Trust in Materials: Library Workers’ Adoption and Adaptation of Open Educational Resources

This paper reports on an exploration of library workers’ perceptions of open educational resources (OER) and the characteristics that support adoption. Library workers play important roles in connecting educators to relevant OER and in developing OER that are used in library instruction and library and information science (LIS) education. In this focus group study, we investigated the characteristics and qualities of OER that library workers identify as essential in supporting adoption, including trustworthiness of OER, examples and stories of use, adaptability of materials, modular organization, and clear metadata. This paper overviews these characteristics and offers recommendations for library workers and library and information science faculty who are developing OER.