Arts & Humanities Council Meeting of June 6, 2019

10:00-11:30am, 303 Doe Library

Facilitator: C. Potts

Minutes: S. Peterson

Attendees: J. Adrián Barragán-Álvarez, L. Cunningham, M. Erviti, F. Ferko, R. Haber, A. Malik, T. Marra, S. Mendoza, S. Reardon, A. Scheel, J. Shepard, V. Shih

Guest: J. Dorner

  1. Announcements

  1. S. Peterson: Library Carpentry workshop will be held at CDL on August 1 & 2. This will be a joint workshop between UC Berkeley and Stanford. More details to come.

  1. C. Potts: Berkeley Languages online exhibit is up to 18 languages. The physical component of the exhibit will be at the FSM Cafe in the fall. A reception will be held in late fall or early spring, so if anyone has any suggestions for speakers, let C. Potts know.

  1. C. Potts: Daily Cal published an article on the new Library Permissions Policy this week.

  1. New reps for CSC, WAG and AHC chair (C. Potts)

Discussion about choosing new representatives for the Chair of the Arts & Humanities Council, as well as for other open council seats since no one has volunteered. A. Scheel and C. Potts will work together to choose a new chair and CSC and WAG council representatives.

  1. Function Council reports

Reports were heard from the following councils:

  1. Public Services Council (S. Mendoza)

  2. Roundtable Update (A. Scheel)

  3. Web Advisory Group (L. Cunningham)

  1. Expertise Group reports

  1. Reports were heard from the following expertise groups:

  2. Data Initiatives expertise group (L. Cunningham)

  3. Scholarly Communication expertise group (S. Reardon)

  4. Teaching and Learning expertise group (L. Cunningham)

  1. Ally tool within bCourses (J. Dorner)

The Ally tool was designed to raise awareness among professors about the accessibility of documents they are uploading to bCourses for their students to use. This is not a tool designed solely for students with disabilities. Ally provides advice on how to remediate problem documents, as well as provide students with downloadable alternative formats. These alt-media formats are not only being accessed by students with disabilities.. Ally has been integrated into bCourses.

Common problems with documents uploaded into bCourses include lack of tagging, headings, and contrast issues. Ally provides a score for each document. The scores on documents are not available to students, only course instructors. Some corrections can be made within Ally, but others require remediation of the original document. Ally will sometimes recommend that an original file (of an article, for example) be acquired from the Library.

Students can choose alternative formats, and the options provided depend on the original file type.

Ally is still a work in progress, so faculty many see messages like "Guidance Coming Soon" when a document is being processed by Ally.

ETS has an outreach program for Ally. It is not up to the Library to remediate documents for faculty.

Please refer faculty members to J. Dorner if they have any questions. More information about Ally can be found here: https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/ally-tool-within-bcourses

  1. Around the table

Members offered brief contributions concerning their recent activities and projects.

Next meeting: August 1, 2019