Hi everyone,

Here at Mt Hood Community College (MHCC), our Cataloging & Metadata Specialist and I have been working to leverage MARC records to make OER easier to find.

Here’s a link to our OER MARC Template – please share with your catalogers and systems librarians!

This initially started because we have a collection development policy to add anything to our collection that’s published by our faculty. There’s no reason this should exclude OER, but not having MARC fields to highlight the open content was a barrier to discovery. So we decided to solve that through local cataloging rules that track and display the following:

·         2 subject headings that indicate a resource is OER (653_6: uncontrolled genre/form terms): OER and Open educational resources

·         Attribution Statement which includes the license type (540: terms governing use and reproduction)

·         Relationship between print and electronic versions of the same OER (776: Additional physical form)

·         Funding source, if the OER was created on a specific grant

·         Link to original and derivative works (787: Other relationship entry)

·         Course outcomes (sometimes difficult to ascertain without speaking with the author)

·         OER revision/remix statement – a note from the author explaining how the derivative differs from the original

For a detailed explanation of what, how, and why we did this, see our recent article “Leveraging Cataloging and Collection Development Expertise to Improve OER Discovery” OLA Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2019).

After that went to print, we figured out how to reconfigure our OPAC to make this OER metadata visible to our patrons. Most of the fields above are searchable, particularly the 653_6 field that indicates a resource is OER. Using that field, we built a LibGuides search box that scopes just to the OER bibs in our catalog. You can see that here, https://libguides.mhcc.edu/oer/guide

We have not yet loaded our OER MARC records into OCLC, as we want to get through this proof of concept first and have some discussions with our peers. There might be better ways to use MARC than what we’ve done here, but this is our first shot and so far it’s working quite well for us. We are excited to share it with you all!

-Heather

Heather White, MLS

Library Technical Services & OER Coordinator

Mt Hood Community College

26000 SE Stark St., Gresham, OR 97030

503-491-7106

heather.white@mhcc.edu

“Study, learn, help one another always.” – Chief Plenty Coups