Jennifer Jordan

Less than a year into my job as an open educational resource (OER) librarian, a coworker told me I wasn’t actually a librarian. She said she didn’t know what I did, but my job wasn’t a librarian’s job. I wasn’t sure how to get out of this conversation. Distraction worked with my kids and my dog, so I looked down at her feet and told her I liked her shoes. She thanked me, and we started talking about where she got her shoes, and I didn’t have to address her claim that I wasn’t a librarian. Try distraction next time someone is outright rude to you. Confuse them, and they’ll leave you alone.

Now that I have been in my job for over two years, I am thinking about what an OER Librarian’s duties should be because the scope of the job can expand and engulf a person. I disseminate information. I help people protect their intellectual property through open licensing. I work to archive OER created by our faculty. I also subscribe to that librarian ethos of wanting to make educational materials available to everyone, except archiving works inside the library, I work to expand openly published educational materials. While I perform duties that are similar to a traditional librarian, there are differences too.

For example, my job is focused on making open materials like textbooks and other materials more discoverable. Another unique aspect of my job is that I work help lower course material costs for students. College textbooks are often not available at the library, and there’s a reason for that. The textbook publishing industry doesn’t want to give away their intellectual property for free.

The publishing industry has most sharply affected my job in the past three months. Our college bookstore is changing its sales model to one where all students are automatically charged a flat-fee to digitally rent their textbooks. Under this model, materials are available to students on the first day of class. It will cost $279 each fall and spring. Students can opt out of the program, confusingly called “Equitable Access.” The word equitable is justified by publishers because they say all students pay the same price.

this new flat-fee rental program is completely counterintuitive for me: charge *all* the students to save them money?

The price is more like an average of what all students pay, so the burden of paying for expensive textbooks and courseware (usually in STEM and business) is now shifting to students who are majoring in degrees that may not line them up for jobs directly after graduation. Many humanities and fine arts teachers at my university have been going textbook-free for a while now. Fine arts students seem to be the most disadvantaged in this sales model because these disciplines require materials not sold at the bookstore, for example, reeds for instruments and art supplies. Supplies for intro art classes are available at the bookstore, but upper level course materials are not available at the bookstore.

Another aspect of this business model that I have learned about is how the textbook publishing industry has co-opted language and research from the OER-sphere to help them grow their sales model. In Rajiv Jhangiani’s blog, he shared an image of a brochure from the publisher Pearson that shows how publishers use OER research to support their sales model.

Like the brochure above says, OER materials *are* available on the first day of class and they *are* digital, but that’s where the similarities end between OER and publisher’s textbooks. I created this Venn diagram to visually articulate the difference between OER and publisher’s digital textbooks. The ideas in the diagram came from this Open Oregon webinar by Amy Hofer and Nicole Allen.

I resisted learning about this program for a long time. I didn’t want to learn about how the textbook industry has co-opted research and language from the open education movement to help sell their digitally bundled materials. But then it showed up on my doorstep, Unfortunately, learning about the marketing techniques of big publishing has become part of my job.

The faculty I work with are impacted by this, and they have questions. The scope of my job varies depending on the day. OER Librarian Amanda Larson identified fifty-one skills in twenty-four job postings for OER Librarians and found that no standard scope of work exists for open education librarians; however, Larson did identify categories of skills including scholarly communication, publishing, instructional design, open education, research, web development, outreach, and general library skills. Anecdotally, I think the ambiguity of the role stems from the newness of OER initiatives. Open education grew in response to the rapidly increasing cost of college textbooks. The price of textbooks has motivated faculty like me to want to eliminate publisher’s textbooks from my own classes.

After Thursday’s department-wide layoffs at the DOE, I have been thinking about the flat-fee rental programs, this new sales model of the publishing industry, and how it doesn’t make sense for any university to enter into a flat-rate automatic textbook rental contract with textbook publishers right now. This business model depends on the availability of federal financial aid in students’ bursar accounts, and federal financial aid is administered through the Department of Education (DOE), a unit in the federal government that is currently being dismantled. What will happen to our students’ ability to afford college 1) if they are being forced to keep the textbook industry afloat, and 2) their means to afford college is being gutted?

It’s uncertain what lies ahead for our students as they work to afford an education in our increasingly divisive time. But I can see my job pretty clearly now, even though it wasn’t in my job description. An OER Librarian is an opposing force against predatory capitalism.