To OER or not to OER? A question for academic libraries

To OER or not to OER? A question for academic libraries

The growing demand for higher education and the ongoing developments in ICT infrastructure have created unique challenges for higher education institutions. Open Educational Resources (OER) were once created to provide an easy access to learning material in order to support especially the education systems of developing countries. Now they can play an important role for higher education institutions in supporting their teaching staff to create effective teaching and learning environments for their students to encourage greater individual engagement with information. Academic librarians and libraries have a long tradition in providing information to their users. With regard to OER, key roles are creating digital repositories, providing metadata, resource description and indexing, managing and clearing intellectual property rights or storing and dissemination of OER. New challenges can be promoting „openness“ and „open resources“ and the role that librarians and library professionals play by helping users describe, discover, manage and disseminate OER and related copyright expertise. As an added value, academic libraries are offering infrastructure, trusted relationships and communities of practice to the OER-movement. They are integrating collaborative, open cooperation to teaching and research work – the library as a "OER knowledge manager” and therefore they are strengthening their central position to the academic community.