Affordable and Open Educational Resources Guide

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014! Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor's curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution's learning management system.

This SPEC Kit explores the degree to which ARL member institutions advocate, support, and develop affordable course content and open educational resources (ACC/OER). Free PDF copies of the sections of the kit are available for download.

A great deal has been published on open educational resources and open textbooks in higher education. While open textbooks and OER are exciting options, focusing only on OER or open textbooks often excludes many new efforts that present a wide array of affordable content options - options that have broader reach given the lack of quality, open resources available in many subject areas. Libraries have played a key role in implementing affordable content efforts at academic institutions. The Evolution of Affordable Content Efforts in the Higher Education Environment includes research and stories from across institutions and provides numerous examples for creating successful affordable content programming.

This Best Practices is built on a series of workshops, interviews, and webinars that were conducted over the course of 2019 and 2020. Without the contributions of those partners and participants this project would not have been possible, and we want to recognize their indispensable support for this project.

This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself.