OER Discovery Challenge:

Finding OER remains a challenge for faculty and the librarians who support them. While there's ongoing improvement in various OER repository search engines, librarians sending emails to listservs asking "anyone know of OER on this topic?" is still an all too common occurrence.

Gold Standard for Discovery: Library Catalogs and Scholarly Research Databases

Librarians have been connecting people to the resources they need for centuries, and since the 1980's we've been doing it with online library catalogs and research databases. But we haven't applied our expertise to OER yet. What do Library Collections have, that OER doesn't?

• vendor-neutral standardized metadata for search engines to read
• collection development, acquisitions, and cataloging workflows, to gather appropriate resources and catalog them to make them accessible through search engines

Why hasn't the OER world figured this out yet?

So far, the vast majority of library advocates for OER have been reference and instruction librarians, as well as library directors. This is great, and we need them to continue to champion OER creation and adoption; but the open education movement needs technical services and systems librarians to step forward and apply their cataloging and systems administration expertise to streamline access to the rapidly expanding landscape of OER content.

We also need to collaborate with our non-library colleagues, such as Creative Commons, LibreTexts, and other major OER repository administrators to make sure whatever standards we come up with are inter-operable with their search engines.

Estimated Time & Work Commitment:

• 6-12 months
• 4-8 webinars (60min each)
• collaborative metadata experiments using our own systems

Goals:

• unique identifiers/match points for OER search engines
• standardized MARC templates
• controlled vocabulary based on course outcomes
• collection development policy models
• acquisitions workflows
• collaboration with Creative Commons
• collaboration with LibreTexts
• other mission-critical things we haven't thought of yet!

Want to help? Sign up below!

Join librarians Heather White and Holly Wheeler (Mt Hood Community College) and Talea Anderson (Washington State University) and a growing number of OER techies to improve the discoverability of OER!