Open Education Resources

In this session, three Librarians from the University of Victoria Libraries and two colleagues from the ETCL will share their insights and perceptions of the hands-on-training in open knowledge creation they experienced as Open Knowledge Practicum (OKP) Fellows. The OKP is a 12-week practicum offered every semester through the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at UVic, located within the Digital Scholarship Commons. The practicum invites all members of the Greater Victoria Region to bring any public-facing project or project of community importance to the ETCL. During the practicum, community members or university staff, students, or faculty work with ETCL staff to bring their projects to completion and publish them in an open access format. The OKP also allows fellows to contribute to Wikipedia or similar open resources and share their knowledge in an online space.
In addition to a brief overview of the OKP and the practical and experiential learning opportunities it provides, presenters from ETCL and the UVic Libraries will share their projects, discuss key elements and briefly demonstrate the digital presence they created during their practicums. Ying Liu, Linguistics, Pacific and Asian Studies and Religious Studies Librarian, will speak about her digital exhibition of two Chinese Canadian community newspapers: the World Journal and New Republic newspapers, and the original Wikipedia article she created. Pia Russell, Education, Children's Literature, and Indigenous Studies Librarian, will discuss the BC Historical Textbooks project. Aditi Gupta, Engineering & Science Librarian, will discuss her work on information literacy resources for librarians in South Asia. Caroline Winter, Open Scholarship Facilitator in the ETCL along with Randa El Khatib, Assistant Director (Open Knowledge Initiatives) of the ETCL will provide an overview of the ETCL, the OKP and other initiatives such as DHSI.
This panel discussion will be of interest to those wanting to know more about how to effectively engage in cross-disciplinary, collaborative research projects in multimedia settings.

“Access to information”. “Breaking down barriers”. “Support for learning”. These phrases are common to both librarianship and the open movement, as are emerging priorities like “marginalized communities” and “connected learning”. There is a clear strategic union between the two communities, and an opportunity for librarians to engage with this sector to better support their patrons within the current state of the educational sector. This session will explore the case for library support of open initiatives, including an overview of key research findings regarding the role of open in education. It will highlight resources to support open initiatives in teaching and research, particularly for patrons not employed in traditional academic institutional roles. Finally, it will suggest simple and time-efficient steps librarians of all stages and sectors can take to get involved in the world of open and education.