The Open Access Books Collection: Expanding Access and Building Connections | The Signal

The Open Access Books Collection: Expanding Access and Building Connections

December 16, 2021 by Carlyn Osborn

This is a guest post by Kristy Darby, a Digital Collections Specialist in the Digital Content Management Section at the Library of Congress.

In March 2020, we first shared about the growing collection of open access e-books available on loc.gov. A lot has changed since then but, in particular, the Open Access Books Collection was created. This newly created collection brings together all known open access e-books available on loc.gov, the number of which has grown significantly from about 300 titles to over 3,200.

s a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Library of Congress staff quickly transitioned to telework in March 2020, including staff primarily focused on print materials. Staff from the Digital Content Management Section (DCM) and the Collection Development Office (CDO) organized a project for recommending officers (ROs) – subject area experts who select new content for the Library’s collection – to identify open access e-book titles from the Directory of Open Access Books, an international digital directory providing access to academic peer-reviewed books with open access licenses, for addition to the Library’s permanent collection. This telework project was specifically created to serve and support Library staff who were newly remote and it successfully resulted in the selection of thousands of titles to be added to the Library’s permanent collection.