 much. Thank you so much. Hello, and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We're so thrilled to be presenting our talk entitled The Summer of Open Policy and Metadata Mutually Informed Initiatives to Facilitate Sustained OER Collection Development. Quite the mouthful. This presentation is about 60 minutes in length with a few minutes at the end to address any questions. Additionally, we've pasted a link in the chat as well as in the presentation profile page in the comment section to the two documents that we'll be talking about if anyone is interested in viewing them throughout the presentation or after. Okay, let's jump right in. My name is Vanya Stanimic and I'm a master's of library and information science graduate student at Western University. I live, study, and work on the traditional territories of the neutral Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. This past summer I was fortunate to join Ecampus Ontario under the leadership of Lillian Hogendorn. I was one of one half of the OER collections development intern team to spearhead the mediated deposit pilot project. I'm delighted to be presenting today with my co-interant and colleague, Samantha Daniels. Hi, everyone. I'm Samantha. I'm a master's of information graduate student at the University of Toronto. However, I'm currently residing in McMoggy, sorry, the traditional territory of the McMag people in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thank you for coming today and we're excited to share a pilot project experience with you. Between June, July, and August, this past summer, Ecampus Ontario ventured to increase the quantity and variety of open educational resources in the open library repository, which is Ontario's dedicated online source for post-secondary OER. This project, dubbed the Summer of Open, was prompted by three things. First, we heard from our community that they were seeking to incorporate more OER into their teaching during the recent shift to virtual instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that our collection wasn't expansive enough to accommodate these new and diverse needs. The second catalyst for the pilot project was an organizational desire to develop a collection that is more representative of Ontario's diverse community of educators and learners. And thirdly, we wanted to pivot to an active collection strategy instead of one solely dependent on OER creators coming to us to deposit their projects into the open library. As such, the pilot project was based on a mediated deposit strategy which involved searching online for new and adapted OER, engaging with university and college OER leads to explore emerging projects and resources, and finally depositing OER into the open library itself. In addition, the mediated deposit strategy was supported by the creation of a collection development policy and a metadata application profile with a view to extend the possibilities and sustainability of future growth for the open library itself. As a team of two, we developed a workflow where an eye searched for OER and led engagement, as well as the creation of the collection development policy, while SAM managed the collection of resource metadata, the subsequent deposits into the into eCampus Ontario's instance of de-space, and the creation of a more robust and expansive metadata application profile. We began the project with several goals and while they've evolved slightly as they do, the three that you see here are the distilled version. I'm going to go through them quickly and then we'll come back to them later. So the first goal was to add 125 new resources to our collection, which would bring us to a total of 500 resources in the open library. The second goal was to better reflect the diverse needs of Ontario's OER creator and educator communities within our library collection, and finally the last goal was to connect with our member institutions and the greater OER community to foster collaboration and sharing. In order to meet these goals, we needed to go beyond simply sourcing and depositing resources. We wanted to support the sustainable growth of the open library and two documents were an important part of these efforts. These documents were the collection development policy, which was created to formalize and communicate the library's decisions in the collection of materials, and then the metadata application profile, which is required to support the intentions outlined in the collection development policy through technological implementation within the library repository itself. And where the collection development policy is very much in the here and now of the library and the organization in the greater context, the metadata application profile is about setting up the repository to support the future growth of the library through that policy. And over the next few minutes, we're going to talk about the relationship between these two documents based on how they mutually inform the development of each other. So first up is Vanya with his collection development policy. Thanks, Sam. So one of the first things that we tackled right from the beginning was this OER collection development policy. Broadly speaking, a collection development policy is a framework and a set of guidelines or parameters around the collection of materials within which library staff and users work. Often these policies are one component of library acquisition and subscription strategies. They are documents that typically provide information and guidelines, which may be used for the selection of relevant materials for the community the library serves. They may outline the goals and objectives of the library itself, and they may describe how the collection supports these goals and objectives. Ultimately, however, these policies are a mode of communication, a kind of informal contract, so to speak, between the library and its community toward a mutual understanding of what the collection includes, what its priorities are, and how it goes about collecting the materials. So why is it important to the open library? It's important because it provides us with clear directions and guidelines towards a sustainable service model and facilitates continued growth of the collection. One of the first steps towards developing the policy was an environmental scan to explore if any OER-specific policies existed that we could use as a template. As it turned out, there are very few OER collection development policies out there. Most of the policies we discovered were created by post-secondary public or special libraries. As you can see here, the policies cover various sections. However, as we began developing our policy, we recognized that not all of the sections would apply to the open library. We found that we needed to expand and refine some of these areas to better reflect the OER context more specifically. In the end, the policy covers, the current policy covers, two main sections. The first introductory section provides helpful information about the open library, its mission and purpose, the collection objectives, the communities it serves, and includes a definition of OER, which is always helpful. The second section of the policy outlines the collection development components and includes information about required and recommended criteria for deposit into the library, scope of the collection, information about open licensing and copyright, and the main avenues towards depositing resources into the collection. So lots of information. In addition, we included information about the open library's ongoing efforts to collect materials created and shared by Indigenous knowledge keepers, as well as francophone content, and resources with the Canadian context in mind. This was one step forward, sorry, one step toward realizing our mission of an inclusive and representative collection of resources for all educators and learners in Ontario. We also aimed at diversifying the types of resources we collect by emphasizing in the policy the immense value of materials like syllabi, slide decks, and other non-textbook curricular materials. There were also some areas of the collection strategy that we recognized would require refinement based on community feedback and SAM's exploration of other OER metadata guidelines, namely how to integrate non-accessible resources into the collection to support the development while maintaining the distinction between those that are accessible or accessibility compliant and those that have the potential to be reworked into accessible adaptions. The other area of refinement included the acceptance of non-derivative work, which we recognized was highly relevant in contexts where the content required it, for example, OER with Indigenous content. So what do we collect? Very simply, the open library aims to collect and preserve OER of any digital format that are openly licensed and include at least one editable file. These two criteria ensure that all OER within the collection have the potential to be adapted, reused, remixed, and shared. Broadly speaking, eCampus Ontario offers an array of tools and services like Pressbooks and the H5P Studio, the aiding, creating, adapting, and using OER in the classroom. The collection development policy is, in our view, the latest addition to this toolkit, one that aids in facilitating the growth of the open library by providing essential guidelines, answering common questions, and making transparent eCampus Ontario's continued commitment to technology-enabled learning. We envision that prospective and experienced OER creators will consult the policy to ensure that the OER projects will have a dedicated home with optimal discovery and preservation. Ultimately, the collection development policy is intended to support ongoing growth of the open library collection in tandem with other OER initiatives such as the metadata application profile, which I will now turn to Sam to discuss. So as a basic background for those of you who aren't familiar, metadata is the descriptive information attached to all of our library resources. Metadata elements include things like the title or an author or license, and we use these metadata elements to facilitate the search capabilities in the library's catalog online. A metadata application profile is a document that contains all the specifications and guidelines that an organization needs to effectively describe the objects in their repository. It details the specific ways each metadata element should be used to ensure the goals of the organization are being implemented appropriately within the repository. The application profile gives guidance for consistently applying the same standard for every single record. An example of that would be the title metadata element, which gives guidelines for formatting and provides directions for what to do when you have a subtitle. Overall, the metadata application profile is an extension of the collection development policy. It's the means to enact policy developments and facilitate the evolution of library services in line with the ongoing pedagogical developments of the larger community. And while there are existing metadata schemas specific to learning materials like OER, some examples of that include LRMI, IEEE LOM, OER Commons, and there's others, we needed to integrate and supplement those schemas so that we could meet the specific information needs of our community. So the work done in the collection development policy as well as in the one-on-one meetings with our member institutions helped us to better understand what those specific needs are. For example, one of the key areas of focus we determined to be especially important to our community was the inclusion of Indigenous, Francophone, and Canadian-centric resources. So with that in mind, we needed to devise ways to best share and represent those resources in their appropriate frameworks. With Indigenous resources, the specifications for appropriate usage often go beyond standard open licensing, so we needed to ensure that we captured metadata that fully encompassed those defined appropriate usages. As a result, we've begun looking into the implementation of traditional knowledge labels, which was developed by local context. This example highlights the necessity of keeping the metadata in conversation with the community and its needs. The metadata schemas that I mentioned before are general enough that they have the capability of accommodating the traditional knowledge labels, but they're not currently used as default in OER metadata. So there are many examples of these types of decisions that we made about the metadata as a result of bringing the collection development policy into that conversation. And so the following three slides are some examples of that. So first, we enhanced our usage of metadata elements to better describe resources in ways that we determined are useful to our library users, and that would make it easier for them to find what they're looking for in our collection. This included adding resource typology and categorization search elements for learning material type education level and file formats of resources. We also expanded our use of relational elements to trace the adaptations, versions, sources, and interreferencing of OER in the collection. And we've decided to start recording sponsorship information about the OER to better identify those who are supporting OER creation and development. The work we did also led us to decide to expand and develop our controlled vocabularies like the subject headings into which resources fit, which increases discoverability and aims to better represent the library's collection in the ways that are most important to our community. And as Vanya mentioned previously, we're using metadata elements to facilitate the ability to include non-accessible resources in the library so that they can be developed into accessible versions while also ensuring that they're clearly differentiated from accessible versions. And we believe that all of the above examples are direct results of the collection development policy and metadata application profile working together. And with these two documents in mind, here is a summary of the outcomes of the pilot project. So as a reminder, we began the project with these three goals to have 500 resources in our open library to have those resources better reflect the needs of our community and to foster a community of sharing and collaboration. At the end of the pilot project, we have surpassed our goal of 500 resources. We've actually deposited 582 and there are another 87 that are in the queue to be deposited. And at the outset, 66% of the OER were textbooks, and we only had 17 French language resources. We now have sourced an additional 37 French language resources. And as you can see, our total percentage of textbook based resources has increased somewhat significantly. But we believe that's due more to the trend in viewing OER as being synonymous with textbooks. So it's something that we're continuing to work on. And that's an important point to emphasize the implementation of this work is ongoing. So we've set the groundwork and we're in the midst of transforming our open library to fit these new specifications that came as a result of our community interactions and support. And we'd love to continue to develop these relationships. So if you have any suggestions or questions or would like to get more involved, we would love to hear from you. During the pilot project, we connected with our member institutions. And we had eight one-on-one meetings, which has resulted in one pilot project that's ongoing with one of our member institutions. Well, Sam and I recognize that actively collecting OER can greatly boost the quantity and quality of resources in the open library. We were also interested in how sustained growth could be supported beyond the project itself. During the process of creating the collection development policy and the metadata application profile, we believe that it was essential that each of these documents should inform the other. That's beginning to lay the groundwork, as Sam said, for a long-term collection development strategy that is flexible and considerate of both the resource collection and metadata components. Some examples where these documents informed each other include areas such as accessibility of resources, as we already talked about, and the best manner in which to grade and display this element. Additionally, the expansion of the repository's control vocabulary through the metadata application profile ensured a greater diversification of content, which became a key aspect of the collection development policy. And finally, through our engagement with the university and college OER leads across Ontario, as well as ongoing metadata harvesting projects, we have been able to shape both documents to reflect and address our community's needs as we gain more insight. To put it simply, the foundation for ongoing OER collections growth are policies that outline the manner of collection, the goals of the collection, and a flexible metadata structure to ensure long-term sustainability based on the needs of our community. It has been our experience that creating these two documents in tandem are important for steps that require minimal resources yet produce valuable direction for the development of the collection. And as Vania has just said, I think the key takeaway of this presentation is that the long-term sustainability of OER repositories like open libraries require the development of both policy and metadata in conversation with the current needs and future directions of the organization and its community. The collection development policy and the metadata application profile together define the roles, responsibilities, and technical specifications required to support our open library and enable the efficient management of resources toward our collective goals. And that concludes our presentation. We have a few minutes for questions, I hope. Please feel free to ask in the chat pod and we'll try our best to answer them. Thank you. Thank you, Vanya and Samantha for sharing this wonderful work. We have many comments in the chat. One question, feel free, the ones that are in the chat chatting away to address any questions here. And that question that we, one question that we have, from Sanya, is a collection development policy you worked on available in the open by now? Is it available? Yes, absolutely. It's available and we have provided some links to the policy and we welcome everyone to view it and to adapt it and provide feedback where it's definitely an open document. Excellent. And also thank you, Leena, for sharing the link to the area NOEG Connect where we see that you have already shared your slides so you can have the access to all the links that you shared in the slide. Thank you very much for that. And unfortunately we have run out of time right now but I encourage everyone to continue the conversation, NOEG Connect. We have shared several times the link. I'm going to share it once again.