See Also:

The UBC School of Library, Archival and Information Studies Student Journal

2015 - Spring


Copyright:

All authors in see also retain full copyright of their material.

All content in See Also is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license.

Dynamite with a SLAISer Beam!

Matthew Murray – thematthewmurray@gmail.com

Matthew is a soon to be graduated library student, a maker, an awarding winning cataloguer, a zinester, a robot enthusiast comic book enthusiast, and editor of the fiction anthology Two Fisted Librarians.

Keywords: OJS, academic publishing, student journals











On November 18th, 2014 on the SLAIS Social Page on Facebook (a group where students discuss assignments, libraries, and other stuff), a simple question was asked: “why dont [sic] we have a SLAIS student journal???”. Simple, sure, but nobody had thought to ask it before. The question was met with an explosion of “likes”, positive comments, and offers of participation. Shared documents filled with ideas and information, discussions were had through mailing lists, and many assignments were procrastinated. Clearly, there was significant interest in this idea.

Meetings were held, proposals written (and rewritten), ideas suggested and debated, and—while enthusiasm may have ebbed and flowed—the idea for a journal that published student work transformed from an idea into a thing that actually existed, with an editorial board, documentation, a name, and even (that crucial aspect) submissions.

Of course, publishing student content was only half of the reason that the journal was started. The other half was learning about the entire academic publishing model in general, and OJS in specific. We learned a lot about the process of publishing a journal: editing, peer reviewing, copyediting, layout, proofreading, and more we are probably forgetting. Plus we created rules and suggestions for every step of the process: how-to manuals, style guides, position descriptions, justifications for using certain file formats… the list goes on and on.

Looking at other student journals (and other OJS journals in general), there are many that feature only one issue (or even none at all!). Our goal in creating the guides and documents was to help ensure that future issues of See Also will be published. Or perhaps we will even inspire other students to start their own journals. In any event, this has been a fantastic experience, and it has been great to work with everyone who was involved with the journal.

Thank you to everyone, from those who clicked “like” on Facebook, to those who worked as editors. Congratulations—we did it!