International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 209

From Soup to Nuts: Expanding Liaison and Technical Services for OER Development
form knowledge. Because instructors
may change over time, it is important
that the text be accessible and editable
by anyone teaching the class going forward.
Moreover, the faculty require a
platform that supports accessibility,
assessment, and the ability to integrate
the text into the university’s Desire-
2Learn LMS. Given these needs, the library’s
collaboration with and support
for the team will continue throughout
development and implementation, for
the foreseeable future.
To address the team’s platform
hosting and delivery needs, the Champion
again reached out to colleagues in
the technical services department who
have experience with content hosting,
management, and delivery. Together,
the Champion and Discovery Services
Librarian evaluated the OpenStax
website and text, and determined that
neither the library nor ALG’s document-centric
institutional repository
(IR) would provide an appropriate
platform. While IRs have been widely
adopted to host OERs and help to ensure
the preservation of this content,
they are less well suited to OER content
that is dynamic or likely to be updated
frequently by multiple stakeholders.
Moreover, because this text makes extensive
use of the MathML XML standard
and the MathJax JavaScript library
to display equations, the faculty require
a platform that accommodates both in
order to ensure accessibility and preserve
as much of the OpenStax source
material as possible. After considering
a number of hosting solutions, and given
the library’s prior experience hosting
student-created work (Mortimore &
Baker, 2019), the Champion and Discovery
Services Librarian determined
that LibGuides CMS was the best available
solution.
Springshare LibGuides and Lib-
Guides CMS offer hosting, access, and
permission controls that support extraordinary
flexibility, both in terms
of content and display and editorial
access and control. Specifically, Lib-
Guides CMS supports administrators’
ability to apply unique access and permission
controls to individual guides or
groups of guides and unique look and
feel settings, including page templates,
language settings, and custom guide
or group-level CSS and JavaScript (JS).
Because access and permission controls
are applied at the guide or group administrator
level, library administrators
are able to cordon off guides from each
other and from platform-level configurations.
In this way, administrators
can open up highly customized guides
to faculty editors while protecting library-created
content. Moreover, because
LibGuides and LibGuides CMS
are patron-facing platforms closely integrated
with Springshare’s other products,
including LibWizard, they are well
suited to meet the accessibility needs of
students and the assessment needs of
faculty and grant funders.
During early Summer 2019, the
Champion proposed LibGuides CMS as
a solution to the team and arranged for
the Champion, Discovery Services Librarian,
and faculty to meet for an initial
consultation. During this meeting,
the Discovery Services Librarian introduced
the platform to the faculty, recommended
a single LibGuide to host
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