Contributed by Editors Sammy Peters & Kristina Clement

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recently hosted its biennial conference in Cleveland, Ohio from April 11th to the 13th. Your very own editors attended the conference and saw many of the different Open Education and Open Access sessions that were offered. This blog will highlight some of the sessions and online content that can be found about these sessions related to Libraries and OER. 

During the pre-conference workshops, there was a session titled OER+Scholarly Communication. This session worked to help attendees feel empowered about highlighting voices from the field and building learning objects that share the stories and expertise of different faculty that librarians serve. You can find out more about the OER + Scholcomm program that these three librarians have created here:  https://lisoer.wordpress.ncsu.edu 

Presentations with available slides

Some of #ACRL2019’s panels, workshops, and longer presentations covered Open topics. In keeping with open methods, many of these presenters shared their slides.

• The Library is Open! Starting Advocacy Conversation to Grow OER on Campus was a panel session that discussed the best point of entry for OER work and best ways to educate your campus on OER. You can access the slides here. 
• Building Your Own Research Database Using DocFetcher Open Source Software was a TechConnect Presentation that talked about using open source software to make documents full-text and searchable. You can access the slides here. (attach ppt slides)
• When Research Gets Trolled: Digital Safety for Open Researchers was a panel presentation that covered topics related to how to protect faculty or students who make their work publicly accessible and come under personal and professional attack. You can view the session notes here. You can view the slides here. 
• Advocating for Open: Putting Ethics into Practice was a panel session that worked to talk about how there is a vital role for libraries to lead open conversations. You can access the group notes here. You can access the slides here. On a note one of our authors Micah Vandegrift was on this panel session. You can see his blog on Open Science and OER here.

OER Posters

Posters are always a fun way to see what research people are conducting throughout the field. Below are some posters about OER. You can view all of the #ACRL2019 posters here.

• An Agile Approach to Promoting Open Educational Resources looked at how you can incorporate elements of agile (transparency, trust, communication, and embracing change) to successfully promote an OER resources project on campus. You can find the poster here. 
• Communicating an Open Access Impact Narrative: An Analysis of Library-Funded Publications talked about the authors work building a dataset of articles that were funded by OA funds. The poster shares an analysis of the data they collected. You can access the poster here. 
• Reframing Open to Support Student Success and Early Career Researchers talked about the programs at the authors’ institutions that helped them support student success through open tools and open culture. You can access the poster here. 
• Librarians as OER Advocates and Leaders shared the stories of librarians who are the 2018 SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellows and shared their stories of the work they have done on their campuses. You can access the poster here. 
• Other posters of interest may include:
  • Inside a Private College: Librarians Recasting the OER Game
  • Open Educational Resources: Moving from Pilot to Program
  • On Course: A Critical Assessment of a Textbook Affordability Initiative
  • Ubiquitous OER? Start with Pre-Service Teachers

Presentations & Contributed Papers

There were many thirty minute presentations at ACRL related to #OER on which presenters also wrote a conference paper. Listed below are some of those papers and presentations.

• Collaborating with Students to Find and Evaluate Open Educational Resources in Engineering discussed the need to get input from subject matter experts to identify proper OER materials to use in courses. The presenters talked about their process in involving students as the subject matter experts in the evaluation and tailoring of OER materials. You can find the conference paper here. 
• The Open Textbook Toolkit: Developing a New Narrative for OER Support discussed an IMLS funded research grant conducted by North Carolina State University Libraries which looked at psychology faculty who are considering OER in their courses. They identified that there were 3 main barriers that faculty encountered in their work: discover, time, and quality. You can find the conference paper here. 
• Finding New Angles: OER Student Survey Data and the Academic Library Narrative talked about a student questionnaire that Rutgers Librarians used to evaluate the success of their OER program. The responses “showed that they were concerned about textbook affordability, like their open and affordable course content, and unanimously support continuing the program.” (Wilkinson & Todorinova, 2019). You can find the conference paper here. 
• Other papers of interest may include: 
  • Part 1 – OER Adoption in an American History Course: An Exploration of Impact on Student Outcomes and Behaviors, 
  • Part 2 – Promotion and Adoption of Textbook Affordability and Affordable Course Materials: Forensic Science, 
  • Designing Online Faculty Development “Mini-Courses” at Community Colleges to Speed OER Adoption, 
  • Support Scholars Who Share: Combating the Mismatch between Openness Policies and Professional Rewards. 

You can access the entire ACRL 2019: Recasting the Narrative Proceedings here. 

Invited Keynote

One of the most popular #OER and Open Access session at ACRL was Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani’s invited keynote titled Beyond Free: A Social Justice Vision for Open Education. You can access Dr. Jhangiani’s presentation materials here. Dr. Jhangiani talked about how crippling student loan debt can be and how textbooks play a huge impact on that. Further, he explained that the OER movement has changed its vision to the freedoms that come from open education practices. “As natural leaders of campus OER initiatives, academic librarians should recognize that adopting digital technologies (even those branded as “inclusive”) solve some access issues while masking and exacerbating others, that accessibility is not a retrofit to access, that open is not the opposite of private, and that not everything could (or even should) be open.” (Jhangiani, 2019). During his presentation Dr. Jhangiani mentioned a blog post he had recently written that looked into the 5 Rs for Open Pedagogy; you can access the blog post here. 

All a-Twitter about OER

Twitter is a favorite tool of many librarians to network and connect with colleagues, but conference time really ramps that up. Often librarians will tweet their favorite parts of sessions they attend so everyone who cannot attend can see slides or quotes from the session. During ACRL, Twitter was blowing up with content related to #OER and #ARCL2019. Here are some of our favorites. 

If you attended an ACRL session that we did not mention related to OER and Libraries, tweet @Sammy_Library and @kc_librarian1 with the session you attended or comment below! 
We sure are looking forward to #ACRL2021 because the theme is Ascending into an Open Future! That theme is giving us ALL the #OER feels.

This post is by Sammy Peters and Kristina Clement and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.