Enhancing Discoverability of OER Beyond the IR: Promoting Collaborative Repository Workflows

Depositing open educational resources (OER) in repositories is essential for promoting the discovery of course materials with the broader educational community. At the University of Houston, we developed a workflow that formalizes our process for depositing OER into our institutional repository, ensuring our materials are archived consistently and discoverable by our community. However, taking this a step further by depositing materials in major OER repositories and referatories, such as OER Commons and MERLOT – where many open educators are actually looking for OER materials – has been an ongoing objective for us. The literature shows greater attention paid to the role of institutional repositories in preservation, and less emphasis on the library’s role in depositing or sharing materials in OER repositories. This article explores this gap in the literature, discussing challenges with depositing OER materials. Specifically, we address the challenge of ownership in maintaining accurate and current records for our faculty- and student-created materials; should this process be led by the Libraries, the faculty creators themselves, or should this be collaboratively driven by both? We will highlight our findings from the literature, the workflow we developed for depositing materials in the UHIR, and our future and ongoing work to increase visibility of our OER collections.