Measuring the impact of OER – Update from the Educational Resources Working Group

Posted: 03-03-2026

The LIBER Educational Resources Working Group is continuing to focus on Open Educational Resources (OER) in recognition of their increasing importance in offering equitable access to quality learning resources.

The group has 4 work packages:

Improving the discovery of open textbooks – initiating a project with Thoth (https://thoth.pub/) to establish a joint open catalogue for open textbooks. We envisage that a repository would enable users to search for open textbooks, linking to the full text, and potentially offer a hosting option for institutions without such infrastructure in place.
Measuring the impact of OER – looking at ways to collate usage data and metrics to support OER advocacy.
Using AI to enhance OER use – exploring the use of AI with OER including the role ChatBots, how AI can help with translation, and how our community has engaged with new initiatives such as Sylla to improve the discovery and use of OER.
Sharing and promoting re-use – focusing on how to share OER, how to promote reuse, and how to assess the quality of OER.

In the lead up to our workshop at the Annual Conference in Trondheim, we will share with the LIBER community details of each of our work packages starting with ‘Measuring the impact of OER’. This work package is looking into ways to collate usage data and metrics to help with OER advocacy. We are developing a reproducible, data-informed approach to understanding and advocating for OER in European research libraries. After initial challenges with inconsistent metadata and unclear definitions, the group refined its approach to focus on identifying the proportion of open ebooks in collections and reading lists, and their sources. A methodology for both Ex Libris (with Leganto) customers and OCLC (with Talis Aspire) customers was developed and is undergoing testing within the Educational Resources Working Group. Next steps include finalising this methodology and expanding testing across member institutions.

Input from the LIBER community before and during the conference in Trondheim in July will be most welcome as we embark on the next phase of our work, creating a step-by-step guide for LIBER libraries to identify and measure OERs in teaching collections, allowing institutions to set realistic local growth targets.

‘Measuring the impact of OER’ Subgroup Members:

Michelle Breen, University of Limerick, Ireland (Chair)
Solveig Sandal Johnsen, Aarhus University Library, Denmark
Suzanne Tatham, University of Southampton, England
Elina Kähö, Helsinki University Library, Finland.
Marjo Vallittu, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Nicole Krüger, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.

Would you like to get involved?

Please contact Michelle.Breen@ul.ie if you are interested in becoming involved in this group and its work.