 Hi everyone. I hope everyone's having a great time at the conference. My name is Pauline Schwartzman and I'm a humanities librarian at the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester and today I would like to tell you about a program that my colleagues and I created. It's called Zero Cost Heroes and it's an effort to recognize and celebrate the people on our campus who make course materials financially accessible to our students. So, in this presentation, I'm going to take you through the process of creating the Zero Cost Heroes project which involved a lot of outreach and interviewing and some writing and designing and ultimately led to what I think is some really fun content that is spreading the word about the people on our campus who are doing this really amazing work. So, I want to start by giving you a bit of background information about the University of Rochester where we work and did this project. So, the U of R is a private research university here in Rochester and upstate New York. We have about 6,500 undergrad and 5,500 grad students. About 70% of our first-year students receive financial aid and 27% of our students come from outside the US and I like to include this statistic especially because one thing we found was that during the pandemic when students had to go home, our international students often had an especially hard time accessing course materials usually due to limited availability in their home countries. Here at the River Campus Libraries, which are the main library system for the University of Rochester, we generally get a lot of support for OER initiatives, especially since one of the goals in our library strategic plan is to, quote, expand services and content that promote open scholarship. At the department level, my colleagues and I who worked on this Zero Cost Heroes project are also part of an OER working group. It's made up of subject liaison librarians that represent a variety of different subjects across the humanities, social sciences and STEM. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 and everyone had to go home, it became really clear to us how difficult it is for some students to access their assigned readings, especially when the library is closed and physical course reserves are not available. We did our best to help students and instructors find digital copies of their textbooks, but this proved to be difficult as for many books, especially textbooks, digital copies simply does not exist. And as we were doing this, we found that so many other staff members and faculty around the University were also working hard to make sure that students had access to the course readings that they need. And it was through that that we came up with the idea for Zero Cost Heroes. So who is a Zero Cost Hero? Well, for us, we decided to make our definition of Zero Cost Heroes fairly broad. We started by just focusing on instructors who used OERs, but we decided to broaden our definition to include any instructor who makes an effort to use low cost or freely available materials in their classes, as well as staff members who help students access course materials. We decided to expand our definition of Zero Cost Heroes for a couple of reasons, one being that it just gave us a larger pool of candidates to work on. The second reason, which I feel is the most important, is that we wanted to highlight all of the different ways in which faculty and staff can make course materials more accessible for students. Course reserves, for example, tends to be underutilized at the River Campus Libraries, but it is a great resource for getting course texts for free. So we made sure to highlight instructors who made an effort to work with librarians to have all of their course materials on reserve and encourage their students to take advantage of reserve materials. We also made sure to highlight the course reserves team at the library. Their work often goes unacknowledged, but it's because of their efforts that so many students are able to do their course readings without having to pay for an expensive textbook. We had a couple different avenues for finding the people that we would nominate as our Zero Cost Heroes. Because we are a group of subject liaison librarians, the natural first step was just to reach out to instructors who we had worked with in the past on OER projects or who had come to us with questions about incorporating OERs into their classroom. We also reached out to library staff and other staff who we felt played an important role in helping to connect students with course materials, such as the reserves team at the library who we felt really deserved to be highlighted. And then we of course had students who would nominate their professors as Zero Cost Heroes. We started by just asking students to send us an email and we ended up streamlining that into a LibWizard forum, which we found students were a lot more likely to fill that out than to email us directly. So once we had our Zero Cost Heroes nominated, we ran brief interviews with each of them as well as with their students if they had been nominated by a student. And the interviews turned out to be really interesting because they revealed that there are a lot of different motivations for using OERs or just for using free resources in the classroom. For some, this was very much an issue of ethics and equity in the classroom. For example, we spoke to one professor from the writing program who said that she only used OERs and free materials because she didn't want any of her students to fall behind if they weren't able to buy a textbook on the first day of class. On the other hand, we had some instructors who said that they simply didn't feel comfortable asking their students to pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook and who said that they felt that what they were doing was not really remarkable or noteworthy. And for instructors who primarily used OERs, they said that their main motivation was just the opportunity to step outside the sort of rigidity of a traditional textbook and get to be more creative with their course materials. Others said that they created their own OERs because they felt that the material they wanted to cover just didn't really exist in a traditional textbook. So for some of these instructors, cost saving for the students was not necessarily their main motivation, but regardless, the impact of it was definitely felt by the students. So after we had reached out to and interviewed our Zero Cost Heroes, next came the most important part, which was sharing everything with our community. So we wrote a series of articles profiling each of our Zero Cost Heroes, which we published on the library's website. And then alongside that, we also made these visuals that we could share really anywhere. We could put them on the library's social media. We put them up as screensavers on the computers. We had them on the digital signs at the library, and we decided to go with the superhero theme because of the name of the project. There's always kind of a fear of going a little too corny with something like this, but we decided to just kind of lean into the corniness, and I think people really enjoyed it. We made these visuals all using Canva, and you can use really any design program that you might have. We decided to use Canva because it's free, and the nice thing about it is that we have all of these saved as templates. So every time we do a new campaign with new people, we can just swap out the text and the photos, and it's really simple to do. Thank you so much for attending my talk today. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you would like, you can take a look at all of our Zero Cost Heroes content on our website. I have the links up here on this slide, and if you have any questions for me, please don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you.