Tooty Ta: A Dance for All Ages - Tooty Ta, a great ice breaker - YouTube

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Rethinking Institutional Repositories: Innovations in Management, Collections, and Inclusion

Over the past two decades, institutional repositories (IRs) have become commonplace in academic libraries. Library workers have grown accustomed to making the case for why their institution needs an IR, but the more fundamental question of “how” remains: How should libraries use their IRs most effectively to benefit their institutions and communities?

Rethinking Institutional Repositories: Innovations in Management, Collections, and Inclusion aims to expand on existing scholarship around establishing a repository and increasing faculty submissions by highlighting a variety of approaches to administering IRs, increasing the variety of content, and broadening participation.
In three sections:

IR Management
IR Projects
IR for All
Chapters explore examples and plans for your IR including migration; engaging remotely; gray literature; student scholarship; partnering with university presses; creating sustainable historical community partnerships; conducting a baseline diversity, equity, and inclusion assessment; automated accessibility audits; captioning; and promoting non-traditional works.

The ideas, scholarship, and examples in Rethinking Institutional Repositories can inspire and reinvigorate how you engage with the repositories at your institutions.

This title is also available as an open access publication at https://bit.ly/IRs

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Building Accessible Futures: Preparing Institutional Repositories for ADA Title II Compliance | Zenodo

With the April 2026 deadline for Title II ADA compliance approaching, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries’ Digital Libraries and Publishing (DLP) department has been working to address accessibility across its digital ecosystem, including institutional repositories, digital collections, open educational resources (OER), publishing initiatives, and electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

This lightning talk will focus on how we are approaching accessibility in the context of our institutional repository. We will share strategies for auditing repository content, identifying and prioritizing remediation needs, and embedding accessibility checks into new projects. The presentation will highlight the development of accessibility assessment templates that provide consistent criteria for evaluating repository items and collections, guiding decision-making for future accessibility work.

Ensuring repository accessibility comes with challenges—including legacy content, limited resources, and the need for staff training—but also significant opportunities to improve user experience and advance equity. By adopting a proactive and strategic approach, we aim to not only meet compliance requirements but also build more inclusive and sustainable digital services for all users. by Karen Bjork of VCU.

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2025 Core Forum: The Digital Accessibility Time Machine:...

In response to the Colorado accessibility law that took effect in July 2024, which mandates that state agencies-- including libraries-- ensure their digital content is accessible to users with disabilities, a health sciences library undertook a comprehensive project to bring its institutional repository collections into compliance. The repository is comprised of nearly 7,000 files, none of which were confirmed to be digitally accessible. This presentation will outline the strategic approach the library adopted to take "the time machine” backwards, to assess, remediate, and ensure the digital accessibility of the repository’s collections long after their ingestion. Attendees will gain insight into the challenges library staff encountered, including limited remediation expertise and challenging file formats. They will also discover the strategies the library employed, including developing a comprehensive remediation roadmap and evaluating accessibility tools and software, to foster more inclusive and accessible digital collections. by Laura Riley and Lori Micho.

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Repository Content Accessibility Toolkit - Digital Repositories Documentation - Texas Digital Library Wiki

This toolkit is designed to support library staff, leadership, faculty, and other users of DSpace at state-funded institutions in meeting requirements set by the 2024 update by the U.S. Department of Justice to regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It includes guidance on web accessibility laws and standards, definitions and best practices for designing accessible documents in various formats, and talking points for advocacy with library administration and others.

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Applying the Rule to Library Content | ALA Accessibility Resources for Libraries

As a profession, librarians have been forward-thinking about providing access to information to everyone, including people with disabilities. It will take time to see how the regulation and exceptions apply to library content.

The Department of Justice has suggested first steps towards developing an accessibility plan, which may need to be slightly modified for libraries. Libraries can use the exceptions as a framework to prioritize the accessibility of current resources that are most widely and consistently used.

Some libraries are approaching prioritization in teams with their institution’s legal and ADA experts, as well as experts in e-resources, IT, and digital collections. Such a group can begin by creating an inventory of the categories of content your library makes available online. For instance, your library may host some or all of the following categories of content:

Third party licensed e-resources, e.g. scholarly journals, databases.
Institutional repositories, which host faculty scholarship, student work, etc.
Legacy digitized content, e.g. scans of newspapers in a historical newspaper database.
Special collections, e.g. digitized content from archival collections.
Virtual services, e.g. online chat, virtual reference/consultation.
Digital archives, e.g. an oral history collection in ContentDM

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How to Build an Accessibility Remediation Plan From an Audit Report | Accessible.org

An accessibility remediation plan is a structured document that turns audit findings into assigned, prioritized, and time-bound work. It maps every identified issue to a responsible team member, a WCAG success criterion, and a target resolution date. Without one, audit reports lose freshness and issues persist.

The plan itself does not need to be complex. It needs to be specific enough that a developer can open it, find their next task, and understand the expected outcome.

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SPARC Statement on GAO Report GAO-26-107738: Federal Research Publishing Costs May 2026 - SPARC

The federal government has one obligation in public access policy: ensure that taxpayers can access the results of the research they paid for. The government does not have an obligation to promote policies that ensure commercial publishers maintain a specific business model in the process. This report conflates public access with pay-to-publish, treating the current commercial publisher business model as an unchangeable feature of scholarly communication rather than what it is: one optional business arrangement among many alternatives.

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May 2026: Federal Research: Agencies Should Better Manage Anticipated Publishing Cost Increases Amid Shift to Public Access | U.S. GAO

In 2022 The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directed federal agencies to make research results freely accessible to the public immediately when published. In response, seven of the nine agencies GAO reviewed issued updated plans or policies. The Department of Transportation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were still drafting updated plans and policies at the time of our review. Five agencies’ plans or policies fully met OSTP’s guidance. The National Science Foundation’s and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plans did not fully address OSTP’s guidance for reuse rights. These rights describe how others can share, modify, or use the research. Better alignment with OSTP’s guidance could help ensure this research can be built upon by others.

Amid the federal shift to public access, publishers are changing their business models to remain viable without subscription revenue and will require authors to pay to have their publications made open access. Agencies allow grant funds to cover these charges. Assuming historical patterns continue, the new policies and publishers' responses may result in significant agency cost growth. This would mean less money for research (see figure). However, only the National Institutes of Health has planned to manage these potential costs. Additional analysis could help other agencies better manage costs, which may triple annually.

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"Journal Evaluation Workflow" by Karen Burton

This workflow document will walk you through the process of evaluating if a journal is predatory.

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