 Well, thank you so much John for being a wonderful host. I'm going to leave this up for just a couple of seconds so that all of you can get over to the Mentimeter. I'm also going to reshare the direct link to it in the meeting chat. The best way to do this I found is to have to have it on your phone so that you can kind of see the zoom and the chat and all that on one screen, and then do the Mentimeter responses on your phone but whatever way you'd like to that's totally fine with us. Just making sure that y'all see this because we are seeing a lot of participants coming in right now. Goodness. That's a lot. Okay, I'm going to repost this in chat I know if you've been here since 1144 you've seen this link about four times but we have quite a few people thank you all for being here. I am posting the direct Mentimeter link into the chat. Alright, so I think we are ready to move, but be sure to copy this and if somebody comes in and says hey how do I get to it, you can always respond that way. I'm going to be operating this full screen from here so I will not be able to immediately jump to the chat. Okay, so let's get started. Come on now. Okay, little bit of lag. There we go. Well, hi everyone and welcome to our presentation OER discovery ensuring OER rise to the top. My name is Rebecca Honeycutt and I'm the collections management librarian. Next slide please, Jeff. I'd like to introduce you to my colleagues starting with Beth Burnett institutional repository librarian, Nikki Cannon rich and ALG champion and research services librarian, and Jeff Mortimer discovery services librarian. All of us are from Georgia Southern University. We have finally Jeff Galant who is the lone non Georgia Southern member here, and he is the program director for affordable learning Georgia. Next slide please. So in this presentation we will cover the current status of things related to OER materials. We'll start off with Jeff Galant as we take a look at affordable learning Georgia and its current work. And then move to the issues and challenges with Nikki who will review the challenges faced with helping faculty. And then we'll move to current trends with myself and Jeff Mortimer. Here we'll discuss what's currently happening with cataloging and description of these resources. Then finally we'll move to Beth and what Georgia Southern is currently doing with OER materials and our digital Commons prototype. So with these topics we will be presenting three conversation starters using meant to meter, posing questions to you about how your institutions are handling OER materials. And now I will turn it over to Jeff Galant to will possibly continue covering meant to meter and any with our questions and your responses and his current, his topic, excuse me, of current status of things, Jeff. So if you just got here, welcome. We have quite a few participants and it's really cool to see you all. I am going to share the direct link to meant to meter in the chat again, because zoom is not good about showing you past chats from before you came in. I am going to get started though because my, my part of this is not the feature this is more about how it is and how it used to be over at affordable learning Georgia, so that Georgia Southern's team can show you what they're doing which is super cool. So we started out all the way back in 2013 as a little pilot team, and one of the things that we wanted to do was encourage faculty to take action within at least a team of two. So that's where our transformation grants and eventually our continuous improvement grants came from. We assumed because we just got around to doing this at the time that Merlot was really big and open stacks just released all of their texts that faculty were going to find these materials and do a straight adoption of them. We were asking them to create an entire open textbook or ancillary materials we were just saying, you're replacing the expensive materials in the classroom with OER and other affordable materials. What we found was that plenty of materials were created, whether they were lecture slides or an entire website for an open course, all the way to some teams, authoring their own textbook. And we didn't have a place for them. So we had some scholarly repositories here and there. And, you know, some institutions were hosting those materials for the institutional participants, but we didn't have a system wide one. We were looking into that but linking folks to the free stuff that was out there. Merlot content builder was there. OER Commons, of course, has open author and they did back then too. There were campus websites, although we kept warning people that any kind of campus website migration would be a problem any personal websites hosted on campus website thing might disappear if you leave. The workshop was great, you can share it through the cloud if you subscribe to it live guides and a couple of other educational sharing space, see spaces that weren't necessarily OER but they were at least free like Kariki. So we started a subscription service to be pressed digital Commons at around 2016 is when it actually got built and started. There's plenty of metadata there because it's all set up to be a scholarly communications type of repository, really geared towards journals so there's already open archive. Yeah, the open archives initiatives protocol for metadata harvesting baked in there, along with some Google analytics. There are some custom fields that you can change which is good because we needed them creative Commons licenses select them right from a drop down menu. We couldn't really group materials by course numbers by subjects we had some makeshift ways of doing that, combining them into various series or communities. Ancillaries it was hard to link those together once something was created for a text that already exists. And of course they were all static files you just download a PDF download a Word document etc. Or we could link over to someone's website but that's not enabling anything new at that points there's no interactivity going on in 2020 that changed. I have been complaining about the lack of a platform to do this and both manifold and press books really stepped up around 2019 and 2020. We were part of the second pilot cohort for manifolds. We helped them out when they were just getting started and basically just providing a lot of feedback. It's great that they have annotations you can do highlighting within a group, for example, an entire class with an instructor. There's a lot of accessibility features, just like they mentioned yesterday being able to change the font being able to change light mode to dark mode having structured text. That is super helpful. It's very easy to group your ancillary materials with the textbook in a nice organized way. The problem of course is that this is not set up to be a scholarly repository so from the start, they didn't have things like a protocol for metadata harvesting baked in the way that digital commons does. It's still not there. So we do a lot of metadata through tags. What's cool about it is that we can then take a smart collection of one of those tags and feature it on the page name it something and now you've got your open textbooks you got your ancillary materials you've got your adoptions and it just kind of shows up that way we can also if anyone's like what are all the ones for calculus we could take the calculus tag and put it in a collection and it's really nice. So it's the primary platform for putting new materials out there. We are still linking from the digital commons one though. We had to change some metadata in order to make this oh we are friendly, just all the way back to our digital commons repository, the core themes and course numbers are super important, and they're not native to these types of platforms, the type of materials so often if you are publishing journals, of course you're publishing articles sometimes as proceedings but we had things like lecture slides we had homework stuff like that. A way to get to the print version of a text that option needs to be there we have the University of North Georgia press, and we need to be able to link over to them to. So then things like editors and contributing authors that you can kind of do it in digital commons but you can actually do it in manifold which is nice. So I am going to pass this on because we are going to move into the future as we start looking at the current issue and the challenges to address. Thank you Jeff you can go on to the next slide. I'm an instructional librarian and I will say that this is from the view of an instructional librarian, who also like many others out there has we are thrown into my duties but it's not my main job. It's just mixed in with all my other duties as an instructional librarian, but as the person on the campus I'm the one who does help faculty and whom ever locate and learn how to use we are materials. So, especially since our friend covered hit the scene. There's been a stream growing interest in we are not to mention people are finally coming to realize 100% that the cost of course materials is a true barrier to many of our students. So the interest is growing the availability is growing, but there is still some barriers out there especially for my faculty. We are tends to be poorly defined, and in many situations like affordable learning Georgia, it is fantastic, but affordable learning Georgia also embraces the use of proprietary materials from the library through library subscriptions, and that often confuses faculty and so they don't really have a firm sense of what is truly we are what is freely available, and what is simply being made free to our students because we have already paid a very large price for it. It's often poorly integrated into some areas as well. So, there's a lot of decisions on how do we spend our effort to make we are discoverable regionally and globally. And we have actually been tasked by our Dean of the libraries to make the we are on our campus, easier to discover for our faculty so that they realize it is an option for use in their classes. Next slide please. So again, the challenges that go out there there are multiple platforms as Jeff lot mentioned for we are it's difficult to keep up, and many of these platforms have limited searches simply because they only contain a small portion of the we are that is actually out there. So open stacks for instance, fantastic. We all know it's credibility, but they don't have materials for every course out there. So there's multiple searches for faculty to learn different interfaces limited searches and some instances, multiple institutions also host their own, we are to highlight the materials their faculty are creating. So again limited subjects because, as they should be, they are focusing on the curricular of their particular institution. There may be some access issues, especially like faculty Georgia Southern, they are encouraged to also pull library subscription materials into much of this. If you're not a member of their institution you won't have access to that, and also just defining again what we are actually the difference between that and just other materials. So as an OER librarian or instructional librarian, we try to help as much as possible. We often will curate list specifically for faculty, but in many cases it's kind of a stab in the dark because I'm just going based on what their syllabus says their student learning objectives are. And I have my guesses and then of course it's up to the faculty to fully evaluate these materials and decide if they're actually going to be useful for their course. Many of us out there create live guides, as we all are a fan of live guides in library world. And this live guide makes perfect sense to me, it has become a monstrous live guide and I use it almost daily to search and find support materials. It does not always make sense to my faculty so there's that problem as much as I try to make it user friendly. It's really more user friendly to me, then it is to some of the faculty who would actually need it. Next slide please. Part of the challenge as I said I'm an instructional librarian is that the team has been slow to build kind of especially at our institution in particular. In Georgia, we've noticed at our affordable learning Georgia meetings, and Jeff Galant has confirmed this, the majority of us who are doing our public facing or instructional librarians, occasionally some skull calm librarians, but still much public facing. We have been better at pulling our instructional designers into the fold, and LG now has an instructional designer champion along with the librarian champions. So these partnerships have been fantastic, but they're usually also very public facing individuals. I think we have been leaving out more so than we should be our technical services group, those persons who actually are catalogers and institutional repository librarians and discovery services librarians. So I'm out here doing all of this we are work, but it's only been recently that I've been touching base with my tech services group saying okay so what do we do with this stuff how do we make it discoverable. We're going to combine it in our systems. Next slide. So here's our first conversation starter. Remember that you can enter into Mentimeter or into the chat if you want to. How does your institution help faculty navigate what is available in the OER world. We have everyone a few moments to respond. We can see some responses coming in so a lot of what I've already mentioned, one on one consultations live guides are showing up curated list. We have a full time OER librarian that's awesome. We have a searchable catalog that mirrors BC campus, lots of live guides and individual consultations. We have an e learning committee and librarians that help with links and information that sounds wonderful. A giant Google sheet. Holy moly. Right. Lots of with direct librarian help live guides showing up multiple times. Affordable learning exchange. Hello Ohio State. Someone is working some webinars in there nice hit or miss right now yes workshops we do a lot of that as well. Somebody wants that Google sheet to be shared. Starting to add OER into the subject guides that's a nice touch. Just gonna quickly show a link that someone had a list of OER adopted by college here. That's really cool. Nice. And now I'm going to wrestle with mentor meter until it goes back to full screen. There we go. Okay, I'm going to move forward but this is amazing. Thank you. Robin says well we get a copy of the chat. You can definitely make a copy of the chat with the save chat if you click on the dot dot dot from the chat part. Oh, yep. She sees that. Okay, good. Cool. I will move on. Okay, so current trends. Go ahead to the next slide please Jeff. So what are the current trends in cataloging and we are materials. Well we call this the Wild West of cataloging and discovery, because there aren't really any trends in this area. There's no real consensus about metadata standards or cataloging practice. However, there are a few things that we can see developing amongst librarians on this topic. One is agreement and OER materials needing quality description and cataloging. Even with this consensus though there is as of yet no established standards or practices. What we're seeing is that most examples of OER cataloging are focused on local discovery only at individual institutions. Recently I sent out a question on a national list served catalogers about what they were seeing or doing regarding these materials, and I got a handful of responses which I was pretty excited about. A few people mentioned mark fields that should be used when cataloging OERs and several 3xx fields and 5xx fields were specifically mentioned. And a few other respondents said that their OER materials were being housed in their institutional repositories. So these responses and the use of repositories shows in a very small pool that there is some validity to our statement that the focus is on local discovery. And it also validates our third point here that repositories are either creating their own metadata standards for local discovery, or they are adopting metadata standards from a third party repository. So finally, there is also evidence of large groups taking on the creation of standards and practices, which we can see through the Spark OER discovery work group. This is a group of nine institutions coming together to work on this question, and it's a step toward the development of trends in this area. However, Spark leads us to our next slide on trends, and I'll let Jeff take it from here. Jeff. I apologize, and evidently I would be the one to stay on mute. I apologize. So, as Rebecca has described, you know, there is some work in this area, but it really remains scattered. So even with the publication of the OER metadata reset a stone, we really remain where we so often find ourselves a wash and a sea of computing standards. If you haven't seen this cartoon before, which I think most folks in library technical services has, have. It sums up our present moment pretty well. Short of the OER community coalescing around an OER repository or a preferred metadata schema, we're unlikely to see much progress toward a shared standard for OER description and sharing. What we can do, however, is put off the effort of describing our institution's OER and making it at least nominally discoverable. But if so then how should we proceed. Next slide please. Today, the most useful advice we found on this is also the most pragmatic. In 2020 paper, a recommendation for core metadata elements for use in OER repositories by Bobby Boffman conducted an extensive meta analysis of current OER metadata schemas and came up with following advice. Don't wait for perfect, but instead adopt the most complete and patron friendly schema you can find with the best chance of crosswalking your records later on when the community does coalesce around a repository or a schema. Based on his analysis Bobby also has recommendation for what schema to employ now. He says only the OER common schema, which is closely based on the IEEE long or learning object metadata standard ticks off most of the boxes. As such the IEEE long should be promoted as the scheme of choice for future OER metadata endeavors. So, what do we have to lose we took Bobby's advice, which you'll hear more about as Beth walks through our OER collection prototype and digital comments. But first we have another question for you. Next slide. Back to Manometer and our question to use this. What challenges have you experienced or do you anticipate experiencing with making your institution so we are more discoverable. So definitely too many repository options but none of them fit the exact need, right, and that gets back to the challenge of standards as well. Wow, lots of responses this is great. I think the press books versions the top result and whatever search engine or discovery tool you're supporting also a real challenge. Yeah, I think that that also has to do with version control to any anything that you want to be the top results because it's the most updated version. We lack the presence of institutional repository platform right, you know, we lack standards, we lack focus on, you know, a small group of repositories to work with, and we have no, you know, sort of dedicated platform that is that is come into existence getting the taxonomies that make sense to us per content curriculum to line up sufficiently with others. That's absolutely right the way that faculty at one institution might think about the organization and discovery of OER made different, different other institutions. Ideally we'd have platforms that would achieve a common standard but also allow customization of how those resources are represented in other contexts. Some feedback that the conversation is super exciting. I like all the challenges question mark. Yeah, it really is the Wild West we don't know whether something exists or where to find it. Nobody knows where to go these days and varying formats different mean different platforms, which begs the question or you know, do we need to stop thinking in terms of one platform to rule them all maybe we need multiple platforms for different kind of content but then we need a metadata platform to make it discoverable. I'm finding that just because it's easy doesn't mean it's best. Often I think we encountered that when with the rise of Google back in the day to and putting it in multiple repositories of overwhelming tasks struggle with version control. I really know here putting it multiple repositories. Ideally we're not putting our we are into multiple repositories we're making our OER discoverable and in multiple indices, right. So the question is how to make the metadata sufficiently portable to be discoverable without replication of content. And if you've got remixes or revisions, like, how can we link all those together. Yeah, we are metadata tends to be available and simple Dublin core. Yeah. Great SEO but it's not made for OER very very common. It's possible to find the expectation of being a static resource. Yeah and then what do you do with the metadata at that point that's interesting. Yeah. Providence and thinking by educational institutions. Yeah, time needs to be funded. That is for sure. Any phrase that has the word rule in it yeah probably know the open community. Ladies and gentlemen, every open community to. Okay, moving forward. So we are going to the prototype at this point. Okay, thank you. So I'll be addressing Georgia Southern University's recent OER efforts and so this part of the session is from the perspective of how an individual institution might approach OER work. But first let me tell you a little bit about digital commons at Georgia Southern. We are subscribed to the B press digital commons platform for institutional repository. This is where we collect archive and disseminate the intellectual and creative output of the university's faculty staff students and community partners. In addition to a small number of open educational resources collected in our repository. Some of the types of materials and digital commons at Georgia Southern or campus publications faculty and student research dissertations data sets and special collections. The repository also hosts 18 journals and the materials from over 30 conferences so we can relate to all of you who said this is the other duties as assigned area of our jobs. One of our top 10 most downloaded papers of all time is an OER with nearly 54,000 full text downloads. So this indicates a strong demand for open educational resources and supports developing a broader collection of subject areas. Next slide please. We can start by thinking about a high level workflow for our institute institution. Our goal is to increase discovery, which we can do by adding OER to places where students and faculty already search for materials, the institutional repository and the library catalog. The workflow starts with public services librarians who are collaborating with faculty to locate and create OERs. Public services librarians can identify OER and notify technical services staff of their location and existence. This is born digital content and we don't have a physical copy in hand, which makes the institutional repository a viable next step. The repository team can create records and digital commons and add either full text materials or links to the resources. From there the repository staff can share those records with cataloging librarians who can create records and OCLC and add them to our catalog. At Georgia Southern we use the spring share live apps ticketing system for managing our work, which would help each person communicate information about the OER throughout the workflow. The additional access points going beyond lib guides and OER specific databases and into the library catalog and institutional repository could help increase discoverability by capitalizing on existing patron information seeking behaviors. Next slide please. Full accurate metadata is part of the solution and making sure that the content in the repository can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. So my first step was to get acquainted with the different metadata standards relevant to OER and understanding what were the most common required and recommended elements. I knew we needed an approach that would include both local national and international standards for describing digital content, plus metadata that captures OERs in particular. So locally at Georgia Southern like I mentioned we use the B-Press digital commons platform which is based on Dublin Core and offers a lot of flexibility in customizing metadata fields. For statewide standards I started by asking our B-Press rep to configure our metadata records like those on the affordable learning Georgia site, because we wanted to include the same elements when developing Georgia Southern's prototype. I also analyzed the digital library of Georgia's metadata guidelines and the Georgia knowledge repository metadata guidelines to get a sense of recommended metadata for digital artifacts in Georgia's existing repositories. For OER specific guidelines I leaned on the Boffman recommendations and studied both the OER commons scheme and I triple ELAM to compile my list of metadata elements. And after I started my analysis I discovered the OER Rosetta Stone, a tool that's moved OER discovery forward by recommending metadata fields for mark records. Once I got my head wrapped around all of that I brushed up on Mark 21 format and RDA for industry-wide cataloging standards. And taking all of these guidelines into account, I felt ready to move forward with developing a full collection prototype in digital commons. Next slide please. For our prototype we have a parent collection on the demo site for all open educational resources and then a child collection for each subject area. My thinking is that a subject hierarchy aligns with library classification systems that group related items together and provides a browsing experience for our OER collections. Next slide please. The Southern has a decent amount of OER for chemistry so we started with that subject first. In digital commons we set up what's called a book gallery style series. The advantage of the book gallery style is that you get a landing page that displays images of book covers next to the title authors and abstract. The book gallery style is similar to scrolling down a page of search results in the library catalog and then you can click on one of the records for more information or a link to the resource. Next slide please. In the work of analyzing required and recommended metadata so my metadata map is stripped down to a simple crosswalk between databases showing possible equivalent elements for institutional repository and our library catalog. And what we're seeing here is a draft of my recommendations for metadata elements in digital commons at Georgia Southern, the definition of those elements, and some potential mark fields for creating catalog records. Some of these elements are self explanatory those are the basic elements that we use as searchable access points that includes the title authors subjects and keywords. I imagined that faculty and students may search for resource by the course title or the course number. So I thought those might be useful as a 246 field or varying forms of the title on a mark record. The description or abstract could potentially go into the 520 summary field of a mark record. For the creative commons license I think it would be useful to take what is one element in our digital commons metadata record and split it into two fields for a mark record. The 506 field for mark records is a place where you can note restrictions on access. And in this case the materials are open access which would be useful to have a note of in the library catalog. And it's also good to have the 540 field that the OER Rosetta Stone identifies, and that includes the terms governing use of materials after access has been provided publication date and publisher. Those would fit nicely on the 264 field for a mark record. The source is a related resource or something the OER is based on it could be represented in a general note 500 field on mark. The name of the grant and a link could go in the comments section and digital commons and then the 536 field on a mark record. For material types I use the OER commons list and descriptions and we have it configured in digital commons as a drop down menu for each type. For example, a textbook or a lesson plan or a syllabus, and then the catalog or working on a mark record this might fit into the 300 field for physical description and extent of the material 347 and maybe the 516 field. And that is defined on the OER commons metadata template as the media type of the item. So in digital commons we configure that as a drop down menu where staff can select text video or image. And this fits in with the leader slash six field and the 366 fields and mark used to describe the type of content like text or still images. And finally upload file in digital commons is the location of the resource so that could be a URL, or we can provide the full text of course in the repository. And for cataloging that would correspond to the 856 field and I would recommend that the URL go to the record in digital commons so that we can gather data on usage and present a cohesive and growing collection of OER. We're working with born digital open educational resources with varying levels of descriptive information available. So we want to use all of the tools at our disposal to collect OER into the repository and create mark records for our catalog. The digital commons platform has the option to add customized metadata instruction so we decided to use this feature so we can include those definitions and recommendations from the metadata map that should help our repository staff gather complete metadata and we can share it with our cataloger. So this slide has some examples that's still in a draft version and there's more customization we could do and continue to add metadata instructions. For now we're keeping this project on our demo site while we explore the process of collaborating with public services and technical services to increase discoverability of OERs at Georgia Southern. Okay, next slide. So this brings us to our last conversation starter. Well, I think what we're going to do is jump over this one because we have so many participants that we went through amazing amounts of answers and therefore the rehearsal was a little different. Yeah, so we are going to go through this one, but it is good to consider what resources and tools you wish you had in order to make OER easier to discover. It is 1225 exactly. So, I know, let's see here. John, did you want to say anything about the end of this? As you said at 25 after, you guys could stick around for a little bit longer, five or four minutes. As you say, there's a lot of questions, a lot of participants, so I'm sure people might have some more questions for you, but I can stop the recording right now and pass over the hosting to one of you if you'd like. Yeah, one good thing to keep in mind. I mean, we're going to share out the slides and the PDF with the Mentimeter answers. There is a team resources Google doc in here that has things like that super helpful spreadsheet that I think y'all would really like, including I think also an email getting sent out to like a template for that. Like, really cool stuff. Yeah.