Open and Editable: Exploring Library Engagement in OER Adoption, Adaptation and Authoring

 In her article, "Open and Editable: Exploring Library Engagement in Open Educational Resource Adoption, Adaptation and Authoring, author Anita Walz talks about the nature of OER's are and how librarians can adopt and use them for low cost opportunities especially in university and research libraries. Libraries are increasingly asked to do more with less. A common misconception about OER is that since they are free-- they must not be quality materials another is the ability to locate relevant OER's by faculty members. There are many universities including San Jose State, that are using OER's to lower the cost for students buying books.

"Locally, the Virginia Community College System has been very active incentivizing development of free and openly licensed materials for nearly 70 courses. A notable example is Tidewater Community College’s “Z Degree,” which replaces textbooks with OER, resulting in a zero textbook cost degree. While project organizers did not initially partner with the library in development of the Z Degree, this author is pleased to see that the library is now involved, per their detailed OER Research Guide (Walz, 2015)."

 Author Walz delves into why individuals would forego future royalties in order to provide a free service to the public. Listed below are a few examples and rationale.

"A faculty member or teacher employed in an educational institution may choose to openly license and disseminate works for original created works via various repositories or websites. Students and teachers benefit by increased access and ease of making derivatives.

Tesla Motors indicated that they would not enforce their patents for electric car technology in order to spur dissemination and development of electric car technology and production.

The Hewlett Foundation funded the 2001 startup of the MIT OpenCourseWare project, a courseware sharing initiative in line with MIT’s mission “to advance knowledge and educate students (Walz, 2015)."

All of these instances really speak to serving the public through expanded opportunities for learning, business growth and affordability. This was a very inspirational article!! It speaks to the forward thinking and educational desires of company owners, librarians and educators.

Reference:
Walz, A. R. (2015). Open and Editable: Exploring Library Engagement in Open Educational Resource Adoption, Adaptation and Authoring. Virginia Libraries, 61(1), 23-31

Open Source Library Services Platform

Greta Acosta

Breeding, M. (2016, April). EBSCO supports new open source project. American Libraries. Retrieved from: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/04/22/ebsco-kuali-open-source-project/

EBSCO Supports New Open Source Project


The survival and future of libraries begins with such innovative projects as the one featured in this article. The project borrows from the very successful business models of tech industry giants such as Apple. Instead of developing one rigid software, EBSCO will fund a platform where collaborators are given the autonomy and flexibility needed in order to expand and maintain the system.

"Its launch opens a new chapter in the library technology industry—potentially wielding an even greater impact than the latest rounds of mergers and acquisitions."

Linked Data in Library Collections

Betty Decker

Leading to Linking: Introducing Linked Data to Academic Library Digital Collections

Lampert, C. K., & Southwick, S. B. (2013). Leading to linking: Introducing linked data to academic               library digital collections. Journal of Library Metadata, 13(2-3), 230-253.  

            doi:10.1080/19386389.2013.826095

A Guide for Transforming Digital Collections Metadata into Linked Data Using Open Source Technologies.

Southwick, S. B. (2015). A guide for transforming digital collections metadata into linked data using open source technologies. Journal of Library Metadata, 15(1), 1-35. doi:10.1080/19386389.2015.1007009

Summary: These two articles discuss how the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries introduced linked data, the ability to add linked data to a library collection, and how that can be accomplished. The author of Leading to Linked provides a simple history of linked data, noting the many definitions available for linked data. UNLV created a group of library professionals to begin the process. The group used Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Unique Resource Identifiers (URI) to practice on items that they considered adding to the collection. Once the group was comfortable, they created a diagram of steps needed to add a linked data item. It was then time to begin adding the UNLV Digital Collections, which consisted of photos, manuscripts, interviews and other formats of historical perspective. The project of adding these items consisted of five phases. In the second article we are provided with more information on implementing RDF and URI triples that are needed for linked data, and the programs used for this implementation.  

Evaluation: I am very interested in adding open source materials to the library collection as well as other items into my collection. Currently we are adding a collection of Kachina Dolls to a Microsoft Access Database in the hopes that we will eventually be able to create a linked data site for this information. These articles were great. They actually spoke about adding items similar to our Kachina Dolls and creating linked open data that would allow them to be easily searchable. I originally started reading the 2015 article first, but decided to find the 2013 article and start from the beginning. I am glad that I did, as it provided me with a better background of what UNLV was hoping to accomplish. If you are interested in this, you should read the article.