Library:Content Curation Strategies for Open Education Resources
The location and selection process will take numerous people to complete:
- Faculty – Needed to develop subject lists for searching and selecting final resources for inclusion.
- Librarians – Needed to develop and support search criteria and the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Needed to train and support student research assistants. Create search plan.
- Support – Needed to search the OER to find subject content listed by instructors/faculty. Needed to assistant in the development and updating of the document search process. This support could be a student or staff member.
The most necessary part of the location process is completion of the inclusion/exclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria will assist librarians and staff in developing an authoritative lists of OER in which the students will complete searching for subject content. If the inclusion criteria are followed, the process of locating OE materials will be quicker over time.
This will be a time intensive process and will require both an education and liaison piece to the work. Instruction for staff/students’ working on the project can be delivered by the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office which will enable an understanding of how content can be used under the permissions provided by the license. This will also create a direct link between the research and permissions process to minimize time spent in administration.
Timelines are important in this process. It can take a long time for permissions to be given for the use of resources. The SCCO may need to contact individual developers and organizations to gain the rights for use of the content. Additional negotiates around curating and archiving the content may add time to the process. It may be impossible to gain permissions for an item. If there is no alternative resource, linking to the resource can be done without permissions.
Note – It would be beneficial to consider the competencies of the students hired for this work. Students in the School of Library and Information Studies with course work related to intellectual property, copyright and research services would be definite assets to the project.
The purpose of ensuring rich metadata at the outset of the project is to support the eventual creation of a searchable interface. While decisions about how the interface will be searchable (e.g. keyword, subject, tagging) need to be discussed, beginning the project with more robust metadata will make decision making easier when a content curation infrastructure is being developed.
Suggested metadata fields and descriptions can be found below. Additional fields can be added depending upon perceived benefit to findability. File:Content Curation Metada.docx
Additional Metadata
- Course – The title and course code in which the item is being used. This would be useful for planning across course curriculum and will support building competencies over the degree program.
- Unit – The unit the resource is attached to in the course curriculum.
Unfortunately there is no system currently available to curate and archive OE materials. Discussions are happening between CTLT and the Library about piloting possible solutions to archiving content. For the interim, content curation work is being completed in other TLEF funded programs, including:
- e@UBC. Archiving of the OE content is being completed in the UBC Wiki using categories for searching. This is a possible space to explore for interim archiving of materials.
- The Biology 112/121 project is using a combination of google forms, excel and Wordpress.
- Sauder is using a Delicious plugin for Wordpress.
Consulting with the Library and CTLT on an interim tool will be useful step in the project.
