Bill Jones (Digital Resources and Systems Librarian at Fraser Hall Library) was interviewed by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) about his involvement in the creation of the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone. SPARC is an international advocate for Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education. Read the full article on the SPARC blog.
What is SPARC?
From SPARC: “SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. As a catalyst for action, SPARC focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders—including authors, publishers, libraries, students, funders, policymakers and the public—to build on the opportunities created by the Internet, promoting changes to both infrastructure and culture needed to make open the default for research and education.”
The Importance of the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone
People have a difficult time finding open educational resources (OER). One of the major challenges in locating OER is the lack of standardization of information about these resources. To address these challenges, an international group of librarians worked together to find a common set of labels to describe OER to help with discovery.
Bill Jones, as one of the developers of OASIS, an internationally-used OER search engine, participated in this OER Discovery Working Group. Jones said, “We hope it makes a positive difference in the user searching experience, in overall OER discoverability across platforms, and that it makes for easier consumption of metadata when adding new OER to existing collections.”
Link to the Draft document for the OER Metadata Rosetta Stone, open for public comment:
YouTube video of the presentation at the Open Education Conference in November 2020:
Link to the Google presentation slides: https://tinyurl.com/yhkl6r5k
This blog post was brought to you by the SUNY Geneseo Open Services Committee. If you would like help finding Open Educational Resources, please use this form:
