1. What do academic libraries have to do with
Open Educational Resources?
Theme: Long term sustainability of open education projects
Open Ed 2010
Barcelona, November 2-4 2010
R. John Robertson
JISC CETIS, Centre for Academic Practice and
Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde
robert.robertson@strath.ac.uk

2. Outline
 Introduction
 Context
 A role for libraries
 Survey results
 Reflections
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3. JISC CETIS
 JISC CETIS is one of three JISC
Innovation Support Centres (ISC),
supporting the sector through:
 participating in standards bodies,
 providing community forums for
sharing experiences in using
particular technologies and
standards
 providing specific support for
JISC funded development
programmes such as the
UKOER programme.

4. Background and context: UKOER
Programmes
 The Open Educational Resources Programme
is a collaboration between the JISC and the
Higher Education Academy in the UK.
 The Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE) provided an initial £5.7 million
of funding, for a pilot programme (April 2009 to
March 2010) and a subsequent £5 million of
funding (August 2010- August 2011) for a
follow-up programme both of which explore how
to expand the open availability and use of free,
high quality online educational resources.

5. Open Education, OERs, and
‘institutions’ - context
 Open education and OERs are not the
same thing; mostly I’ll be talking about
issues around OERs
 ‘Institutions’ will play a vital role in Open Ed
and OER .
 If nothing else they provide jobs to people
with expertise and experience who may be
able to involved in Open Education
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6. embedding, sustaining, and scaling
 Project funding is nice but it doesn’t last
 So ‘what’s next?’
 How do we embed, sustain, and scale?
 Wider discussion but questions around:
 How do we make this part of what we do anyway?
 How can we be efficient?
 Who does this sort of thing already?
 One answer is to consider Open Education
Practices – eg OPAL (http://132.252.53.70/ )
and wider discussions
 Another may be to consider the possible role of
libraries and librarians (among others)
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7. Academic Libraries: possible
connections
 OSS community often discussed as a model for Open
Ed and OER release
 What if we consider models around Open Access? like
OSS there are some natural links, perhaps closer links
given OSS community are developers and OA
community are academics...
 [there are lots of massive questions about the validity
of either as a model, which we’ll elide]
 In the context of my work on UKOER asking the
question about the relevancy of OA led to considering
the role of the library
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8. Academic Libraries: Open Access role
 In OA libraries are highly involved in:
 Advocacy
 Establishing permissions and managing IPR
 Running and supporting software required
 Providing services to faculty and students to
support OA and adding value
 Often, increasingly ties into institutional
research management and may contribute to
raising research profile
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9. Academic Libraries: relevant skills?
 Metadata and resource description
 Information management and resource
dissemination
 Digital or Information literacy (finding and
evaluating OERs)
 Subject-based guides to finding resources
 Managing Intellectual Property Rights and
promoting appropriate open licensing
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10. Academic Libraries: digital literacy –
example
 What do students need to know to find and use
OERs?
 Find it
 Evaluate it
 Understand what they actual need
 Know how to engage with/use it in a way
that will help them
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11. Academic Libraries: digital literacy –
example part 2
 Some of those skills and knowledge fit directly
with ‘traditional’ information literacy courses
which librarians often provide and it would be
possible to easily include OERs as examples in
those classes
 Some of those skills and knowledge fit naturally
with ‘traditional’ study skills providing by other
units on campus
 An opportunity for libraries to collaborate and
embed
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12. Academic Libraries: questions and
pitfalls
 Libraries can be slow to adapt and support new
services or modify existing ones
 OERs are often ephemeral and require a lighter touch
and different forms of access than traditional research
materials [a danger of cataloguing to death]
 Managing OERs is like herding cats, can libraries
afford the time and effort?
 New skills may be required
 OERs require a degree of risk management , not just
risk avoidance – libraries are traditionally risk averse
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13. Academic Libraries and OERs
survey: audience and caveats
 Responses and incompletes
 Audience
 survey of OER initiatives (not libraries as
such)
 but went out more widely
 Design of last question caused some
confusion in responses
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14. Survey respondents: 36
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About 52% librarians, all based in
libraries

15. Academic Libraries and OERs survey
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16. Academic Libraries and OERs survey
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17. Academic Libraries and OERs survey
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18. Academic Libraries and OERs survey
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19. Academic Libraries and OERs survey
 Infancy on involvement
 More involvement in release than use.
 Spectrum of types of activity being carried out
 data here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AuN3UUVNPUJ1dE
dkY0k0dU9kRG9PMHpLYTBsUGtoRnc&hl=en#gid=0
 UKOER experience. 8 responses 50/50 but noticed
institutional vs subject centre projects
 Too soon to tell which has thus far been sustainable, but...
 Very positive comments, but need to consider more
than libraries
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20. What’s next?
 Following up with expressions of interest in this work
 Thinking through a wider follow up survey of librarians
 Trying to identify more closely the challenges and
opportunities afforded by library involvement
 Identify other possible collaborations
 Ongoing support for UKOER phase 2
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21. Further Information
 http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/oers-and-libraries/
 http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk//topic/oer
 http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Educational_Content_OER
 Belliston, C. Jeffrey. Open Educational
Resources: Creating the instruction commons
C&RL News, May 2009 Vol. 70, No. 5
http://tinyurl.com/yhoezak