Week Eight: Resolution
Hannah Hiles | 10 March 2016 | Durham NC
I had the chance to enter my first moment of contention this week. This was actually a bit of carry over from something that had happened last week, which was a tipping point for something that had happened about a week prior to that.
Which, I suppose, is the best place to start.
At Duke, we have something called an Institutional Repository. It isn't Duke specific – many institutions use these. It's a place where the university and its many departments can upload all kinds of files which are then accessible on a global level. While reading through our department's own files, I noticed something – very few of our uploaded files were PDFs. Most, instead, were Microsoft Word documents.
I noticed the issue largely because I use a Chromebook, and am a Linux user. In my own personal document creation, I try and provide documents that are accessible from any user on any platform – something which PDFs satisfy.
I brought the issue up to my supervisor, and she agreed – documents in the IR should be PDFs. But once the conversation went beyond the two of us, we hit snags. Staff members were using the IR to pull documents and edit them, or to take out tables and statistics. They had a hard time doing that with PDFs, and wanted to keep those documents as .docs.
This all came to the aforementioned contention last week when, during our departmental meeting, I was on one side of the proverbial table and much of the rest of the department was on the other – I felt very strongly that files in the IR should be PDFs. The rest of the department, not so much.
For the next week, I hunkered down. I scoured every bit of Duke documentation I could find about the Institutional Repository and how the university and the IR's creators wanted it to be used. I built up an argument about my case, and created three specific points about why I knew that this was such an important issue, all culminating in one very easy sentence:
The Institutional Repository should be for all users, not most users.
Yesterday I presented my argument to my supervisor – it didn't go perfectly. I didn't have my notes in front of me, but I had a firm handle on what I wanted to say.
She agreed. My argument was valid and well-thought out, and she knew that this would be a step in the right direction – a tough, but right step.
It's a big project ahead of me, but I want to be as deep into it as possible. I told her that I couldn't fight for something like this and then leave it to the department to sort out themselves – I want to help with planning how it will happen, and then actually executing that plan.
Open Access is something I have felt strongly about for a while now, and it's something I'm proud to fight for. Seeing this happen feels like something of a victory, and I'm proud to have kept with it.
HRHILES 