Jessie Loyer
Question #3: Please tell me about an Open Education project, textbook, or group that you have been a part of.
When I first saw this question, I thought, “Oh no, I’m not Open Access-y enough for this question.” But then I was thinking a bit more about it [and realized] I have been involved. We have an instance of PressBooks at Mount Royal University. There’s been some great librarians there, Cari Merkley, for example, has been really amazing at championing that from the perspective of student research, from the perspective of “How do we make this more accessible?”, “How do we think about that?” That’s my experience with that kind of particular project that I know a lot of people are familiar with.
But then I was thinking a little bit more and I actually think that two of my longest experiences with all concepts of Open are Indigitization and Wikipedia. Indigitization is a project at the University of British Columbia (UBC), specifically the Xwi7xwa Library. They have an endowment where they provide grants for First Nations in British Columbia that allows them to digitize their own cultural material. They award them the grants and then they bring them in for training. Then they have these kits that can be sent out to the community so people don’t necessarily have to come down to Vancouver. Especially if they’re from a more isolated reserve, they can come down for the training and then they get sent the kits so that they don’t have to be there for weeks on weeks.
I had first heard about this when I worked as a student at the Xwi7xwa Library when I was there. But then they really got going in a big way when I was working at MRU, so I just admired it from afar. I always wanted to bring an instance of that to our province in Alberta but because of the endowment, the restrictions were based on provincial borders. It could only be a First Nation in British Columbia. Two years ago we were able to bring Gerry Lawson who is a trainer with Indigitization. We brought him to the Blackfoot Confederacy offices and we got a number of people from Treaty 7 Nations trained up in how to do this kind of Indigitization. One of the kits is currently on the Blood Reserve at Kainai with Mary Weasel Fat. She’s a librarian at Red Crow Community College and they’re doing some really exciting Indigitization stuff there.
It’s really nice to see that because, for me, that project really gets to the heart of what’s different about the way Indigenous people approach this. It’s not just sort of, “Let’s digitize everything!” “Let’s put it online.” Because so often funding bodies require [putting everything online] when we’re digitizing, they’ll say, “you have to make a copy available or you have to deposit a copy.” But what Indigitization does is it says we’re going to provide the capacity, the technology, and the tools that you might need but you decide what happens with this stuff. If it’s something that can be shared; maybe elders talking about their childhoods or s