This project came out of a desire to know more. It started rather small. My original project involved creating an OER initiative adoption toolkit for librarians at regional librarians working or wanting to work in the OER space. I determined that if I wanted to create a valuable and relevant tool kit, I needed to find out the needs of this group of librarians. So like any self-respecting librarian, I turned to the literature…or lack of literature.
While the literature of Open Education is heavy with faculty needs assessment (Belikov and Bodily 2016; Bauer, Heaps, and Jung 2017; Hong and Jung 2016), very little research has been done to understand the needs of librarians working in the OER space. As a community, we have been so preoccupied with making our case to faculty, university administrators, state legislators, and students, that we have neglected to ask the people who work on the front lines how they feel or what kinds of support or education they need. I realized that limiting the scope of my needs assessment to just librarians working at regional institutions would not give me a real picture of the needs of these knowledge workers. Ultimately, I designed a needs assessment for all librarians with ways to "drill down" based on Carnegie classification.
While there are limits to this study, this small needs assessment is my attempt to begin the conversation about identifying the needs of librarians working in the OER space. My hope is that you can use or modify my data collection instrument and my data in unique ways to continue to explore this conversation.
