45 SPEC Kit 351: Affordable Course Content and Open Educational Resources
By harnessing the experience and skills established to support open scholarship, libraries are well
positioned to both partner with and establish their own presses to create open textbooks, increasing
access to knowledge.
Continue to encourage use of library-licensed content in classes and provide technical infrastructure
and staff to support this role.
I believe that the research library can and should take a leadership role on campus to advocate for
textbook affordability, to fund incentive programs, to educate and create awareness about textbook
affordability to create an institutional strategy that will help to ensure program success and to create a
coalition of campus partners who will work to make textbook affordability an institutional priority.
I don’t see a huge shift from what we currently do. We provide scanning services for content that
falls within fair use and our university has an affordable coursepack system for content that does not.
Course reserve staff will assist faculty with creating stable links in Canvas to our licensed content. As
faculty become more sensitized to the course materials cost issues, they may seek more assistance from
librarians in finding affordable course content.
I expect that research libraries will make the costs of materials more transparent to faculty, allowing
them to understand better the financial implications of curricular resource selection.
I see it as an area where the library can play a leadership role facilitating services, content and expertise.
I would like to see groups of libraries work on publishing/grants for open educational content. I would
like to see individual library help in the area of education, identification, etc.
I’d like to see libraries negotiate better publisher agreements that give explicit permission to use
licensed manuals in courses. Ultimately, I’d like to see more open access publishing and outrageous
subscription prices driven down. I’m very hesitant to put many efforts in the area of affordability
without tackling the larger publisher-monopoly issues. (This is my personal opinion and not necessarily
that of my institution.)
Integrating affordable content into courses (specifically LMSs) by working closely with faculty should
be one of the primary services that research libraries offer. This is a service area we expect to make
significant progress and see significant growth in the next three years.
Leveraging our library holdings and resources to maximum potential in order to support the teaching
and learning needs of the institution. This means expanding course reserve, pushing boundaries of
copyright and fair use, advocating what we have, and assessing what we’re not providing.
Libraries are often seen as the stewards of information. This should include open information as well.
We provide expertise in searching and synthesizing content to fill the needs of faculty and students of
the university.
Libraries are part of a broader campus-wide conversation about the high cost of texts. Different
units are approaching the problem from different perspectives and strategies. Libraries focus on
open materials.
Libraries have an opportunity to lead in these areas and we should. We should be an active participant
in the research life of the university.
Libraries should participate in development of standards, business/funding models, and policies to
enable availability, integration, and accessibility of ACC in formats that are most useful to teachers
and learners. Libraries should be a partner with other campus leaders in developing strategies and
programs to support ACC services. In addition, libraries can provide skills and systems to support
discovery, authoring, licensing, publishing, and archiving of ACC.
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