Open Educational Practices

Library materials are free to access for students, even though most do not have a Creative Commons license and are therefore not OER.

Library materials can include ebooks, streaming videos, articles from library subscription databases, or archival collections. 

There are many ways you can integrate library materials into your courses when striving for zero-textbook costs. While they are free to use in your courses, you cannot edit or remix these items. Like all other copyrighted and restricted materials, you must be careful how you use library resources to make sure you do not violate the terms of use of the resource. 

1. Consult your subject librarian or specialist. Ask them about the specific resources you might want to use in your class.  
    
2. Be aware that many online materials, such as ebooks, journals articles, and streaming media, are not owned by the library. This means that resources may change from semester to semester as subscriptions change.  
    
3. Know that some ebooks may not be accessible by more than one student at a time depending on the license of the individual ebook. 
    
4. For use of library materials in your course, such as an article from a database, link to the resource using its persistent link instead of downloading or making digital copies. If you do not know how to link to a library resource, consult your subject librarian or specialist or contact another library staff member on your campus. 

This page is adapted from Introduction to OER by Rachel Arteaga and Suzanne Wakim which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.