Creating a Culture of Openness and Accessibility | PennWIC

"The first talk I attended was on open educational resources (OERs) and copyright given by Nicole Allen, the Director of Open Education for SPARC. Nicole discussed the rising cost of college textbooks and journal subscriptions, and how high costs impede college students’ access to these materials. One partial solution to this problem involves institutions adopting OERs, which are free, openly-licensed teaching, learning and research materials that follow Creative Commons principles. Places to find OERs include repositories such as the OER Commons and Open Textbook Library; an example of a successful OER model is the OpenStax College project out of Rice University ... This topic provided a perfect segue into the next event I attended: the Digital Humanities Forum’s spring symposium,Research on a Global Scale: The Radical Potential of Linked Open Data. The event featured three amazing speakers who all discussed how we can better link the data we have at our own institutions to make it more accessible to other libraries, institutions, cultural heritage sites, and publishing platforms ... Much of Corey’s project hinges on meaningful metadata that accurately describes digital resources, and this provided a nice introduction to Amy Rudersdorf’s talk about theDigital Public Library of America (DPLA) ... The last talk at this DH Forum event was given by Eric Kansa who discussed direct applications of open data to publishing and scholarly research. Eric talked about his own project, Open Context, based at the Alexandria Archive Institute ..."