I am so grateful to be interning as an Open Educational Resource (OER) Assistant at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) library. With the guidance of Jean Amaral BMCC’s Open Knowledge Librarian, I have helped connect BMCC faculty to free and openly accessible educational materials that better and more equitably serve their students, courses, and various teaching styles. My responsibilities as an OER Assistant include developing an OER LibGuide, meeting with faculty interested in OER, and helping facilitate OER workshops for professors committed to redesigning courses that are Zero Textbook Cost for students.

This upcoming Spring and Summer I will be working in CUNY's Office of the University Dean for Libraries and Information Systems in the department of Open Education under the supervision of Megan Wacha (Scholarly Communications Librarian). As a college assistant, I will work to streamline the uploading of academic research to CUNY's institutional repository. My current participation in HarvardX's course on Copyright Law has provided me with theoretical and applicable understandings of how copyright law functions in the U.S. I hope to utilize this knowledge, as an assistant, by sharing these concepts with CUNY professors in order to increase repository deposit rates.

I expect that this internship will introduce me to digital librarianship as it is practiced at a large university—I’ll be collaborating with a lot of technology folks, as well as the head of collection management and of the E-resources department. My main job will be figuring out how to introduce OERs—what it takes to make the switch across a variety of courses, how to negotiate for new resources with publishers, how to get digital licenses. And I look forward to having one foot in the academic world since I’ll be dealing with faculty in multiple departments. My interviewing advice would be to read up on the latest trends and conference proceedings since things in our profession are changing so quickly.

I am the OER Library Assistant at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and I assist with the library's efforts to increase the number of CSI courses taught using Open Educational Resources. This is my first time working in a library; I am excited to learn about the inner workings of an academic library and to contribute to the goal of making education more affordable for students.