You will hear the following presentations:
OR, open licensing, and the role of librarians as the vanguard of the open movement
(Neil Butcher, OER Africa, OER Strategist. South Africa)
Drawing on work that OER Africa has been doing with the African Library and Information Association (AfLIA), this presentation will explore the concepts of OER and open access and their relevance to librarians in the context of the knowledge economy, including discussion on how this has become even more important given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic globally. The presentation will explore how open licensing is changing the role of librarians, while making their function more important than ever before. We will also explore what we have learned about the key skills and knowledge that librarians need to take on these new roles and strategies we have deployed to help to develop those skills amongst AfLIA members – and outline what lessons this might hold for libraries globally.
The burgeoning field of open education librarianship
(Nicole Allen, SPARC, Director of Open Education. United States)
Over the last decade, academic libraries have emerged as drivers of OER policy, practice, and publishing of OER in the U.S. and Canada. Prompted by student concerns over the rapidly rising price of postsecondary textbooks, libraries have launched programs to support the use, creation, and pedagogy associated with OER, cultivating a new and growing field of open education librarianship. This presentation will explore the past, present, and future of why open education matters to libraries, focusing on a North American context.
Supporting educational resource discovery through distributed faceted discovery of open access resources across multiple systems
(Edmund Balnaves, Prosentient Systems Pty Ltd. Australia)
Digital services supporting educational delivery increasingly need to draw on disparate data sources to bring together the research assets supporting content delivery.
This presentation discusses our experiments with very large discovery frameworks and to consolidate asset discovery across multiple sources in an opensource framework supported by analytics feeding into Artificial Intelligence for smart discovery of content in a very large asset store.
The use of this in the context of asset discovery for University of New England, Australia will be discussed.
