Pre-Conference Workshop 4: How Can We Enhance the Discoverability of Open Text Books? Hands-on Workshop and Discussion

Pre-Conference Workshop 4: “How Can We Enhance the Discoverability of Open Text Books? Hands-on Workshop and Discussion”
Organised by the Educational Resources Working Group

Location: MTA Library 2nd floor Small Meeting Room

Presenters: Tamara Pianos, Helen Moore

Findability of quality open textbooks
The Working Group just started sharing the topics for 2023/24. One important aim is to enhance the findability of quality open textbooks. The goal is to make open textbooks more easily discoverable and used through libraries for the benefit of learners, and for the benefit of teachers so they can find and re-use open textbooks, and promote their own work.

Some questions in this context are:

  • What does enhanced findability mean for collection curation?
  • Can or should open textbooks be found in common library discovery environments?
  • How can we make special textbook- or OER repositories or infrastructures like ENCORE or EduArc more accessible to our library users in the future?

Topics of the workshop:
The focus of this workshop will be on aspects that will be helpful in making more open textbooks findable in our collections (through discovery systems, catalogues)

quality criteria

  • define quality criteria
  • list existing collections that have a convincing quality control
  • list cornerstones for collection curation (as a basis for decision making for inclusion of publications)
  • depending on background of workshop participants: exchange between OA / OER and collection management about quality evaluation and acquisition practices of (diamond) open access publications and / or OER like text books that are published in institutional settings instead of publishing houses.

formats

  • a format is usually not necessarily a quality criterion but it can be an obstacle: Is it a showstopper if an open textbook appears in the form or an ever-changing website rather than a PDF or e-book? Does this pose a problem for the participants/libraries?

After a short introduction to the Working Group activities, we would like to discuss these and other questions with the workshop participants. The goal is to have a first set of criteria by the end of the workshop.

53rd LIBER Annual Conference