The Brookens Library is a governing member of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) which is a membership organization for academic and research libraries in Illinois providing services to create and sustain a rich, supportive, and diverse knowledge environment that furthers excellence in teaching, learning, research, and innovation in order to serve students, faculty, and researchers. As part of this role CARLI is a consortia member of the Open Education Network (OEN), itself a consortium of colleges and universities working to advance open textbook initiatives.
The University of Illinois Springfield Library through its association with CARLI is part of OEN’s community of schools, universities, and institutions making a difference in higher education by addressing the growing concerns about educational affordability. The Library and the University through CARLI have access to programmatic, financial, and collective resources and ongoing programs.
OEN supports the Open Textbook Library, a searchable online catalog of complete textbooks available for faculty and students to freely use, adapt and distribute to best meet the needs of their courses. Open textbooks can be downloaded at no cost or printed inexpensively. The Open Textbook Library's resources can be found via the link below.
CARLI’s OER Common Hub: Open Illinois facilitates the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and supports training, advocacy, and coordination of cooperative efforts for CARLI and other Illinois stakeholders. The Open Illinois Hub is a customized, branded resource on OER Commons where CARLI libraries can create and share collections, have an institutional presence or work collaboratively (both called Groups), and share news and events associated with a project or organization. This centralized repository provides materials helpful to academic and research institutions in developing OER and advocating for adoption of OER on their campuses to reduce students’ costs.
Overall, OER Commons is a digital public library and collaborative platform that provides comprehensive infrastructure to identify high-quality OER and provides the space for collaboration during the creation or the adaption of open educational resources.