 So I welcome back to Big Talk from Small Libraries. It is 3 p.m. Central Time. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. The Big Talk from Small Libraries is co-sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission and the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. And for this hour, we have, if you have any questions throughout the session, use your question section to type them in. And for our three o'clock session, we have Shayna Halla-Cuz on the line with us from the East Coast, Pennsylvania. She's from Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Good afternoon, Shayna. Hi. First of all, I wanna thank... Nope, she's gonna talk about something that is... First of all, sorry about that. Had some questions. I wanna thank Krista and the Nebraska Library Commission and the Association for Rural and Small Libraries for organizing this, we're hosting it. And as Krista said, I work at Wilson College. We are a very tiny, private, liberal arts college in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. My job title is Collections Management Librarian, but as most of you who work at small schools probably realize, small school means small staff means small budget. There's my mic, sorry about that. Small school means small staff means small budget, which means I do a little bit of everything. My title is Collections Management Librarian, but we only have three credentialed librarians on staff for the entire campus. So I also do most of the tech services work, systems librarianship, electronic resources management. I do our budget, I do acquisitions. I supervise about 25 work study students. So I end up overseeing circulation and interlibrary loan, the stuff that they kind of do to keep the building running. And on top of all of that, when I started here, which was about a year ago, January, 2018, my boss approached me and said, we've never really had anyone working on scholarly communications. And that's the thing I really think we should be doing. We should be talking about things like open access or OER or digital humanities or maybe thinking about having an institutional repository. And no one's really doing that right now. So why don't you take it and run with it and see what happens? So what I'm gonna talk about today is how I have started managing to do that with no dedicated budget and on top of the 12,000 other job duties that I have, so very little time and no staff or anything like that, that a lot of larger libraries tend to have. So I'd like to start out today by defining some terms. So just to make sure we're all on the same page. And I'll tell you in general that I work in an academic library. I have a background in public libraries and in K-12 schools. But I'm gonna end up talking about my campus a lot. If you're not in an academic setting, just substitute your community for that campus community. While open access and OER is sort of a niche topic in higher ed right now, I think it's definitely relevant, especially the educational resources when it comes to K-12 education. And also, if there are public libraries who have patrons who are interested in publishing their work, this is a great way to get on board. So open access is still, there is still some debate as far as what we mean when we talk about open access. So what I mean when I talk about open access literature is literature that's digital, it's online, it's free of charge, and it's free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. And this is an important thing to note because a lot of people assume if I can download a thing for free and it's not stuck behind a paywall, then it's open access. My definition of open access goes just a little bit farther than that. Not only is it free to read, but it's also free for you to download and share. And that segues nicely into what open educational resources are for the purpose of this talk and the research that I do. Open educational resources or OER are educational materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students. So OER materials include the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute their content. For those of you who are steeped in this OER environment, you may recognize that as sort of the five Rs of OER. Again, that definition also slightly debatable, but for me, the important and most exciting thing about OER and open textbooks isn't just that they're free. That's a great benefit. And especially at a school like mine, where we cater, not primarily, but we cater a lot to first-generation college students, non-traditional students. We have a lot of working parents, people who can't necessarily afford $1,000 a semester for textbooks on top of everything else that they're paying. Free is definitely important, but what's really exciting from a pedagogical standpoint, from an education standpoint, is that you also get these other rights baked in where not only can you download it and print it out and give it to all your students, but you also get to edit it and revise it and really make this textbook personal for your class and really specific to the needs of your students. And that's not a thing you can always do with traditionally published literature. I have some copyright symbols up here, some Creative Commons things. Open access and OER doesn't happen without open licensing. And open licensing sits on top of copyright. So it's important to know a little bit about copyright if you wanna know about how these things work. I'm not gonna go super in-depth with that today. I'm not gonna be talking about in-depth copyright issues or fair use or the Teach Act. And I'm not gonna go super in-depth into how Creative Commons licensing works. I think it's important to know that Creative Commons, first of all, what Creative Commons is, which is that it's a global nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people understand and exercise their copyrights and their intellectual property rights and to provide tools that make it easier to do that. So the important takeaway here is that most of the open access and OER materials that you will find are able to be openly used and shared because of Creative Commons licenses. They're pretty much the only player in the game right now for open licensing. There are a couple of other open licensing schemes out there, especially if you work in the realm of open software, there are some separate licenses there and like Pixabay, if you're familiar with them, they're a place to get images that you can freely use. They have their own licensing model, but by and large, when you're dealing with audio, visual, materials and texts, textbooks, videos, PowerPoint slides, for example, you can see here that my PowerPoint slides are Creative Commons licensed. That's what that little box is in the lower left hand corner. Creative Commons licenses are the primary way to make your material able to be openly shared and downloaded and edited in a legal way. So with that groundwork, let me tell you a little bit about what I did to start this whole open access and OER conversation in my own community. So my next slide here says everyone's favorite, the survey. There's a longstanding joke in librarianship that a library researcher has never met a survey they didn't like, but I actually did a little bit of work before this. When I started here last year, this directive really sort of came from above. We'd like to do more OER things on campus, figure that out. So I started talking about these initiatives with my boss, with my coworkers, and I realized that I need to figure out where we are as a community right now. Is there anybody using OER materials already? Does anybody have any idea what these are? Do people know what open access is or what it means? I mean, what am I working with here? And I did a lot of research on my own. I read a lot of scholarly articles about open access. I took every chance I could get, every conference I went to, every listserv I'm on, finding OER librarians, finding scholarly communications librarians, and asking them what is it that you actually do day to day? And what initiatives and what things are you working on at your campus that I might be able to modify and make work for my faculty and staff and my students? I learned what I could about copyright issues, about Creative Commons, other OER things. And towards the end of my talk, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how I did that and how you two can go ahead and do that with no money and just some stolen bits of time here and there. But I quickly realized that, okay, I know what's going out there in the world of librarianship. I know what other people are doing, but I really have no clue what's happening on my own campus. For those academic librarians out there, Wilson's slightly unusual in that librarians do not have faculty status here, we're staff. So I'm not sitting in on faculty meetings. I don't necessarily have the same connection with faculty that I might have otherwise. So I don't necessarily know what they're doing in their classrooms. So I decided I would do a survey. And I'm hoping you will receive copies of these slides. I know Christa's gonna post them to the website. I'm hoping that my notes will also show up with the slides, because I have a lot of things in the notes for each slide, citations, links to resources, and for this one, I got the idea to start doing the survey from an article that was on the Digital Humanities and Libraries website. It's an ACRL subgroup about conducting an environmental scan. And I didn't follow exactly what they did in the article on their campus, but it gave me the idea to kind of start this process. So here's a screenshot of what the survey that I developed looks like. Now, survey design is one heck of a rabbit hole you can go down. I just kind of went with my gut. And I'm gonna show you guys here, kind of a live view of what the survey looks like. And because I made all the questions required, I'm actually gonna go into the edit mode here. So you can see on the back end what this looks like. Well, if I, it'll go. There we go. It's thinking, okay. So just to give you an idea of the sorts of questions I was asking, open access literature is sort of generally geared more towards publishing, what your faculty actually research and publish for their own careers. Whereas the OER end of things is more focused on what they're teaching in the classroom. I thought about maybe separating those two out, but decided to smush them together in the survey. So started with the open access stuff, asking them questions about, well, how many articles do you really publish? You know, how many articles have you published over the span of your career? How prolific are my faculty? What are the factors that influence where they decide to publish? Have they ever published an article in an open access journal or do they plan to in the future? What kind of characteristics do they think open access journals have? What are their attitudes? What do they think about the quality? And then did similar things for OER, are they concerned about the cost of textbooks? Or they can, how this question, how many of your students have their textbook in hand by the end of the first week of class? I actually knew the answer was not many, but I wanted to see is access to the textbooks a problem in your class? Are students falling behind because they're waiting three weeks into the semester to try to find a cheap used copy, for example. You know, when choosing a textbook, what are the factors you're looking for? Have you ever used OER before? These sorts of things. One of the important things I did at the end here is I made sure to leave a space for contact information. I knew that I was going to want to talk to faculty one-on-one. I knew that the survey was not going to tell me everything I needed to know. And that I was going to have to fill in the gaps with taking the time to have some conversations. And I thought it was really important for the survey to be anonymous. And I think I got some more explicit responses because it was anonymous. And you can see at the top here, I only got 20 responses. At my tiny school, that's about 20% of the faculty, which I thought was pretty good for an unsolicited survey. It gave me a decent sample of kind of what some people are thinking. But yeah, I also gave people the opportunity to leave me their name and email, see if they were willing to have a follow-up conversation with me. And I got about a dozen people that did. So to back up for a second and give you an idea about the timeline, I really started thinking about how to do this, how to start this conversation on campus. I started doing research last winter. I started this job in January, probably closer to spring is when I really started diving into this. And I released this survey just this past fall semester. So I had the survey open for a month. And then it took me another two months to complete all the interviews. I tried to keep them to about a half an hour. Some of them ran over, such as the nature of things. So for these interviews, I have this lady with her hand, her ear listening intently that you'll all have to look at for a bit because I quickly realized that the number one most important thing for me to do in these interviews was to listen. And I am a person who talks a lot as you may have already figured out. And I think like a lot of librarians, I am a person who likes to solve problems. It's one of the reasons that I decided to do this career. I really like helping people. I really like solving problems. I think a lot of us are like that. But I needed to know, I needed to understand that the purpose of these initial conversations was not for me to jump in and solve all their problems. I was still on a fact finding mission at this point. I still wasn't sure, did my campus need more education about what OER is, how to find it, how to use it? Or did they know that and I needed to do more advocacy? I still needed to find that out. So if any of you are thinking of starting an initiative like this and doing this sort of environmental scan, definitely, definitely take the time to listen. My notes for this slide say, do a lot of listening, listen, listen, listen, and then listen some more. I did not go into these interviews with any sort of structured set of questions. I really thought it was important to let the faculty members set the tone and the direction of the conversation. Some of them were really excited about OER. They thought it was maybe a really cool new opportunity. They just didn't know that much about it. Some of them were really not open to the idea and they just wanted to tell me that. And that's a place to start a conversation. That person may not go on to adopt OER in their classrooms, but it's still important for me to know what the feelings are on my campus and what the thoughts are of my community so that I can figure out where to go next. We did a lot of talking about barriers to OER and this is where figuring out what the specific barriers are in your community is gonna help you figure out what to do after you're done finding all these facts and need to decide what the next step is. So on my campus, I had a lot of statistics ready about how textbook prices have risen exponentially over the last 20 years and how publisher profits are three and 400 times what other industries are. And I found out through these conversations that that's not the case I really needed to make. My faculty were on board with the cost thing. They knew that we have a lot of students who are struggling financially and they were happy to look for more affordable textbook options when they could. They were on board there. So through these conversations, I found out, oh, the things I need to be addressing are things like they're worried about not having enough time to find a whole new textbook and adapt it to a course which takes a ton of time. Their concerns are things like, I don't know how to find open content or how to tell if it's peer reviewed or not. So these conversations I think were really key and figuring out what to do in the next steps. So for me, the next steps was a workshop. I got really lucky because we have built in faculty professional development days every January. So I just did this workshop last month in January. And these faculty development days are not mandatory. They're totally optional. So I had about, I did this session twice over the course of one afternoon and I had about 30 faculty members total between both sessions, which again, for a tiny school like mine, I thought was pretty great. The workshop was specifically, I adapted it from a workshop that I had seen previously by David Ernst from the Open Textbook Network. So you can sort of see, this is a screenshot of my opening slide. And you can see that David Ernst made these slides. They had a lot of really great statistics in them, which is one of the reasons I liked them. He openly licensed them and said, hey, anybody can use them so long as they give me credit. That's what the CC by license means. And so that's what I did. I decided to make them more specific to my college and inserted some things that I knew my faculty were concerned about based on the conversations that we had had based on the survey results I got. And when you get the slides, this image and also in the notes, both of those, there's links everywhere, but you can link, you can see this presentation. You can see the slides that I used for this workshop and they are openly licensed. Feel free to use them, adapt them for your own needs and present the same information to your own communities who might be interested in open education, open pedagogy sorts of things. So yeah, I did this workshop. It was based on the needs I identified in the survey and the interviews. And it wasn't until here. I mean, this is a full year after I first got this directive to do open stuff. This is when I finally began the education and advocacy work on my campus. You know, after all this lead up, this is really where the conversation begins. And so I think that's important to note. I, especially coming from a public library background where things seem to happen very quickly, transitioning back into academia for me. I have a friend who puts it this way. You know, in the business world, you run in terms of weeks. In an academia, you run in terms of years. These sorts of projects, they take a lot of time. So it's important not to be discouraged by that. That this sort of careful thought and planning and research to go into these things, it takes time. And especially at a small library with all of our limited resources, it might take even more time. I am not a full-time OER staff person, so I can't devote 40 hours of my week to this topic. But over the course of a year, we did a survey, we did a workshop, we're getting there. We started a conversation. And I think I have a little bit of time. I am gonna show you, let me get my web browser over here. I can show you a little bit about what these slides look like in case you're interested. And then again, of course, you'll have links afterwards to all of this information. And these slides also have some great notes. But there's just some great statistics in here, some great charts and graphs about how government funding for education has fallen over the last 20 years and tuitions have just increased exponentially as a result. There are notes in here about, so this slide has the higher education funding for Pennsylvania, but there's a note somewhere in here that shows you where to get these statistics for your own state, so that you can really tailor this to your school. Here again, we have some student loan data and here's the Pennsylvania number. But in the notes, it tells you where to find the number for your specific institution, which is, I think, really helpful. There are some videos in this presentation that are also really great that show you the student perspective. So I definitely wanna make sure you guys have access to that as a resource. I think it's really super helpful. So, Shashina, is that one linked from? So, the last section, the last sort of piece of this that I wanted to talk about, let me go back to full screen here, is Open Pedagogy. So, what I've done so far did a lot of background research, figured out what schools, who have a lot more resources than me are doing, figured out ways I could tailor that down, did a survey, found out where my community is as far as OER, which is to say, they've all sort of heard of it but don't really know much about it. So I said, okay, education is the thing we need first. So I'll do a workshop. That education is ongoing, obviously, that workshop hasn't reached everybody yet, but we're getting there. I will note that so far after the survey and those one-on-one interviews, after doing the workshop, I have two faculty members who I'm working with very closely. I have their syllabi and we're going through exactly what their intended learning outcomes are and finding OER that can map directly to those. I have another faculty member who's interested in maybe doing some peer review work for some open textbooks. That's sort of in the works right now. And I have one faculty member who is intending to apply for a grant program that we have on campus. It's minimal funding. I don't even know the details, but there's some sort of faculty development grant that lets them do professional development work. And his plan is to write a proposal to apply for that grant to write his own open textbook to use for his courses. So, out of the 30 people that came to my workshop, I have maybe three or four who have met with me and really seem interested, but that's a start. It only takes one to make a start. And what I've learned from other institutions and what I hope will also happen here is that those faculty members will go, they start using educational resources, open materials in their own classrooms, see the benefits and start talking to their colleagues. Hey, I tried this in my classroom and I think it worked really well. Maybe you should go down to the library and see Shayna in her office and talk to her because I thought this worked really cool. So, if we go a little bit above and beyond OER, there's this whole idea of open pedagogy, which is just the open ethos and how we can apply it more specifically to the work that we do in the classroom. And again, in my notes, I have some links to two websites that I think provide a really good overview of open pedagogy practices, but just to mention some things that are possible. You know, this Garrish Neon 90s style remix party graphic is here to show that one of the things that colleagues I know at other schools are doing, and then I'm hoping to get some people here interested in, is taking existing OER materials and working with their students to adapt and remix them for their classroom. So, one of the things I've seen, I think it's a Brigham Young University, and there are examples of this in the workshop slides that you'll see. Brigham Young University found an instructional design textbook that they thought was pretty good, and they have an instructional design class that they teach. But the book that they found was really focused on international issues and business types of issues. And this instructional design class was really geared towards classroom educators. So, for a final project for the class, the professor worked with the students and had them rewrite certain chapters of the textbook to be more classroom education focused and less international business focused. And successive semesters of the class have gone through and repeated this process to continue to make improvements. So, now there's an audiobook version of the textbook and they've updated some of the formatting and they've changed all the images and figures so that they're openly licensed and accessible also. And they've added a bunch of classroom examples to make the text really come alive and they've added some sample assignments and things. So, none of this would have been possible in a traditionally published framework. You can't go and buy a textbook and add stuff to that textbook and then package it as your own and give it to your friends and say, look, I remixed to this thing. But with openly licensed materials, this is now a thing you can do. So, they were able to revise and adapt this open book, republish it as an open work, still giving credit to the original authors because those people came up with the original ideas and then they added to it. Now, they're contributing authors too. And the students really get involved, which I think is one of the greatest things about OER. You know, I did give one idea to a professor who said, oh, you know, it'd be really cool if I could write an OER textbook but I don't know how I'll ever have the time to do that. And I said, well, one idea that I have seen work at other schools that you might wanna think about is you teach your course using whatever materials you use now, but again, at the end of the course is a final project, have your students write one section of one chapter of a textbook that deals with your class topic. You know, it has to be well researched, it's gonna have to be well written. You know, this might be an assignment that's more appropriate for upperclassmen students or graduate students, but I think there's definitely some undergraduates who could handle it. And even in high school, you know, there's definitely some upperclassmen, high school students who are great writers who could definitely handle an assignment like this that they could go and actually start building an open textbook themselves. And one of the things we find that I have found in doing educational research is that students are much more likely to be motivated to do a project if they know that someone other than their teacher is going to see it. So this is one of the tenants, not the only one, but this is one of the tenants behind peer review, right? Is if somebody other than your teacher is going to be looking at it and grading you, you might wanna do some slightly better work. You might be more motivated to really make this an awesome project. And so I often also encourage faculty, even if you're not using OER in the classroom, consider incorporating projects into your classroom that are open, that your students can share openly or not. It's the student's choice, you know, that if they're creating a work, they hold the copyright in their work, it's their choice whether or not they want to make that available to the world and under exactly what circumstances they want to. But I found even in classes that I teach, you know, instead of having a PowerPoint presentation that they show to the class, if I have the students make YouTube videos and those videos get uploaded to YouTube and now they can share them on social media and their family and friends might watch them and strangers might watch them and contact them on social media and say, hey, your video was really great. Often those students are more motivated to do a really good job and as a result, their grades are better and they end up really grasping the material in a much more deep and personal sort of way. So, you know, this is a way to bring more of these sort of active learning principles, more of these authentic project-based learning principles into the classroom. The other image I have on here is for Wikipedia. Wikipedia for, I'm assuming everyone is familiar with this by now. It's an openly licensed encyclopedia. The content there is open and freely available for anyone to edit. But Wikipedia articles actually need to be really well-sourced in order to be published, typically, especially brand new articles. But I've seen projects in libraries where libraries will sponsor Wikipedia edit-a-thons, you know, find an article and make it better. Or I have a librarian colleague right now who's working with some of her students to go back through the American Library Association's history and there are some really notable people there who have been like ALA president, for example. And that's a notable enough position that you'd think there might be a Wikipedia article about that person, but there isn't. And so she's having her students make one. And the Wikipedia community is such at this point that a lot of the editors are very strict about making sure that your sources are reliable, that the sources you're using, they're good, they're authoritative, that you're not relying solely on one source or one point of view. So this can be a really good way to introduce students to the research process and to have them build an open project where at the end of it, they really get to show off what they've learned, again, in an open and public way that for many of them is gonna feel more authentic. So the last thing I wanna cover here is where do I go to start doing this stuff, right? It's all well and good for, I just told you guys at the beginning that, oh, I went and I learned a bunch of stuff about copyright and then I just, it all just came out onto a survey. So here, this is sort of the money slide with all of the links. This is the stuff that I did. This is the stuff that I thought about. There is surely a lot more out there, but I think this is a good starting point. And if you have no clue where to start to learn about things like copyright, things about open access, things about OER, I think these links are gonna be really helpful. So the top link there is the Creative Commons website. Again, they're this global nonprofit organization. Their whole purpose is to educate people about their intellectual property rights, to teach people how copyright works and how you can openly license your materials so that you still have the copyright in your work, you still get to decide what to do with it, but you maybe want to make it more openly available for people to use. Creative Commons does have a certificate course. I took this last year when it was relatively inexpensive. They have raised the price. So the bummer there is that the Creative Commons certificate course costs money. However, all of the learning materials for that course are openly licensed and available to you for free. So you can go through and do all the readings, watch all their videos and learn all the content of the course. You just don't get the fancy piece of paper at the end of it. And I think for most of us, the fancy piece of paper is fine and a nice thing to have, but the information is really what we need. So the information is freely available. I think that's important to know. The Creative Commons website also has a ton of other material educational stuff to teach you about how open licensing works. They have an entire open education community. They're really active on Slack, which is a messaging app that a lot of businesses use. So that's another way they have a super robust community of people, of experts who can answer any of the questions you have. Another thing I'm doing right now is Copyright X. This is run through Harvard University. It is free. It's a completely free course. All of their course materials, again, are free and openly available. There are readings, there are lectures, and then so many times a year, you can apply to be part of an official class section. And those class sections are also free. So this is great. I'm in one of them now. The added value of being in a class section, for me a lot of it is just having a dedicated weekly meeting with an instructor forces me to actually set aside some time to do the work, to actually learn some things about copyright. That's kind of the biggest thing you get out of it is you'll be part of a cohort where you get live lectures and you can get feedback from your fellow students. And again, there's a fancy piece of paper at the end of it. If you want the fancy piece of paper, but all of that material is available for free. I also, I'm not in general a huge fan of massive online courses, MOOCs, massive open online courses. I find the quality can be really wildly divergent from one to the next. But these two courses I have links to from Coursera are actually, I think, really good. In my opinion, they were produced at Duke University and they were developed by three librarians who are also lawyers. So one of the librarians was at Duke at the time. I think he has moved on to somewhere else now. One was at UNC Chapel Hill and the other one I think is at Emory. They're librarians who also have law degrees. They're just class act experts in this stuff and they put together these free courses on Coursera. Again, Coursera has this model where you can spend some money to get a certificate. I didn't do that option. All the content is available for free. They have some great videos. The copyright for educators and librarians I think is a really great course to start with. They're also pretty short. And the best part of this is you do this all on your own time. So especially if we're like the Coursera courses or if you're going through any of the other courses on your own time. This is where we know that time is a limited resource for us but you do fit these things in as you can. So often I will find myself watching lecture videos while I'm doing just sort of general systems maintenance that doesn't take a lot of work or we're doing a massive weeding project at my library right now. So I am one of many people along with my army of work study students who's just going through deleting books that we've weeded. There's quite a lot to deal with. And so as I go through delete books I have a lecture for copyright playing in the background that I can pay attention to because deleting books doesn't take up too much of my attention. So these are things you can fit in around a busy schedule that I think in a really good way. I also want to show you I put together and this is a shameless plug of my own work here. Let me slide this over so you all can see it. I put together an open access and OER research guide. This is our Wilson College library website. And again, this is all material that is openly licensed to feel free to use this. A Google search will get you a ton more LibGuides out there of libraries who have made LibGuides about copyright, about open access. This is mine, I have it linked here because it's mine and so I like it. But I also, when I did the Creative Commons training I made a lot of these videos and so these are embedded in here too. I have a lot of videos about, you know a lot of people are confused about well what's the difference between an OER and a library subscription resource because if my library subscribes to it it's free for me to use, right? And the difference that most of us realizes that well it's not free to the library is one big thing. You know, there's some info in here about how Creative Commons works, how the licenses work, if you want to get more in depth into that some basics of copyright and a whole lot of other resources in here. If you want to start looking for OER there's a ton of OER search engines out there I have linked to just a few of them. So these are resources that are available to you too. And lastly, I got really involved in this and get a lot of support through an organization called Affordable Learning PA. And this is an organization that is actually run by a consortium in Pennsylvania. And it's interesting because Wilson College is not a member of this consortium but they have graciously allowed anyone whether you're a consortial member or not to be involved in Affordable Learning PA which it's really just kind of getting off the ground but it's basically a community of practice for librarians and educators who are interested in OER and open access things to get together, provide resources, talk about things that are or aren't working on our campus. And I know that there are organizations similar to this in other states. So that would be a big word of advice for me is to look for these communities of practice especially if you're just getting started or you know that you're under resourced partnering with other librarians who might be in a similar situation or other librarians from organizations or from libraries with more resources or maybe not with more resources but with different resources. You can work together to find these people so that you can start talking about open education on your campus and bringing these practices to your communities. So I know there are some state library organizations that have started OER programs. There are some OER, some scholarly communications groups through things like ALA and ACRL. And one thing I haven't started yet but I have plans to is to look for grant opportunities. A lot of larger schools have started doing this. My particular favorite model and I have a link to it in the notes but not on the slide for some reason. Penn State just last year started a grant program for OER. So they recognize that for faculty members to write their own textbook for example is a ton of work that most people would not typically take on over the course of their career. It's certainly not required as a part of their regular job duties. So they provide an additional financial incentive to help people who might be interested who want to do this sort of thing but just need that little extra push to take the time to do it. So I know, you know, Mellon grants are very popular for this sort of thing. Penn, like I said, Penn State started their own grant program and their website has a ton of resources and information about OER. I only just found out that my campus has this faculty professional development grant. So now I'm setting up some meetings with the administration to see if there are some small amount of funds that we can tap into there that might be more specifically devoted to OER stuff. So that's a thing that I'm looking forward to in the future but just kind of throwing that out there as another idea and I'm sure we all know. If you're at a small library and you don't have a budget, look for a grant. That's kind of what we do. So at this point, I am happy to take questions. My contact information is here. I am very available. Send me an email if you have any questions, any gripes, anything. I'm also very active on Twitter but I will give you the warning that I bring my whole self to Twitter. So there's a lot of library stuff there but there's also a lot of just random opinions and pictures of my cats. So if you're looking just as strictly library stuff stick to my email. But at this point, I'm not a hundred percent sure my speakers are on anymore but let me see if Krista has any questions for me. Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me? I don't think you can hear me. Can other people hear me? I hope. I know my voice has been going today but I know Shayna was able to hear me at the beginning. Yep, okay. Yep, Shayna, we are here. All right, I'm just typing in chat to Shayna. Let her know I'm talking that I don't think she can hear me. Let's see. Hopefully she'll see that there, yeah. See if we can get her to check her audio settings. See if we can get some questions. Does anybody have any questions for Shayna? I know we're all listening. Oh, yes, I know. Okay, now our microphone's not working. Yeah, okay, I think I'm back. There you are, yes. Can you hear me now? Sorry about that, yes. All right, awesome, we got it fixed. No problem. Yes, I checked with everyone else out there too that they were able to hear me. It was just something that was going wonky with your connection, I guess. Yeah, that's all right. Unwittingly hit many buttons but I have now hit the right combination of buttons. Yeah, so if anybody has any questions, type them in and we can get Shayna to answer them. I just want to say I'm glad that you put up a lot of that information about copyright, especially. I know that is something that we have lots of questions here about and people do struggle with that they're trying desperately to figure out what do we do with it? What is it about? What am I supposed to know? And it either is courses to take or something to pay for or they just give up. I think some of them just say, I don't know. Yep. I'm just going to not even worry about it until something maybe something happens. Absolutely, and I have sort of become the de facto copyright expert on campus despite having no background in this really at all. But it's doable. Yeah, there's a lot of resources out there and of course, I worked at a public library so you get questions all the time about taxes and things. People know you're not a lawyer, you're not a tax expert. Here's the information I found, I can point you to some places you could do research yourself and that usually works pretty well. If anyone does have further copyright issues that was a little bit beyond the scope of this particular talk, but I'm putting together That's another talk on its own, yeah. Putting together some other resources for future talks and if anyone has questions about copyright stuff or definitely look at the resources in the slide but I'm also happy to answer emails if anyone needs advice or more places to look at. I do have a laundry list of links about things like fair use and the Teach Act. The Teach Act is the part that applies if you teach online to distance learners. So I'm happy to send a laundry list of links to anyone's way. Great, and now that other presentation that you showed is that one that's just linked from this one? Or is it, okay, so when we get these slides we'll have the link to that other extra one too as well. Yes, absolutely, and that's the one, okay. Yeah, the link will be in these slides and that's the presentation that I did, that's the faculty workshop that I gave, so that'll work. I think those statistics that were in there and especially if I could even get them for other areas because we've got people across the whole country here watching today is very important. And I think that's a key thing in need when you're trying to sell this to your administration or your library board to whoever is like, I'm not just saying this because I think it's what we need to do. Here's the numbers that are out there and we need to do something about this. Yeah. Yeah, and we have a question that came in here. We want to know specifically, I guess a little more detail about, so what actually happens when someone comes in and does want to self-publish? Well, there's a lot of questions to ask them. So, you know, I just started working with this faculty member who's thinking about writing their own open textbook. And I have an advantage in that my husband's a Penn State professor who's been writing open textbooks for six or seven years now. So I really got to watch him go through this. Yeah, there are things you need to keep in mind as far as, you know, one of the first questions I ask somebody who wants to do this is, what is your end goal? You know, are you looking to make a traditional textbook that maybe students can print out and have in class that you can use in your own classes or just share with the world? Do you want to make something that's truly digital and more unique to the online space? One of the things that you can do since open textbooks are often online is make them multimodal so you can incorporate videos, you can incorporate slideshows, you can incorporate all sorts of interactive elements that you can't necessarily get in a paper textbook. And so there are a lot of places out there where you can, a lot of platforms where you can publish these things. Pressbooks is a really common one. There's also some Merlot is an OER sort of consortial thing that has their own platform to publish open works and which platform you use kind of depends on what you want to do with it. You know, if you're just want to write a textbook, you can do that in Microsoft Word or Google Docs and then we can publish an accessible PDF and throw it up online and you're self-published. If you want to go a little beyond that, that's where we do a little more research to kind of figure out exactly which tools are going to work well for your project. And my husband's an engineer. So he has some tools that he knows about to do, you know, he has to have a lot of figures and diagrams in his work that are hard to draw in Microsoft Word. So he has his own tools for that that I haven't had to deal with yet. But if I ever do, I just go bug him. Of course, go to the experts. Yeah. So it's going to be a case by case kind of thing of what you'll have to do. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, this is one of the beauties of being a librarian, right? Is that we're good at doing this research is kind of what we do. So there is no one size fits all answer. But it's a lot like, you know, a typical reference interview is, you know, asking some questions. What is this person really trying to do? And then let's find the tools to make that as easy and as accessible for you as possible. Yeah. Yeah, I say that so much. Librarians don't know everything, but we know how to find out everything. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, it doesn't look any other desperate questions that come in. We answered the few that came through for you. So that's great. Thank you so much for this. And I think I'm going to pull over a presenter to myself again. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for being with us today. Yeah.