The increasing proliferation of technological strategies including open sources and commercial licence softwares, are causing librarians to take a bold step in redefining their professional roles in this information and communications technology (ICT) savvy society. Triggered by the advancement of ICT, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. While most institutional repositories’ content is scholarly and intellectual, the degree of openness provided to the wider community to access their resources forms an entry point to open knowledge.
It is in this context that Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources (ROER). Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO. The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users. Positive results emanating from the University open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching for the institutional benefit and network communities of practice in OER.
This paper also describes future collaboration work with local and regional institutions in sharing their open access resources, hence creating knowledge sharing across institutions even though it is just metadata sharing. In conclusion, this paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries.
Paper presented at the 29th Annual Conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (Kuala Lumpur : 30 November-02 December 2015). This paper won the Silver Medal under the Best Practice Award category.
Open access repositories on open educational resources: feasibility of adopting the Japanese model for academic libraries
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WEKO_ROER
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