This is Martina Svyantek with my poster, University Policies and the Concept of "Open-access":
Document Collection and Critique.
What you should takeaway is that University documents should be created purposefully,
using Universal Design principles so they can be preserved intentionally.
One barrier to investigating Disability within higher education is the lack of institutional-level
discussion; there is a similar lack of policy documents, which I detail in my work.
My methods broaden disability studies methodology by expanding the definition of "open" with
regards to research.
Going beyond the boundary of direct financial costs, I call to remove other gatekeepers,
some human and some procedural, between researchers and what should be public documents.
The document collection is a retrospective view over a 25 year time span at five-year
intervals using July 1st to July 30th as a year for a search.
At each time point I looked for 13 different types of documents, covering three large categories-
the pink indicating access policies, the blue for general handbooks, and the yellow for
campus experiences.
I'm sharing today three matrix visuals showcasing my VT search results.
In the bottom center of the poster, the first Matrix contains an overall perspective of
the findability of the 78 documents in question.
A solid black square indicates no records mentioning such a document could be found.
A brick pattern indicates that later documents have a start date definitively outside of
the time in question.
Polka dots represent materials that may exist in a physical form that could not be verified,
while no pattern indicates that a digital "something" was found.
In the top right of the poster, the document cohesion matrix sheds light on the format
of the digital materials.
Here, solid black indicates a lack of digital versions.
Polka dots indicates that multiple related materials were scattered, while an unpatterned
blocks indicate that there was a single document that could be found and downloaded for the
item in question.
In the bottom right corner, the document source matrix is where I go to more granular level
to discuss the sources of these digital downloads.
Again, solid black means "no download" and polka dots means a multiplicity of sources.
Single source documents are delineated here using vertical lines for university resources
and unpatterned data points which were found through the random availability via the Internet
Archive.
Again, just by looking for a small sample of university documents that might have been
made over the course of 25 years, I've encountered a digital wall with nearly half of the documents
in question, as well as a lack of intentional preservation.
I look forward to your [questions].