Throughout the first five weeks of the term, we worked on creating an educational video about Open Access, which would help inform the Carleton community about resources available through the college. Before this project, I had no background knowledge about Open Access, so I spent the majority of my initial work hours learning more about this subject through research and conversations with my supervisors. One concept that I found incredibly pertinent within my research was actually related to this year’s theme for International Open Access Week: “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion”. Although Carleton has access to recent research and numerous publications, this is not the case for everyone, and without the support of a private liberal arts institution, it would be incredibly difficult and costly to find these materials. Scholarly research should be available to everyone and organizations like SPARC serve as an educational resource about the benefits of Open Access.
Even though the research aspect of this project was incredibly beneficial, my favorite part of this project was creating the video. My section of the video focused on introducing and defining open access. Since I had previous experience with video editing, I decided to learn how to use a new animation program called Doodly, which is a drag-and-drop animation program for creating videos that appear to be recorded as if someone drew them on a whiteboard. Once I finished editing the introduction, I combined it with Owen’s section of the video, resulting in our final product! I’m so happy I had the opportunity to learn more about Open Access and hope other interns can build off this project in the future!
Clara Posner
