[eIFLoa] Fwd: [SOAF] SPARC-ACRL Denver Forum to Focus on Open Educational Resources

[Iryna Kuchma]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jennifer McLennan <jennifer at arl.org>
Date: 1 §¤§â§å 2008 18:29
Subject: [SOAF] SPARC-ACRL Denver Forum to Focus on Open Educational
Resources
To: SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum at arl.org>

For immediate release
December 1, 2008

For more information, contact:

Jennifer McLennan
SPARC
(202) 631-8854
jennifer at arl.org

Kara Malenfant
ACRL
(312) 280-2510
kmalenfant at ala.org

SPARC-ACRL Denver Forum to Focus on Open Educational Resources

Washington, DC & Chicago, IL ¨C December 1, 2008 ¨C SPARC (the Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College
and Research Libraries (ACRL) have announced that the SPARC-ACRL Forum at
the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, Colorado,
will examine "The transformative potential of Open Educational Resources."

In the academic community, there is growing interest in the concept of Open
Educational Resources (OER) and their potential to transform the way
scholarship is conducted. At the heart of the movement toward OER is the
idea that the world's knowledge is a public good, and that technology
provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse
knowledge. OER are fundamental components of education, as content and tools
for teaching, learning, and research that reside in the public domain or
have licenses that permit their free use or re-purposing by others.

OER are a logical extension of what the library community supports in the
Open Access movement, and underscore the need for the larger playing field
on which scholarly communication takes place to be made more equitable. OER
focus not only on journals, but also on full courses, course materials,
modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques that are critical in the learning environment.

This SPARC-ACRL Forum will introduce OER and the philosophy behind them to
the wider library community; to highlight examples of how different
constituencies are currently advancing OER on campuses; and to offer
suggestions for how libraries can further engage to support OER.

The 18th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4:00 ¨C 5:30 PM on
Saturday, January 24, 2009. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee will
host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4:00 ¨C
5:30 PM on Sunday, January 25. Further details will be announced shortly.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more
information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/forum.

##

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC
Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800
academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of
scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational and publisher
partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is
on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

ACRL
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the
American Library Association (ALA), represents more than 13,000 academic and
research librarians and interested individuals. It is the only individual
membership organization in North America that develops programs, products
and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians.
Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role
that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research
environments.


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