Sharing information literacy resources as open educational resources: lessons from DELILA

In all higher education institutions, librarians create a wealth of teaching resources that they use in their information literacy sessions. But is everyone reinventing the wheel, looking for the best way to teach search strategies, citing and referencing or keeping up to date for researchers? In practice librarians are usually more than happy to share their resources through numerous information literacy conferences and networks. Many of us share materials with colleagues across our own institution; some share more widely across institutions, for example, by using the UK’s learning resources repository Jorum (http:// www.jorum.ac.uk), either by putting material on open websites or even by emailing copies of our materials to colleagues. There have been several initiatives or projects to encourage librarians to share their teaching materials. One set of pages of the Information Literacy website (http://www. informationliteracy.org.uk) collects examples of good practice in teaching. In the USA and Canada the ANTS project (http://ants.wetpaint.com/) is a wiki where librarians can share library tutorials. However, it is only fairly recently that librarians have been encouraged to share their materials specifically as open educational resources (OERs), which means the materials have an open licence(such as Creative Commons).