ENGAGE YOUR LIBRARY

Recognize and develop relationships with librarians as strong allies supporting OER awareness and adoption for your campus community.

Librarians have the power to reach a lot of students. They work in a space that students use to research, study, and collaborate. Librarians are most likely involved in open access information initiatives or they have their own passions and interests with OER. Librarians are perfectly positioned to help you with student outreach!

Getting Started:

If you are NOT a librarian, you should ask your librarian to identify what is the most egregious expenditure for databases at your college. Be prepared for strong opinions and passionate responses about the cost of databases on your campus!

If you ARE a librarian, you’ll know just who talk to in order to engage the right people in your library who are passionate about affordability, access, and learning.

Ask librarians for their ideas about how they can help educate faculty members about OER, support OER adoption, and contribute to already-curated courses. Are they willing to create LibGuides (online webpages containing helpful resources) that will work in concert with faculty curated courses? Do they have other ideas for ways to promote OER to faculty and make using OER simple for faculty and students?

Work with your librarians to create displays that educate students about the cost of textbooks and about open education. They have the power to create fun informative displays that will pique the interest of students. Having these displays appear in the library at the time of your OER professional development events for faculty, for example, can be helpful marketing of your initiative.

Pro Tip:

Libraries often employ students, so seek out the manager of student employees. Ask him/her for recommendations of star student employees who might give you ideas on how to reach other students. The more you can engage librarian leadership about students, the better connected your community of OER support will be on your campus. If you don’t have time for this community-building, maybe your OER spokesperson might excel at this engagement with the library.

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