 Hi, I'm Emily Carlisle Johnston, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Crystal Mills and Courtney Waugh. We work for the libraries at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and today we're going to talk about a targeted OER outreach initiative that we led this summer in response to the shift to remote learning. Crystal will start with some background for this project. Courtney will talk about the outreach initiative itself and I'll share lessons and future directions based on what resulted from it. The course reading service assistance directors in providing access to their assigned course materials in a number of ways, such as scanning and uploading book chapters under fair dealing, ensuring stable links to online resources, purchasing new content for the collection, placing physical books on reserve for loan and remitting copyright permissions to the rights holder. The course reading service is not truly open access as we use the areas platform to restrict content to enrolled students. However, the primary goal is to reduce course costs for students and to support faculty in using library collections and OER as alternatives to commercial textbooks and custom course packs. For the 2020-2021 academic year, we could not offer physical reserves due to the high proportion of courses being taught online and students opting to study remotely, as well as provincial quarantine requirements that made short term loans impractical. We promoted our other course reading services over the summer for instructors rapidly redesigning their courses for online delivery. We redeveloped our own workflows to fully exhaust our options for online access, including digitizing full works and making them available via a controlled digital lending platform. The CDL option was a crucial stop gap in a difficult time and allowed us to provide access to approximately 250 titles otherwise only available in print. However, we recognize that the CDL service cannot continue long term as we look toward an in-person fall 2021 semester. In addition to requests driven by faculty course reading submissions, we also cross-reference our library holdings against the bookstore required textbook list, making purchases of any new titles. We prefer to purchase in the online format, but money titles from the list are not available for institutional license as e-books from the publisher. For these titles, we began to look for sustainable solutions and alternatives. This is where OER and our targeted OER outreach initiative came in. A 2018 report of Western's OER working group indicated that open education was gaining momentum at Western, but that there was a need for increased awareness. Despite the working group's findings, there was little institutional support for implementing the recommendations. The report was essentially shelved in 2018, but Western libraries continue to work on the side with other campus partners to try and gain some traction. COVID and the shift to remote learning provided a timely opportunity to refocus our efforts on OER awareness, and we saw this targeted outreach initiative as a manageable project with potential for high impact. We turned our attention to the bookstore list that Crystal mentioned, exploring open alternatives for those titles that weren't available for institutional license as e-books from the publisher. We felt like this was a great opportunity to target faculty for whom we were not able to purchase materials and see if they would be receptive to using OER to support their courses. So what did we do? We started with a list of approximately 100 titles that we were not able to purchase from 30 subjects across the disciplines and representing about 60 faculty members. We knew that we wouldn't be able to get through the whole list, so our strategy was to identify classes with high enrollment, areas where we had subject expertise, and previous relationships with faculty. We started with those, searching for or searching a number of OER repositories, looking for alternatives to the titles we weren't able to purchase as e-books for. In cases where we found what we thought would be a viable alternative, we sent an email to the course instructor. The gist of the email was sharing the title of the text we weren't able to purchase, offering an OER alternative or alternatives. We provided some information about the benefits of OER and links to resources and other online course materials. In the end, we contacted 12 faculty from Nursing, Philosophy, Indigenous Studies, History, Human Resources Management, Communication, and the Writing Program. And we shared open textbooks and chapters with them. So what did we hear? Well, we didn't really hear much. Of the 12 faculty that we contacted, only one faculty member replied. Our initial response to the email was positive. Essentially, thank you so much. I'll check these out. But her follow-up email was less than enthusiastic and reflected a concern that the resources we proposed would dilute her course content and essentially dumb down her teaching. We were also unable to understand what was being provided related to her field and asked, would you have better sources, preferably specialized and devoted just to, in this case, the specific period in history? These results have shown us a few things. First, that two librarians with searching expertise couldn't find open alternatives for most titles really highlighted to us the gaps that continue to exist in OER subject coverage. For many of the upper year specialized courses, there just weren't options to replace commercial materials in their entirety. Second, we often felt intimidated to cold email an instructor and propose an open alternative because we weren't sure that the alternative would really work. And this reinforced to us that course materials are a really personal thing that course instructors are best positioned to choose. Now that's not to say we can't support faculty and instructors in finding alternative course materials, but, and this is the last lesson learned, relationship building is important. It was probably admittedly a lot to receive emails out of the blue sharing a new textbook plus a ton of context and additional resources about OER. Had we been able to share that information over a longer period of time and propose an open alternative only when faculty seems ready to consider it, there may have been more adoptions from our effort. So that was our initiative and that's what we learned. Now, though, with most courses no longer remote, there's not the same urgency to find alternatives to physical course materials. We do want to carry forward the momentum from the project but since it no longer makes sense to present OER solely as this solution to restricted ebook access. We're left with the question, how do we reframe our outreach. Well for us, it looks like presenting OER as one of many resource options that faculty might consider and to supporting offering support with searching only to those who respond or reach out with interest. And this approach makes sense to us for a few reasons. First, it lets us combine our messaging about OER with communications that are already going out about other services that support affordable course materials. And in a recent, for example, in a recent email blast alerting faculty to the course reading service, we added a note about and a direct contact to our service that supports finding and adopting OER. We also recently held a course materials Q&A to talk about OER, copyright and our course reading service all at once. Second, combining messaging about OER with messaging about other course materials services ensures that we're really reaching those who would find the message most relevant. For example, we're in the process of adding information about OER and our course reading service, alongside existing information about the bookstore in new faculty orientation materials. Earlier this spring, we added similar information to a supported course redesign program run by our Center for Teaching and Learning. Finally, approaching our advocacy in this way rather than cold calling instructors, lets us reach wider audience while protecting our own resources. We can instead spend our time educating and building relationships with those who reach out so that when it gets to the point of helping them locate an OER for possible adoption, our time spent searching won't be for nothing. We do want to continue offering support in identifying OER, but for the sake of sustainability, we'll only be doing so by request for the time being. So to conclude, while our targeted OER outreach initiative didn't necessarily turn out how we hoped, we learned some lessons along the way. These lessons have gotten us closer to advocating and supporting OER in a way that's responsive to our campus climate and is more sustainable given the limited resources we have to support open education. Thank you.