Library and Museum DI&A

The Library leads Open Education Resource (OER) initiatives at Mines to promote affordable and open learning resources and reduce financial barriers to higher education. Initiatives are led by Scholarly Communications Librarian, Seth Vuletich and collaboratively managed via a Mines OER Steering Committee that includes faculty, instructional designers, and students. 

One initiative that is yielding substantial rewards is the OER faculty grant program, now entering its fourth year of CDHE funding. This program has been funded $118,000 over 3 years to support 37 faculty incentive awards to adopt, adapt, or create OER for the Mines curriculum. The program is already saving Mines students approximately $621,000 annually in required and supplemental course material costs. This represents a 5x return on investment at the time of implementation, with much higher cumulative savings in coming years from continued use.

Learn more about this and many other ongoing OER initiatives.

Arthur Lakes Library offered a short course for faculty and faculty-track graduate students interested in learning about OER and becoming an OER@ Mines Champion.The purpose of the course was to introduce the faculty and faculty-track graduate students to the OER conversation and spark interest in Open Education initiatives on campus and within their discipline.

To help faculty develop ADA compliant accessible course materials, the library created a short Canvas course. the course covers accessibility implementation strategies for various course material formats including video, PDF, and Powerpoint. The course is available for adoption and adaption in Canvas Commons. Additionally, the Library has facilitated 2 cohorts through which the course has had 38 participants across 7 institutions.

Government records are public records, the people's records, and are freely accessible at the library in both paper and electronic format. The Library's Government Publications section is in the process of tagging all it's records with an open access icon.  Look for it in our library browser (Primo).

Additionally, the Library has been hard at work advancing Open Access initiatives. Through Innovation Funds the library has created an Open Access funding program to assist faculty in paying Article Processing Charges. This program has just concluded it's inaugural year with 21 papers funded. The Library also supports Open Access through agreements that allow Mines Affiliates to publish Open Access with Cambridge Press and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) free of charge.