The MSU Libraries hosted an Open Textbook Network (OTN) workshop for faculty and other university partners in October. The workshop helped launch our participation in the Open Educational Resources (OER) Program, which aims to reduce educational costs for students by providing free, low-cost, and openly-licensed learning materials. Open textbooks are a type of OER and are openly licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed. Nearly 75 faculty members attended the workshop. The MSU Libraries have 668 titles from the Open Textbook Library available in our Library catalog.

This new collection was built to support teacher education classes during the 2020-2021 academic year which took place entirely online due to the pandemic. The books chosen were award-winning, genre-specific, and/or curriculum-specific books that were also available as e-books for our academic library to buy. Though children's and young adult book are available in e-book format as evidenced by collections at public libraries, the selection available for our library to purchase through Gobi was more limited than expected.

The project began with a title list from Gobi with award-winning children’s and young adult books from 2015 to 2020. From that list, specific awards were chosen. Within that selection, books were selected based on genre, age, use for the curriculum, and user license. The goal was breadth, not depth, of coverage. Initially, fifty-six books were purchased for Fall 2020 with another twenty-three added for Spring 2021.

Since the students using this collection were accustomed to a physical collection in a specific space and e-books can be difficult to find in our catalog, a guide with links to the e-books was created. It included brief summaries of the plots, awards won, and the number of simultaneous users. This made sharing of the collection simple in a year where ease and barrier removal was particularly important.