Open Education Resources: Storing and Accessing Computable Biomedical Knowledge in Libraries

ObjectiveThis article describes how funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) provided resources for state and public libraries to deliver health information to their patrons.MethodsThree IMLS publicly available data collections were used: State Library Administrative Agency Survey data; State Program Report system; and the Awarded Grants Search portal. Data about health related projects from these two administrative data sources for 36 competitive award projects since 2015 and 143 projects supported via the formula-funded Grants to States Program between 2015-2018 (inclusive) were included. Descriptive statistics about projects with a health and wellness focus were presented within the context of others supported by Grants to States.ResultsCompetitive projects supported public libraries’ health resources and built librarians’ skills to facilitate patron access to health information. The Grants to States program supported 143 projects associated with health undertaken by 29 states plus Puerto Rico between 2015 and 2018. The IMLS $14.4 million investment during this period leveraged an additional $5 million from state and local sources to support health information projects in public libraries. Finally, data from the State Library Administrative Agency Survey showed that in addition to projects that relied on IMLS Grants to States funds, 29 state libraries provided program assistance in health literacy to the public libraries in their jurisdictions in 2018.ConclusionsThe findings point to a need to determine whether there are ways to collect additional information via IMLS’s data systems to further support state and public libraries in meeting patron health information needs. The lessons learned in the analyses in this article offer useful food-for-thought about how IMLS might work with our data stakeholders to continue to modify each of these data sources to describe the role of libraries in an increasingly complex information landscape.

IntroductionWorkforce Issues in Library and Information Science Joanne Gard Marshall (bio), Paul Solomon (bio), and Susan Rathbun-Grubb (bio) Beyond buildings, collections, and services, the library and information science (LIS) workforce is key to the success of many aspects of a knowledge economy. LIS professionals partner with educators in the instruction of youth and young adults, support reading and information literacy required for productive participation in society over the life course, enable research and development through access to research findings and translational systems, and promote commerce through Web development and organization and retrieval of information, to name just a few of their service objectives. Whereas librarianship has a long history as a profession, the expanded field of library and information science presents many new opportunities for information professionals to work in non-library settings. Occupational employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2008) estimate that there are 151,170 librarians, 113,510 library technicians, 5,330 archivists, and 3,960 library science post-secondary faculty in the workforce (not including self-employed workers). The American Library Association (2009) estimates the number employed in academic, public, and school libraries at 329,941. Library and information science professionals working outside of libraries are much harder to identify and their numbers tend to be spread among various occupational categories. The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics (2008) reports that there were 6,767 master's degrees in library science conferred by degree-granting institutions in the academic year 2006–7. While the number of degrees has been slowly increasing since the late 1990s, the supply of new graduates does not appear to be adequate for the number of retirements that will take place as the baby boomers leave the workforce. According to Dohm (2000), the impact of the retirement of seventy-six million boomers on U.S. labor supply will be greatest in the decade following 2008. As [End Page 121] shown in table 1, Dohm (2000) presented Bureau of Labor Statistics data that placed librarians seventh on a list of occupations with the highest percentage of workers aged forty-five years and older in 1998, at which time the median age of librarians was forty-seven, compared to age thirty-nine for all twenty-four occupations on the list. Concern continues to be expressed about potential LIS workforce shortages, given the expected baby boomer retirements, and the need for increased recruitment, diversity, succession planning, and leadership development in the profession. Less attention has been paid to retention of LIS professionals at various career stages, although this is another strategy that is worthy of consideration, given the nature of the workforce challenges that lie ahead. Given this concern, it is an ideal time for an issue of Library Trends that begins to take stock of some of the major issues related to the LIS workforce and to lay a foundation for future research and workforce planning at all levels. In 2004, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) initiated the 21st Century Librarian Program, which made workforce research a priority. In the same year, IMLS funded a national study on the Future of Librarians in the Workforce being conducted by Griffiths, et al. (www.libraryworkforce.org). The national study aims to project the supply and demand for librarians and to provide data from a wide variety of surveys of libraries, library employees, employers, career counselors, educators, and other groups. In 2005, IMLS funded another large scale workforce study by Marshall, et al. (www.wilis.unc.edu), which provided an in-depth look at the careers of graduates of the six LIS programs in North Carolina from 1964–2007. A follow-up study known as WILIS 2 is using the recent graduates' portion of the full retrospective career study as a basis for creating an alumni tracking survey that a wide range of LIS programs can potentially use. Other major LIS research studies have also been undertaken by the 8Rs Research Team in Canada (2005) and the Colorado State Library (Steffen, Lance, Russell, & Lietzau, 2004). In 2004, the Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States, also funded by IMLS, was conducted by the Society of...

When librarians at Oklahoma State University (OSU) began creating services to support data intensive research they found plenty of published guidance about doing surveys and outreach to get started. However, they also found that offering the prescribed workshops and consultations didn’t assure that researchers would use them. A Sparks! grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) allowed OSU to try two novel techniques, customer journey mapping and design thinking, to engage researchers and answer the question “What is the role and impact of the library in helping researchers manage their data along the entire project lifecycle?” One of the outcomes of the project was creation of a toolkit that provides a step-by-step project management plan to guide libraries, especially those with limited resources, to prioritize needs and create offerings with the assistance of their user communities. This column intends to discuss this project management framework, with an emphasis on how it was implemented to meet the goals of the IMLS project.

This article describes the design and development of an educational intervention intended to improve information literacy skills based on research with first-year college students. The intervention was developed over the course of a three-year period, during which time grant funding was received from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), supporting the collection of research data on the learning needs of first-year college students who scored below proficient on a standardized information literacy test. A variety of empirical methods including tests, surveys, interviews, and focus groups were used to collect data. The resulting intervention is a modular session that can be used as a stand-alone presentation or incorporated into other information literacy interventions. The design of the intervention stresses three main research goals: orientation to information literacy as a skill set, improved ability to self assess skills, and the acquisition of at least one skill that demonstrates the utility of instruction. At the heart of the intervention is the three-step Analyze, Search, Evaluate (ASE) process model of information literacy, which is easy to remember, easy to adapt to multiple instructional situations, and can provide a foundation for building additional information literacy skills.

Digital collections of primary source materials have potential to change how citizen historians and scholars research and engage with local history. The problem at the heart of this study is how to evaluate local history coverage, particularly among large-scale, distributed collections and aggregations. As part of an effort to holistically evaluate one such national aggregation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content (DCC), we conducted a national survey of reference service providers at academic and public libraries throughout the United States. In this paper, we report the results of this survey that appear relevant to local history and collection evaluation, and consider the implications for scalable evaluation of local history coverage in massive, aggregative digital libraries.

This research project centers on in-service K-12 teachers’ experiences of a continuing education course about open education resources (OER) and how to use them in ways that support students’ ability to use identity resources while engaging with disciplinary learning experiences. Using a qualitative design-based research approach, I sought to both improve the course and examine how teachers took up the ideas from the course in their planning and teaching. While OER are valuable resources for K-12 teachers in and of themselves because they are free and often available in easily adapted formats, their licensing typically allows edited versions to be reshared, meaning other teachers can benefit from the adaptations teachers have made. It also means that students can adapt their curricular materials in ways that better reflect their lived experiences, interests, and funds of knowledge. Seeking to resist the standardization of learning by providing teachers with the tools to work with students in the localization of OER, while simultaneously resisting the deprofessionalization of teaching by introducing sociocultural theories as ways to interpret classroom experiences, I offered this course in the hopes that teachers will find sustainable ways to engage their students in work that reflects their identities. Six teachers completed the Ready OER Not course, a credit-bearing continuing education course, and the research. Each teacher completed a pre-, peri-, and post-interview with me, and these were the primary data source for the study. I used activity theory to analyze the data, visualizing how knowledge from the course moved through their individual contexts, interacting with their identity and practice. After examining each teacher’s individual activity system via a case study approach, I looked across cases to identify themes that emerged from the data. Key findings were that teachers’ experiences as students (both in the course and memories from their childhood and young adulthood) inform their practice and that sharing resources publicly is not regularly part of their teaching practice. This is significant, because without sharing resources they have created or adapted, it limits the potential of OER to benefit other teachers and students. Additionally, I discuss the ways that deficit-based thinking emerged in our interviews, teachers’ perceptions of the research process, and how teachers view their workloads as increasing. In the final chapter, I discuss how these themes can be connected to the literature around professional learning experiences and open pedagogy, exploring the role of empathy, research, and deficit-based thinking on

This article conceptualizes four business models for sustainable open education resources (OER) at four levels: the social level, the education institutional level, the OER community level, and the individual faculty member level. The business model at each of the four levels has its application realm. At the social level, social benefits of OER are the central motivation of the OER movement. At the institutional level, education institutions are facing challenges of student enrollment increase. At the OER community operational level, communities of practice must be established. At the individual faculty member level, the key players of OER must take effective actions for OER. Sustainable OER can be achieved only when the stakeholders at the four levels collaborate towards the common objective of sustainable value creation. The comprehensive set of business models can be used for all parties involved in OER to define and implement strategies for sustainable OER. The article also provides recommendations for future research into tests of the conceptualized business models for sustainable OER.

Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to education systems worldwide, leading to a paradigm shift to technology enabled learning (TEL) from face-to-face (f2f) interactions. TEL ensured teaching-learning continuity and prevent learning losses without f2f interventions. The pandemic became an opportunity for expansion in creation and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and marked the beginning of a shift towards Open Educational Practices (OEP). These developments, amidst disruptions created possibilities to harness both OER and OEP to mitigate short term learning loss during Covid-19 and to build education systems that are capable of overcoming adversity and are resilient to future crises and disruptions. This paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to outline how OER and OEP support open pedagogy as an educational response to Covid-19. It presents a generic OER-OEP framework based on an open pedagogy continuum which includes ‘Enhance’, ‘Extend’ and ‘Empower’. It identifies the barriers faced in respect of OER adoption and OEP engagement, and the perceived impact of OER on teaching practices. Based on this framework and on identified barriers, a set of guidelines for the effective use of OER and OEP for teaching and learning is presented. The findings figured out the importance of OER adoption, especially in times of crises, and an increased engagement with OEP for sustainable learning opportunities, contributing to open education development post pandemic. The study recommends building more focus on scaffolding for faculty and students in the implementation of open pedagogy, as well as more institutional support for better learning experiences and outcomes.

Librarians have a role in working with faculty to provide low-cost alternatives to textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) are an alternative to textbooks in college courses, but there can be barriers to using OER. Are students successful in OER courses? Do faculty see librarians as collaborators in designing courses using OER? What are some alternatives to OER that libraries and library consortia can take advantage of to make college more affordable for students? The following articles address these issues, and the work of the following authors can benefit all types of academic librarians as they contemplate their role in the OER world.

I am especially pleased to have been asked to contribute to this issue of RBM, focusing as it does on the convergence of libraries, museums, and archives. This has been a major interest of mine for a long time, and almost all of my professional experience has been within institutions housing collections comprising not only rare books and other library materials, but also incorporating rich assemblages of institutional archives, historical and literary manuscripts, maps, prints, photographs, oral history resources, works of art, and artifacts. As Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), I found myself in a . . .

Public libraries submit the number of holdings and circulation of items in their collections to their state libraries annually, which in turn report these statistics to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Survey (PLS). The reported numbers qualify public libraries for federal and state funding. Additionally, the quantity of holdings (traditionally monographs, serials and physical popular media) is often compared to the circulation (number of check-outs) of those items to calculate a cost-per-circulation number. This calculation becomes complicated when a library’s “holdings” become ephemeral due to the nature of digital media and digital licensing models. This article describes several existing metrics for assessing the holdings and circulation of digital assets within both public and academic libraries and argues for the adoption of post-custodial holding metrics used by archives to better represent items available to library patrons, especially those in traditionally underserved demographics.

In the context of open education and online education, open educational resources (OER) play a very important role. Our whole education system is upgrading and at the same time being widely spread to reach out to the maximum learners wherever they are. Open educational resources aim to provide support to self -learning and life -long learning along with the formal education at different levels. The present paper aims to know about the open educational resources, how they started, their features, the pros and cons of OER, how they help in learning. The paper also studies the Indian initiatives on open educational resources and focuses on the role of libraries as well as LIS professionals in OER.

PurposeFollowing is an overview of the open and affordable textbooks (OAT) program, strategies for outreach, as well as discuss approaches that faculty awardees have taken to designing their courses. This paper aims to address a couple issues such as the effectiveness of open educational resources (OER) resources, the process of creating OER resources and how faculty and instructors have updated their courses and adjusted their pedagogy.Design/methodology/approachThis paper describes five cases where the faculty adopted open pedagogy. They include a general chemistry course, psychiatry clerkship, microbiology lab, a medical Spanish course and a radiology elective in a medical school.FindingsThe use of open pedagogy promotes two things: up-to-date resources and practical experience. Since the creation of the Rutgers OAT program, faculty and instructors have been rethinking how they teach their courses. Students enjoy the content more and faculty loves the increase in engagement. As the program continues to grow, the creativity fostered by open pedagogy improves education for everyone involved.Originality/valueThe paper offers a general overview of an effective open and affordable program at a public research university. It demonstrated the effectiveness of the program while also offering examples of novel course materials for interested librarians and faculty. It opens the possibility from just finding resources to creating them and how they improve education.

This essay considers how open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks, can address barriers of cost, representation, and access in teaching medieval literature. Beginning with the adaptation of existing free digital materials, the author outlines the benefits and challenges of curating resources that emphasize disability studies and diverse cultural perspectives. The discussion then turns to the creation of original open textbooks, such as Heritages of Change, which integrate Universal Design for Learning principles and cultural heritage frameworks into first-year writing and literature courses. These initiatives expand the accessibility of medieval content by eliminating financial burdens, embedding multiple perspectives, and offering flexible pedagogical approaches. The essay argues that the labor of developing OER is offset by the ability to provide equitable, inclusive, and up-to-date course materials. Ultimately, open textbooks not only increase student access to medieval studies but also foster connections between the past and present through inclusive and socially responsive teaching practices.

This paper discusses the role of open educational resources (OER) in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning. Usually the media used in OER are video lessons, presentations, some open textbooks, etc. But how does this paradigm apply to interactive learning environments? Can users have permissions to engage in the 5R activities (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute) both to the course content and to the platform for the course? The authors present a model for creation of educational virtual environments. The designed methodology is applied in development of various Computer Graphics-related university courses - Educational Languages and Environments, Geometry of Motion, and Fundamentals of Computer Graphics. There are presented three use cases for open educational virtual environments as illustration of the proposed methodology - Suica, Mecho and Meiro. For each of these environments are presented directions for 5R activities for both the course content and the educational virtual environment. The approbation of this innovative eLearning tools at bachelor's degree level shows improvement in students' comprehension of the course material and performance during the courses. The OER have a significant impact on the co-creative activities of the students.