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This study aims to describe how open educational resources (OERs) were used in a system-wide, competency-based higher education program. It discusses barriers encountered, solutions developed and suggestions for future research on OER-focused curricula for self-directed learners. The case demonstrates practical application of the best practices for OER usage and contributes to discussions among the open education community about what constitutes quality OERs and how quality measures can help instructors select the best available OER.

This case study uses a reflective approach to describe what the organization did to facilitate OER use in University of Wisconsin Flexible Option. The authors reflect on tools and processes used and highlight alignment with best practices from OER literature.

This case confirms that there are challenges associated with OERs, especially for faculty with limited experience using them. It also offers insights into how to evaluate and curate OERs and confirms that students are generally satisfied when OERs are used as primary learning resources.

Formal research was not conducted. This case provides a starting point for potential future research about the use of OERs by self-directed, competency-based students.

Practical implications of this case study include concrete tools and methods faculty and instructional designers can use to locate, evaluate and curate OERs. This case study highlights the role OERs can play in increasing overall satisfaction with learning resources while decreasing students’ costs.

This case ties unique needs of self-directed, competency-based learners with the use of OERs, addressing two overarching questions about OERs: what constitutes a quality OER? and how is quality measured?

“Human service is a fundamental concept in librarianship, and the essential role of reference librarians is to connect people with the information they want,” wrote Jennifer Mendelsohn in 1994. To further this connection, librarians have suggested looking for, and have often actively sought out, patrons before they approach the reference or information desk, yet our image of the roving reference encounter remains sketchy. This picture ranges from that of a harried, overworked professional dispensing inadequate service to a multitude of users, to a librarian effectively extending a hand to the three‐fifths to two‐thirds of all users who would not otherwise request assistance. The picture one sees depends on one's individual work preference. Such conflicting mental pictures lead to round after round of endless debate.

To argue current calls to address grand challenges like income inequality are unlikely to succeed until the academy acknowledges how accounting is constitutive of these problems. We demonstrate how accounting is part of the problem because of its adherence to a legal model of the corporation erected on false suppositions.

Using multiple disciplines, e.g. history, economics, law and philosophy, pertaining to the nature of the corporate form, we present a logical argument that the official telos of accounting obstructs any fruitful effort to address grand challenges.

The global legal concept governing corporations (an aggregate of members) makes corporations a major cause of the grand challenges humans face. Adherence to a legal theory of the corporation leads accounting policy to rationalize income and wealth inequality by subsuming the legal powers of corporations to expropriate wealth into a singular maximand labeled “earnings.”

Though accounting is essentially “of” law, scholarly efforts to understand accounting’s social role are based on an information metaphor. We provide reasons for skepticism of any efforts addressing grand challenges until accounting acknowledges the legal nature of its social role as a regulator of business conduct. There are no accounting solutions to grand challenges without acknowledging how the accepted legal nature of the corporate form makes the corporation the cause of the grand challenges we face.

Universities are increasingly aspiring to be both models and catalysts of change, leading the world to a more sustainable and desirable future. Yet complex and ineffective governance, traditional disciplinary boundaries, and the lack of a shared vision at academic institutions often hinder progress toward this goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach to envisioning and engagement used by the University of Vermont (UVM) to overcome these barriers, and in the process, continue the university's progress toward leadership in systems thinking, ecological design, and sustainability.

The envisioning and engagement process involved 1,500 participants from the UVM campus and Burlington community. Participants' visions of a sustainable and desirable university are gathered through two community events and three online surveys. Their responses are analyzed using a modified Q methodology, a survey method in which participants direct the formation of survey categories. The results of the analysis lead to the formation of a vision narrative, a sustainability charter, and guide the creation of a range of initiatives.

The results of these efforts suggest that when provided with ample and well‐structured opportunities, university community members will become active participants in initiatives aimed at fostering institutional change. By focusing on shared values and long‐term goals, envisioning exercises can achieve a surprising amount of consensus while avoiding the divisiveness and polarization that often plague open‐ended discussions and university governance.

While envisioning exercises are sometimes conducted by local governments, institutions of higher education still rely predominantly on more traditional and hierarchical methods of planning. The innovative process outlined in this paper for adapting Q methodology for community envisioning appears to be an effective method of eliciting participants' visions and establishing broad‐based support for actions that promote sustainability planning and education.

Harold Samuel, music librarian and professor of music at Yale University, provides an excellent overview of the growth and development of musicology and the implications for library music collections in his recent article “Music and the Music Library” (Library Trends, April, 1977, pp. 833–845.). He notes that the musicologist's narrow emphasis on the “serious music” of Western Europe has broadened to include serious study of ethnomusicology, popular music, “serious” music of the United States, and musical performance. While my survey does not cover popular music, the growing importance of the other three areas is reflected in the best reference books of the past year.

WE seem to be immediately facing a drive for much more technical education and for many more technical colleges and schools to produce it. In the condition of the world today this is an inevitable, an indispensable, process. The reasons are loudly proclaimed and patent to every librarian, and the library must come strongly, as it always has, into the picture but perhaps now more universally and with greater intensity. Dr. Chandler, who is proceeding at a rare pace to specialize his departments, has created a new local council to unify the information work that has already been done at Liverpool. Every technical book costing over five shillings is bought, and the usual collections of periodicals and other material of technical and industrial interest are being increased and a bulletin of additions is being issued soon after the end of each month. The Technical library is one that combines lending and reference activities, telephone and postal services; in fact all the orthodox activities that have been standard in the larger towns since Glasgow began them in 1916, and possibly new and extended ones. The William Brown Library which was destroyed in Air Raids is being reconstructed and the enlarged Technical Library will be developed in it. This is one city only; every large city reports some increase in the services rendered, for example the Telex service is now available at Manchester. It is essential that public libraries everywhere realize the part they may play; if they do not, the suggestion made recently that the lending of technical books should become an activity of the Technical Colleges may become a reality.

This chapter explores the role of libraries and librarians from the perspective of the information seeker in general and from business school students in particular. In a recent article in First Monday, Keller et al. (2003) pose the question: “What is a library anymore, anyway?” The answer to this question would be “That depends.” It depends upon who you are asking and the perspective from which you are answering the question. The notion of perspective has been raised before in the library and information science literature. Zweizig (1976) noted that users were the focus of studies, they were examined from the perspective of “the user in the life of the library” rather than from the perspective of “the library in the life of the user.” More recently, Lipow (1999) noted that librarians discuss how to serve “remote users” when in fact it is the library that is remote to the user.

This chapter compares the status of intellectual freedom in libraries “then” (1970s) and “now” (2005). As starting points for comparisons, it uses two Advances in Librarianship chapters, by Edwin Castagna (Castagna, 1971) and David K. Berninghausen (Berninghausen, 1979), respectively. The US Supreme Court, although somewhat ducking the direct question of library censorship in a school library case in 1982, has consistently upheld intellectual freedom, even in the face of an onslaught of federal laws passed by Congress to restrict speech. The high-water mark came in 1997 when the American Library Association joined the American Civil Liberties Union and others to challenge the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which would have prohibited “indecent” speech on the Internet, an undefined term that could have swept away vast quantities of speech. In 2003, however, the Supreme Court ruled against libraries when it held that a narrower law, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is constitutional. This law requires libraries and schools that receive specified federal funds and discounts to use “technology protection measures” to block obscenity, child pornography, and material “harmful to minors.” This chapter looks at these and related cases, as well as the library profession's evolving ethical and political stance on intellectual freedom issues.

The Library Association of Ireland issued last month the first number of An Leabharlann, their new official journal. The title, for those of us who do not speak the language of Erin, means The Library. It is an extremely interesting venture which will be followed by librarians on the mainland with sympathetic curiosity. In particular our readers would be interested in the first of a series of articles by Father Stephen J. Brown, S.J., on Book Selection. The worthy Father lectures on this subject at University College, Dublin, in the Library School. It is mainly concerned with what should not be selected, and deals in vigorous fashion with the menace of much of current published stuff. No doubt Father Brown will follow with something more constructive. Mr. T. E. Gay, Chairman of the Association, discusses the need for a survey of Irish libraries and their resources. We agree that it is necessary. The Net Books Agreement, the Council, Notes from the Provinces, and an article in Erse—which we honestly believe that most of our Irish friends can read—and an excellent broadcast talk on the Library and the Student by Miss Christina Keogh, the accomplished Librarian of the Irish Central Library, make up a quite attractive first number. A list of broadcast talks given by members of the Association is included.

Purpose – Latino and African-American children and families in Washington, DC, face difficult circumstances, including high poverty, crime, and teenage pregnancy rates coupled with lower educational attainment. This chapter describes empirically supported approaches to positive development within and between the Latino and African-American communities, highlighting those utilized by CentroNía, a community-based, multicultural learning community in Washington, DC.

Approach – Community psychology promotes strength-focused, evidence-based practices shown to enrich child, family, neighborhood, and societal development among disenfranchised groups. This community psychology framework is used to examine CentroNía's work in support of the Latino and African-American communities of Washington, DC.

Findings – CentroNía espouses many of the tenets of community psychology. Its systematic efforts include the promotion of cultural unity and development, preventive interventions in early childhood and during the after-school hours, and context-enhancing practices at the family, school, and city levels.

Social implications – As the neighborhood of Columbia Heights becomes gentrified and the cost of living increases, Latino and African-American families find it increasingly difficult to remain in the community they have established together over the past 25 years. The consequences for low-income children, youth, and families, along with the evolution of CentroNía in this rapidly changing context, are discussed.