Brigham Young University Faculty Survey Seeks to Advance Open Education Through Academic Libraries

Jeff Belliston and Elizabeth Smart from Brigham Young University are working to address the issues facing academic libraries trying to advance open education, beginning with BYU.

The Harold B Lee Library at BYU has made several efforts towards this goal. It sponsors ScholarsArchive, an institutional repository for content produced by the university, which houses 2,518 electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs); 1,376 papers, posters, and presentations; and two research collections with nearly 4,000 curated images. Among other similar initiatives, it has also begun partnering with the Internet Archive to digitize materials from its collection and now has 9,440 complete books available on archive.org.

Within this framework, the library began looking where to make further improvements. They conducted a faculty survey and received 510 responses on topics that included publishing support, an open access repository, and open access journal hosting...