Thing 17: Sharing Your Work

Fortunately, I had a presentation on hand for this Thing, a workshop on ORCID I’d led earlier this year. But I hadn’t planned on posting it anywhere. (Me? The “old” librarian who doesn’t have the fresh-from-library-school training so valued in my department? Someone would be interested in my work?) Consequently, it needed some touch-ups for accessibility.

I find Adobe annoying, since PDF document elements (blocks of text, images, links) often don’t mark up in proper reading order and fixing that requires much clicking and dragging. The ordering process in PowerPoint offers an easier approach. Of course there’s more to making a slide show accessible, including entering alternative text for images, verifying working links, and adding both descriptive and explanatory metadata to the file properties. Most of this is quick and simple, and so is uploading to SlideShare (a task for this Thing).

It’s trendy to create presentations displaying only images, intended to evoke emotion, and save the content for oral presentation. (In theory, text files are available afterwards via links or by contacting the lead author.) Does alternative text, however, succeed at evoking the desired emotional response from someone using a screen reader?

There’s debate in the library community about which Creative Commons license is best. Some people argue that CC0 is the ideal, a license we should apply whenever possible (although there are some questions as to whether a CC0 license is interpreted as public domain in all countries). Others insist that they don’t want their work exploited for commercial means, and so they apply Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licenses. Another contingent opts for the more controlling Share Alike (SA) license, which dictates which license subsequent users may apply to modified works. I like the argument that a simple Attribution (CC BY) makes your work as available and hence accessible as possible. So here’s my presentation on SlideShare: reuse, revise, and improve it. Don’t forget to give me credit, and let me know what you’ve done – I’m interested in seeing your work.