James Neal, Senior Library Program Officer from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) began the OpenEd 2021 session entitled “Federal Funding For OER: Spotlight On IMLS Grants.” I didn’t know about IMLS and learned from Neal’s introduction that it is a federal institute located in Washington, DC, and established in 1996. It is known, according to neal, as a “petite institute” though it is the primary source of federal funding for the nation’s libraries and museums. IMLS has a grant program and develops policy and national initiatives. For the fiscal year 2020, IMLS awarded about $280 million dollars. The discretionary programs include new leadership initiatives. Neal mentioned that for the last five years, IMLS has been focused on OER and open… in general: open data, open access, open science. The session featured grantees and their work.
First, David Ernst, Executive Director of the Open Education Network (OEN), talked about an IMLS-funded project they have worked on. OEN includes 318 members and about 1606 institutions. The project included curriculum developers from across the country, and it was wonderful to read Will Cross on the list! The program started with an online meeting and then monthly mentoring cohort meetings. The idea was to share an action plan with a supervisor. There were cohorts of eight librarians. Simliar to RLOE, the product is an action plan. There are five modules in the curriculum: open education, OER, and Creative Commons was the first module; module 2 is about making the case for open education; module three is the role of libraries; module 4 is about building a program and best practices; and module 5 is “making it real.” The first cohort in 2019 had 31 participants followed by 56 in 2020, 64 in 2021, and 64 in 2022. In 2020 they added a resource-poor institution rate, and in 2021 a BIPOC Librarian Full Scholarship. The format has ranged from five to ten weeks of mentorship online over the course of five months. Tanya Grosz is the Director of Educational Programs and has helped bring in great instructors, including Will Cross. The program is the Certificate in OER Librarianship. What a great program, and we are lucky to have Will here!
Lisa Petrides, Ph.D. from ISKME spoke about the impact of IMLS investments in OER. Petrides spoke about first having a conversation with an IMLS program officer in 2010. Over the next decade, ISKME applied several times for funding and was awarded funding for a couple of programs. The current grant seeks to bring together six academic consortia to study how faculty and library staff search for and discover OER to develop content and an automated system. Petrides emphasized how they have “grown the field together with the funder.” It was also good to learn that they have gained a lot from reviewing proposals and serving as an advisor.
Next, Dean Ruth Hodges from SC State University spoke about their grant and what they learned from the process. The purpose of the HBCU Academic Librarians OER Grant was to increase HBCU librarians’ knowledge about various types of OER, awareness of the strategic role of the library in promoting and sustaining OER on their campuses, and the number of academic courses utilizing low-cost or no-cost materials. An impressive 48% of HBCUs were represented at the HBCU OER Summit! They held three HBCU OER webinars that were attended by over 300 people. Twelve HBCUs received the Textbook Transformation Grants. Their lessons learned included: librarian-faculty collaborations require commitment; frequent types of engagements are key to administrator buy-in; and, there is a need to address racial inequities in technology access and use for effective OER utilization at HBCUs.
Will Cross, the Director of the Open Knowledge Center at NC State spoke about the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN) grant. They developed after a conversation at a meeting the OER and Schoolcomm notebook. They brought in a host of contributors and faculty committed to using this for ILS education. They wanted to create something more dynamic and community-driven. They developed The Scholarly Communication Notebook as a site for renewal. I want to check it out! Cross spoke about seeking out and cultivating resources to fill in gaps. They asked subject-matter experts from the community and asked them to bring the best resources. They are looking to expand the resources included on the site. Will Cross is also involved in a code of best practices for OER. Cross shared a diagram connecting all of the programs described before. Will is always involved in so many open and interconnected projects that bridge training librarians, helping faculty, and supporting students. Will answered a question about fair use eloquently highlighting how we all seek to transform information appropriately and through our intellectual effort. I thought that was a great way of explaining how we all want to use resources “fairly” and create knowledge as students, staff, and scholars.
