Libraries Support STEM Education with Open Access

"Texas A&M University was established as the state’s first public institution for higher education, which sought to provide a broad segment of the population with practical education that would serve direct relevance to their daily lives. More than 150 years later, members of the Texas A&M University Libraries are championing those initiatives by providing Open Access scholarly literature to a West Texas school district in an effort to support STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) education reform. Texas A&M has emerged as a worldwide leader for its ability to provide free Open Access materials on the Internet, via the Libraries, for the benefit of the public—such as the students and teachers at Roscoe Collegiate, an early college/STEM academy in the rural West Texas town of Roscoe, located about an hour west of Abilene. As a member of the Texas High Performance Schools Consortium, Roscoe Collegiate is developing a multiple measure accountability system for students in grades 3-12, in collaboration with the Libraries, Texas A&M faculty and the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension—among other institutions and organizations. Two areas of the multiple measure accountability system will include student developed research presentations and evidence based electronic portfolios, which will rely on accessibility to the Libraries’ Open Access scholarly literature. 'In order to support the ability of the teachers to engage their students in research projects, they [Roscoe Collegiate] needed access to a quality library,' said Dr. Bruce Herbert, director of the Office of Scholarly Communication and professor. 'They invited me to be part of their advisory team and help them make this transformation. As I worked with them it became apparent that if somehow we could get Open Access materials into the hands of the teachers and students it would help them conduct their research projects because they have no other source of trusted scholarly information.' Since online access to most university library holdings is restricted to enrolled students and faculty, Roscoe Collegiate was in need of a solution moving forward. Dr. Herbert and a team from the Libraries worked with a library automation solutions vendor, Ex Libris, to design a portal that bypasses the need for authentication, which allows Roscoe Collegiate users to search through the Libraries’ collection of Open Access materials for a first-of-its-kind collaboration made possible through a new search portal, OakSearch. This portal allows everyone, including the students and teachers at Roscoe ISD, to bypass the need for authentication and to search and download through 6 million scholarly documents ..."