As open education initiatives aiming to lower the cost of course materials appeared at two universities, librarians became involved in identifying open educational resources (OERs) for university courses. However, when considering a number of subject areas-particularly in colleges focused on upper-division instruction-librarians encountered problems related to the availability of resources and materials selection processes. For this project, librarians selected one prominent subject area at their respective institutions-engineering-and worked to identify best practices for introducing OERs into courses. They surveyed engineering faculty and instructors to better understand their perceptions and needs related to OERs and, based on this work, they suggest best practices for liaison librarians in specialized fields who wish to incorporate OERs into their outreach work with a focus on upper-division courses.

The ACRL information literacy standards include the need for students to use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose. To use information for a specific purpose students should have an ability to differentiate the types of information available, assess the relevance and credibility of the source to their application, and then apply the information within the context of their writing. Engineering students are usually aware of monographs and periodicals from introductory library instruction but are unfamiliar with grey literature and engineering standards. To address this need, collaboration between library and engineering instruction for a senior level capstone mechanical engineering design course was created. The course consisted of 3 independent sections of approximately 18 students each that were randomly paired and assigned projects from the same pool of 10 system-level experiments. The students were tasked with developing a full analysis and report of the system-level performance of their respective experiment. Library instruction occurred during the second lecture of class and consisted of a fifty minute overview presentation followed by two hours of work time. All sections were presented information types as five different categories: monographs, scholarly articles, grey literature, standards, and multimedia. One section of the class was randomly selected and presented information types placed into contextual uses within example sections of a report and assigned a worksheet requiring them to find sources specific to their project and list them within the report section they planned to implement the literature. The efficacy of this pedagogical change to contextualize examples followed by immediate application was assessed by measuring the frequency and type of citations used by all 3 sections of the class. Citation analysis found a statistically insignificant 7% increase in total number of citations used by the test section students. Although the utilization of engineering standards did not increase, the use of grey literature in the test section increase 83% compared with the two control sections taught by the same engineering faculty. Furthermore the test section decreased their use of multimedia information. Two subsequent sections of the course taught by other engineering faculty are also compared. This provides a preliminary indication that contextualizing library instruction by information type increases the diversity of literature utilized by engineering students. The overall credibility of citations utilized by students in their reports is likely to increase if this diversity increases the use of grey literature and standards.

What's Standard? Industry Application versus University Education of Engineering StandardsABET requires engineering students use design standards produced by professional societies during their senior year to prepare for life after graduation. However, no standard approach for educational content development on the use of standards is available and an information deficit exists on how application of these standards differs between industry and academia. To address this need, the first part of our analysis focuses on the use of standards in a capstone mechanical engineering senior design course, a class that is ubiquitous in engineering programs in the United States. The capstone senior design course partners with industry sponsors to produce a product for implementation at the end of a sixteen week semester. An early stage in the design process is the identification of standards applicable to the project. Students are given instruction on finding and locating standards at the library and also through outside sources. Students are asked to seek out standards "at will" rather than being required by the project narrative and record the standards utilized in the final design report. The second part of our analysis surveys the use and organization of standards by the industry sponsors of the design course irrespective of the sponsored projects. The data collected includes how company sponsors acquire standards, utilization rate, and of particular interest is the organization of standards that are purchased for future use. After identifying synergies between the academic and industrial approaches, we propose a foundation of engineering standards education based in the contextual learning curriculum. Finally, we provided recommendations for engineering standards literacy to reinforce the need for life-long learning skills.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education established the need to understand the iterative nature of research through posing of increasingly complex questions. Students must have the ability to monitor information gathered and assess for gaps or weaknesses. Students in lower level undergraduate engineering courses are usually unaware of techniques for monitoring information gathered and assessing for gaps in standalone research papers. Moreover, the management of literature research often becomes overwhelming when engineering students encounter team-based design projects that occur over the course of an entire semester. To address this need, we have modified the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) engineering design method to monitor and assess information resources as a natural outcome of the design process. More specifically we have modified the matrix design method known as the House of Quality to associate literature sources with customer determined design constraints and quantify the coverage of the literature review. We introduce this method of identifying literature gaps and weaknesses using QFD in a junior level mechanical engineering systems design course after an initial client interview. Library instruction included a mix of lecture and active learning activities to engage the students with the iterative nature of research. We were thereby able to incorporate information literacy into the preexisting course workflow using the ACRL framework as a guiding document for information literacy.

INTRODUCTION Open educational resources (OER) are gaining traction in higher education and becoming accepted by academics as a viable means for delivering course content. However, these resources can be difficult to find and use, both due to low visibility and confusion about licensing. This article describes one university’s work with faculty members to identify barriers in their search process when they are looking to adopt OER. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM A scholarly communication librarian and science librarian partnered to collect faculty and instructor reactions to a particular OER search tool, with the intention of better understanding the difficulties encountered during the search process. Eight interviews were conducted as participants were asked about their preferences when it comes to locating OER, understanding licensing information, and adopting materials for class. NEXT STEPS From these interviews, the librarians identified practical recommendations for instruction/liaison librarians and technical services/systems librarians as they continue working to support faculty and instructors through the OER discovery and selection process. These recommendations relate to four themes uncovered in interviews with faculty and instructors: the need for increased transparency in search tools, the importance of intuitive narrowing and broadening features in search tools, the need for detailed and consistent metadata in OER records, and the need for clarity in intellectual property statements. The librarians note that these recommendations might best be pursued through wide-scale collaboration across library units and, more generally, between libraries, consortia, and institutions.