Day/time: May 8, 2025, 2:45 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. EDT
Title: Enhancing Discoverability of OER: Promoting Collaborative Repository Workflows
Presenters:
- Xiao Zeng (she/her), Open Publishing Librarian, University Libraries, University of Houston
- Kate McNally Carter (she/her), Open Education Librarian, University of Houston
- Ariana Santiago (she/her), Head of Open Education Services, University of Houston
Description: Depositing open educational resources (OER) in repositories is essential for promoting the discovery of course materials with the broader educational community. At the University of Houston, we have developed a workflow that formalizes our process for depositing OER into our institutional repository, ensuring our materials are archived consistently and discoverable by our community. However, taking this a step further by depositing materials in major OER repositories and referatories—where many open education advocates are actually looking for OER materials—has been an ongoing objective for us. The purpose of this presentation is to share our workflow for depositing materials in the institutional repository, and to discuss challenges and best practices for depositing materials in various OER repositories and referatories. Specifically, we will address the challenge of ownership in maintaining accurate and current records for our faculty- and student-created materials; should this process be led by the Libraries, the faculty creators themselves, or should this be collaboratively driven by both? We will discuss how this consideration is informing our planned approach for sharing our OER materials.
Title: Leveraging Technology and Bite-Sized Projects to Drive OER Adoption
Presenters:
- Yassin Nacer (he/him), Open Education Librarian, Utah State University
- Kirsten Cox (she/her), Digital Scholarship Librarian, Utah State University
Description: Creating Open Educational Resources can feel like a daunting task for faculty, especially when it comes to developing large-scale resources such as textbooks. To address these concerns, our library developed a targeted workshop for faculty at our university, focusing on two key strategies: leveraging technology to ensure OER are accessible and encouraging the conversion of smaller, already existing resources, such as assignments, lesson plans, and student projects, into OER. These approaches not only make the creation of OER more accessible but also help lower the barriers to entry, fostering broader faculty engagement.
In this session, librarians will explore how to leverage campus technology and develop effective outreach strategies to support the creation of accessible Open Educational Resources (OER). By focusing on small-scale projects, such as assignments, lesson plans, and student-created works, attendees will learn how to encourage faculty to contribute to the growing OER movement, lowering barriers to creation and increasing access to educational materials.
The session will also emphasize the importance of accessibility in OER creation, focusing on how librarians can support faculty in making OER materials usable by all learners, including students with disabilities. By the end of the session, attendees will have actionable strategies for using technology to support OER creation and promoting small-scale OER projects that lower barriers to participation and enhance access to learning materials for diverse student populations.
Title: OA Math Textbook Publication with LaTeX
Presenter: Cale Erwin (he/him), Scholarly Communications Associate, Butler University
Description: This individual presentation provides an overview of aiding in publishing an open-access textbook, Linear Transformations on Vector Spaces that began in 2021 and ended in 2023. The presentation provides an overview of the project and documents the successes and challenges of publishing an open-access mathematics textbook in LaTeX. LaTeX is an open-source typesetting system commonly used to produce scientific and technical documents. LaTeX is widely used in mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering due to its unique capability to present complex mathematical equations, symbols, and notations using a specific markup language. The book’s publication is part of a larger effort by the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) consortium and their publishing platform, PALNI Open Press, to further the mission of expanding open-access resources for affiliated institution’s faculty. Because of this unique relationship between PALNI, this presentation also touches on the importance of the librarian’s role in facilitating collaborative academic publishing. Furthermore, librarians and professional staff act as project managers, aiding authors by managing workflows and ensuring compliance with accessibility standards to navigate copyright considerations and dissemination strategies. In this role, the librarian becomes central in coordinating the technical and administrative dimensions of the publication process.