International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 211

From Soup to Nuts: Expanding Liaison and Technical Services for OER Development
Figure 2. OER LibGuide page with modified OpenStax XML and MathML encoded
equations. Equations are displayed using the MathJax JavaScript library.
attention on revising the text, examples,
and problem sets for the Engineering
majors who will be taking the course.
Once the faculty have completed this
task, the Discovery Services Librarian
will normalize the CSS across pages using
LibGuides’ Guide Custom JS/CSS
feature, ensuring a consistent look and
feel. While this step is not necessary,
given that the initial import is sufficient
to deliver usable text, the process of
re-styling the text is simplified by utilizing
the offline files. Unlike the copy and
paste method, which introduces extensive
in-line styles into the HTML, using
modified offline XML preserves source
IDs, classes, and tag attributes that can
be used to develop a single style sheet
for the entire LibGuide.
As the faculty have worked with
the imported OpenStax content, they
raised additional content and feature
requests requiring librarian support.
For example, in the course of researching
additional content to include in the
OER, the faculty identified an open
source interactive simulation from
PhET at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Unfortunately, the simulation
is available only in Java, which cannot
be run natively in the browser and requires
students to have Java installed
on their computers. Moreover, unless
students know how to open and run the
203