Workshop 1.4 | LIBERating Metadata Flows to Improve Findability of European Open Textbooks and Exploring Tools to Improve Advocacy and Adoption
Date: Wednesday, 1 July 2026, 16:00-18:00
Location: R91
Speakers:
Suzanne Tatham, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Michelle Breen, University of Limerick, Ireland
Toby Steiner, Thoth, United Kingdom
Organised by the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group
LIBER’s Educational Resources Working Group is continuing to focus on Open Educational Resources (OER) in recognition of their increasing importance in offering equitable access to quality learning resources. The main part of the workshop will showcase an ongoing project conducted by the Working Group to establish a joint open catalogue through the usage of Thoth (https://thoth.pub/). Following this, the workshop will outline further areas being taken forward by the group to improve the adoption of OER, with a focus on open textbooks.
Area 1: OER discoverability
Currently, most examples of OER and OER repositories come from North America. Whilst European institutions have been able to benefit from the expertise of these colleagues, we are at a point in time where we need to look at developing our own infrastructure to improve the visibility and discoverability of European content.
The integration of open metadata management into textbook production workflows, library cataloguing systems, and long-term archiving solutions is gaining importance and urgency in the open access environment. Provided by the UK non-profit Thoth Open Metadata, this open source and community-led platform provides metadata management and distribution solutions to tackle the challenges of getting Open Textbooks and Open Access books into the wider book supply chain (incl. into libraries’ catalogues), thus ensuring their long-term discoverability, sustainability and accessibility.
We will show how metadata for textbooks are being managed, exported, and disseminated to platforms and indices including OERSI and the Open Textbook Library; how DOIs get auto-registered with Crossref for books and chapters alike; how textbooks are registered with larger-scale indices such as ProQuest, and how publications are automatically archived in open repositories such as the Internet Archive and Zenodo through the Thoth Open Archiving Network, an open, transparent and auditable alternative to existing long-term preservation mechanisms.
Following an initial presentation to introduce the plan devised by our Working Group, we invite participants to collaboratively consider the requirements of such a catalogue, how to ensure sustainable upkeep, and to reflect on what kinds of open educational resources they would like to see included in such an open catalogue.
Area 2: OER and AI
AI has many potential applications in relation to OER. In this workshop, we will outline the role ChatBots can play in OER, how AI can help with translation, and how our community has engaged with new initiatives such as Sylla to improve the discovery and use of OER. We will invite participants to share initiatives from their own institutions.
Area 3: Measuring the impact of OER
The working group has been exploring ways to measure the adoption and potential impact of OER as a way of supporting OER advocacy. We have done this through the collation of usage data and metrics. The aim has been to develop a reproducible, data-informed approach to understanding and advocating for OER in European research libraries. Within the workshop, we will seek feedback on the methodology we have developed to assess OER usage and visibility within university teaching collections.