tooling; and crafting documentation for consistency and onboarding. We’ll share practical metrics and milestones, such as editorial turnaround times, role definitions, and staffing transitions, to illustrate how operational choices impact sustainability. Attendees will gain insights into balancing volunteer contributions with structured responsibilities, aligning journal values with operational practices, and leveraging library publishing resources to support emerging scholars. We’ll also discuss how we manage cross-institutional collaboration, inclusive recruitment practices, and capacity building for early-career contributors interested in editorial participation. By focusing on what it takes to manage and grow a library-supported journal, this session offers actionable guidance for academic libraries, library publishing programs, and collaborative publishing initiatives seeking to launch, refine, or scale their own journals. Participants will leave with concrete strategies and templates to help them operationalize editorial standards, build resilient workflows, and support community participation in scholarly publishing.
Working with authors can be a rewarding, complex, and sometimes frustrating process. Expectations can vary, emotions can run high, and communication can be misinterpreted. How can publishing professionals more effectively provide and receive constructive feedback to facilitate meaningful conversations? In 2024, Angela Watters and Corinne Guimont were assigned as peer mentors through the LPC Peer Mentor program and through our conversations we shared our experiences working with complex projects and authors and the strategies we took to navigate these situations. In this workshop, we plan to share some of our strategies within the framework from the books Crucial Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback. We will examine the three types of feedback (appreciation, coaching, and evaluation) and how to both give and receive feedback especially when the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions are strong (as is often the case when working with an author who is sharing work they have been committed to for several years). We will share the general frameworks and ideas presented by the two books and then provide publishing specific scenarios for attendees to discuss in small groups and then share back to the larger group. We will also provide time for attendees to share their own experiences and strategies for navigating complex, yet constructive, conversations with authors.
TEI is a mature technology for encoding scholarly texts, but publishing those texts on the web in a sustainable, maintainable way can be challenging. Projects invest significant effort in encoding content, only to find that rendering and long-term maintenance present their own set of problems. And while XSLT has long been the default tool for TEI transformation, it comes with tradeoffs—browser support is being deprecated, the learning curve is steep, and many projects find themselves maintaining bespoke pipelines that are difficult to update or hand off to new staff. When the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library received NEH funding to modernize the Middle English Text Series (METS), the goal was straightforward: replace an aging Drupal site with something modern and sustainable. What emerged was a modern alternative to XSLT-based rendering: a Rails GraphQL API with a React frontend that harvests TEI documents, normalizes them, and renders them in a responsive web reader. The same TEI files also flow to InDesign for print production, giving Rochester a true single-source publishing pipeline. A year later, the California Digital Library faced a related problem. They had nearly 1,900 UC Press e-books encoded in TEI, but the in-house system used to render them had become difficult to maintain. Standard XSLT transformation tools proved unworkable for their collection. But the parsing engine developed for Rochester offered a path forward. CDL commissioned an adaptation to convert their TEI into static, sustainable HTML, a concrete example of library publishers building on each other’s investments. This panel brings together the library publishers and developers behind both projects to discuss the promises and pain points of TEI-based publishing. We’ll share practical lessons on building modern TEI pipelines and reflect on how grant-funded infrastructure can benefit institutions beyond the original project.
