1. Intention, Tenacity, and a Bit of Serendipity How we’ve grown open on the Canadian prairies
Shannon Lucky & Heather M. Ross
University of Saskatchewan
February 2, 2018

2. University of Saskatchewan
Located in Saskatoon
17,000 undergrads
Medical / Doctoral
University of Saskatchewan – CC-BY-NC-SA

3. OER at USask 4,000 students using open textbooks in 7 colleges
$800,000 saved since 2014 / 2015
Open pedagogy

4. Quick Stories Students gouged by publishers Student cries with relief
Students cheer
What the textbook rep told one of our departments
Student in Karla’s Geology course – would have had to drop class
Noreen and Brooke telling students they were using an open textbook

5. How We’ve Done It Workshops One-on-one consultations
Department Meetings
Funding
Food
Student advocacy

6. “Meet Them Where They’re At”
Have resources
Do your homework
Listen to their needs
Be the textbook rep they want to see

7. Get out and make serendipity possible.
IMAGE USE
KLNMAX – CC-BY-SA

8. How can the library support OER on campus?
Library was a later addition to the group or OER proponents on campus and our support has grown in a grassroots way that mirrors the work Heather already discussed
Multiple ways the library (as an institution) and our individual librarians/library staff support OER on our campus, the following are some of the major areas and related projects we are currently working on, followed by some future areas for growth.

9. Infrastructure Technical and operational
Stability for preservation and access
Integration with how campus community already accesses books, articles, etc.
One of the biggest challenges for OER adoption and sustained use is having the technical and operational infrastructure for storing, managing multiple versions/remixes, preserving, and making materials accessible to students and faculty in a way that makes sense to them, where they already look for information.
This is what the library does! We exist to help connect people to the resource they need and to keep information safe and accessible for the long term.
Bring our expertise in search & discovery, recommending resources, metadata and indexing, digital preservation and data storage, copyright, and user behavior to challenges facing widespread OER adoption.
The library can also leverage the reputation we have as the place to access free resources on campus and as information literacy experts.
Local examples: At the U of S, we have developed technical infrastructure (Islandora, eCommons, archivematica, Drupal, integration with our Primo discovery layer) to preserve and provide access to digital resources. While not specifically designed for the development and promotion of OER, they can be adapted to include OER in various formats with the goal of getting open resources where people are already searching – integrate in with the rest of our collections and support for teaching and learning.

10. Teaching and Learning ancientsportandspectacle.usask.ca/
One specific example is a collection of images created by Dr. Angela Kalinowski from our History department. We worked with her to input an extensive collection of her own photographs into our Islandora DAMS, create metadata to make the collection searchable, and set up a basic website that anyone can access. Dr. Kalinowski uses this online collection as a resource for one of her undergraduate classes and, in the future, she plans to have students contribute their own research to the collection (using the login option for the site).
Typically a substantial amount of work to create an digital project for one professor, by providing access to our technical systems and consultation/training on creating metadata and uploading images we were able to get this resource online in a matter of months. This is something we could make available to any professor with a collection of research images and some students RA time to spare.
Other efforts that involve teaching and learning on campus focus on the social infrastructure the library is a major player in
Subject librarians connect with professors to offer education and help integrating the use of OER in the classroom and as part of their pedagogy.
E.g. DeDe Dawson (Science librarian) recommended an open textbook option to one of our Chemistry profs – he is now using it in his courses and has become an advocate for OER in his college.
ancientsportandspectacle.usask.ca/

11. Publishing Undergraduate Research Journal
Copyright copyright/general- information/open-educational- resources.php
While we do not have a university press or other formal publishing program at our library, we do provide support for online publishing using Open Journal Systems (OJS) to host the U of S Undergraduate Research Journal (listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ)
USURJ us a faculty-reviewed journal that published the original work of U of S undergraduate students
While not strictly OER, the capacity to support open publishing – particularly student research – is an initiative we see as a natural extension to supporting OER and a larger culture of Open on our campus.
Copyright office is located in the library, can provide support for researchers/authors and encourage them to avoid copyright headaches by embracing open publishing. New website launched this week with an entire section for Authors and Creators and information about using OER
Cover art by Mike Tremblay usask.ca/urj ISSN

12. Institutional Repository (IR)
Library provides IR systems and support to host open access articles, preprints, conference presentations, posters, ETDs and other scholarly outputs – major contribution to supporting open research on campus.
Major update coming this year– previously our eCommons repository was limited to ETDs and librarian research but we have been working with campus research services to scale up this service to a campus-wide level to support researchers in all colleges and departments to make their work open and accessible.

13. Future Opportunities
Make open textbooks findable and accessible in the library
Creative Commons licensed library guides & handouts
Support instructors in offering Z-Courses
Adopt and integrate Open Access tools (unpaywall.org)
These are just a start in systematically integrating OER into our library culture, some future opportunities are:
Open textbooks – add to catalogue, host or have links in our discovery systems, have print copies available in the library
Walk the talk in our in-house created resources. Release digital and print resources (handouts) with CC licenses
Development of library guides – open to the public web (academic integrity guide in LibGuides rather than BB) – leading by example
Support the development of Z-Courses though digital course packs, library reserves, recommending open resources to instructors – generally spreading the word about open alternatives to commercial textbooks
Look for systems support for OA resources - oaDOI Unpaywall link resolver tool to link to open version of digital resources – oaDOI.org indexes millions of articles and connects library users to open-access full-text versions over an open API (MIT using it already)
Still in the early days of doing all we can to support OER on our campus and much of the work I have described as been done off the side of our desks and as experiments to support something we believe is beneficial for our community. Scaling up these projects will require more dedicated staff time, specialized training, technical resources and infrastructure developments, but the work we have already done has proven there is a demand on our campus from students and faculty that the library can meaningfully contribute to.

14. Questions Heather M. Ross Shannon Lucky
Education Development Specialist, Digital Pedagogies Gwenna Moss Teaching and Learning Centre
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Shannon Lucky
Information Technology Librarian University Library
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