International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 115

Rural Librarians’ Journey to Understanding Students’ Role in OER Outreach
terials. Once polled, most students are
relegated to the proverbial “kiddie table,”
while the “grown-ups” (librarians
and faculty, sometimes administration)
talk about how students are expected to
spend their money.
While we sought and obtained
IRB approval for our research, the results
were secondary to the outreach
itself. The purpose of both the research
and this paper was to discuss the need
for documented methods of creating
student outreach that go beyond soliciting
numbers or statistics and into engaging
students in conversation about
textbook costs and the consequences
thereof. The multifold benefits of such
dialogue include promotion of the library
and librarians as valid resources
for students’ educational needs; increased
student awareness of information
privilege and how it impacts them,
both positively and negatively; and, of
course, knowledge of open resources so
that they can advocate for a shift away
from traditional textbooks and toward
more open sources.
The first round of research was
poorly timed, with summer classes finished
and fall classes not yet in session.
We spent four days visiting various
campus buildings with two laptops (the
campus coffee cart, the School of Business
atrium, and the Student Union
Building), asking students if they had
time to discuss textbook costs with us,
and to take a brief, one- to two-minute
Google Forms survey. We offered candy
as thanks for those who participated,
but many declined the reward. The
students were open and willing to talk,
and the interactions as much as the results
told us they were actively engaged
with what we were saying. The interest
generated by placing the students at the
center of our outreach efforts seemed
to increase faculty interest as well; several
professors stopped to ask for more
information. This solidified our hypothesis
that students advocating for
themselves may bring better results
than librarians working with faculty
alone.
In a second form of outreach,
we emailed a link to the survey to all
enrolled students, undergrad and graduate,
on-campus and off-campus. It is
possible for students to have completed
more than one survey per person;
no email addresses were gathered; but
it is felt to be very unlikely. The email’s
subject line—“Are you impacted by
high textbook costs? Tell us about it!”—
caught far more attention than we had
hoped, and when we gathered the data
for the paper, we had 159 results in
fewer than 10 days. While this is only
about 6% of our total student body, it
was a decent number of respondents
during so short a window, when students
are far less likely to be checking
their school email accounts or thinking
about buying books. The survey
contained 12 questions; all except ethnicity
were required. We asked them to
provide their year in school and major
to ascertain some basic demographic
information. However, the focus was
upon those questions involving student
perceptions of textbook costs.
Our first non-demographic
question asked them to rate their stress
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