Your own practice

As we’ve seen, librarians and other ICT and support staff have an important role in supporting colleagues in finding OER and using it correctly. Here’s a few good practice suggestions to help you get started:

• When you’re searching for openly licensed resources, it’s important to keep a record of where you found material, who created it and what CC licence it uses, so you can attribute properly. We’ll find out more about attribution in the next section. You may want to create a separate document (sometimes called an ‘asset log’) to help you keep this information in one central place. You should also save the downloaded resource in a central location. Keeping a record of how you use different OER is particularly important when you are working on complex projects such as developing an open course that incorporates existing material. We will look at some examples of this in Unit 5.
• If you’re working with colleagues to find OER, or finding openly licensed content yourself, it is important to review and check each resource you’d like to use. Remember to proceed with caution when you find a resource with no creator or licensing information. Could you find an alternative resource to use? Sometimes you may need to go back to the original website where the creator uploaded the resource to find the information you need. Remember that one of the benefits of openly licensed material is that it should provide clear information about the creator and how they want you to reuse the resource.
• Finally, you might already have resources you’d like to use, but have forgotten where you originally found them. Can you use them without breaching copyright? Are they openly licensed? If the resource is an image, you can perform a Google reverse image search [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] to find the picture and information about its creator and copyright information. Otherwise you may be able to use a search engine to find the original resource by using key terms.