Library Out Loud

In July, Massey’s first ever open educational resource (OER) was published with support from the Library: Critical Health Psychology: Foundations, Approaches and Applications https://oercollective.caul.edu.au/critical-health-psychology/

Written by a team of eight from Massey’s School Psychology and led by Professor Sarah Riley, it’s a fascinating examination of the psychology of health, illness and treatment and how that interacts with issues of power and equity in society. It’s being already used as a textbook in one Massey course and is intended to be used with two others and two practicum courses.  It’s also attracting interest from around the world. As an openly-licensed book, it is not only free for students (or anyone!) to use and download but can also be adapted by others without breaching copyright.

Massey University Library staff worked in collaboration with Sarah’s team so that the book could be published openly. What did our support look like?

Some of it was financial: the Library paid for the ‘shell’ of the book in Pressbooks and did a lot of formatting in Pressbooks (very fiddly). The book project won a grant from the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) OER Collective, which paid for copy-editing and external peer review. Three librarians were part of the project team with the editors and handled a lot of administrative tasks. Our biggest task was checking the copyright status of all material the authors wanted to include that they hadn’t created themselves. This included cartoons, images from public health campaigns, YouTube videos, and figures from journal articles. If these weren’t already public domain or Creative Commons, we would contact the rights holders and ask for permission to use the item for free. This required a lot of persistence and even sleuthing skills – who did take that photo of a graffitied public health poster?!

An important later task was to check how accessible the book was. It was the CAUL OER Collective who would give final permission to hit publish, and they had high standards regarding such things as alt-text, table layouts and headings, use of colour and more! Very useful to learn more about accessibility of web resources and with the help of the handy Web Accessibility Evalution tools we got it over the line!

It’s fabulous to see the book out in the world doing its thing and knowing that we were part of it.