Open content and libraries
I was really interested in Tony Hirst’s recent post Open educational Resources and the University Library Website, which raised something which had never occurred to me and I am not sure why. At the end of the Mosaic project one of our key conclusions was “maximise discoverability, put open content where people already look for things” and somehow in writing this, immersed in the web and web 2.0 and thinking of google and flikr I overlooked one of the key places where people already look for things are library sites.
It still seems to me the two biggest barriers to wide-scale uptake of OERs remains 1) licenses and 2) the ability to find useful OERs in the first place.
So I agree with Tony, this is something we have to resolve, and soon.
September 8th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I find your post and the original one by Tony Hirst really interesting.
SOLO http://solo.ouls.ox.ac.uk does go a small step in the right direction as it searches the traditional OPAC and subscription electronic resources but also ORA so reaches some open access material.
If course material is open access, there’s no reason why a library website can’t link to it, but usually the problem is that course material is either on a protected course website or on a VLE, neither of which library staff are likely to have any access to.
Hopefully Cascade may offer a way of linking library to the course material if not the other way round. There is a really interesting article in the latest CILIP Update (ie the old LA Record!) about the OU and how they have integrated library resources seamlessly into their course Moodles. unfortunately I can’t put a link here as the online version is accessible to CILIP members only, but I’ll send you a good old-fashioned paper version!