This session introduces the Open Metadata Exchange (OME), a decentralized network of open libraries that serves as a force multiplier in the search, discovery, and sustainability of open educational resources. It achieves this by activating the curatorial experience and expertise of librarians across the world, supercharging the exchange of each other’s open educational resource metadata. The OME provides the infrastructure for libraries and end users to discover, publish, and share resources across libraries.

Open Educational Resources (OER), as defined by UNESCO, are teaching, learning, and research materials that are freely accessible and openly licensed for reuse, adaptation, and redistribution. OER can include textbooks, lesson plans, datasets, simulations, videos, and audio created and maintained by governments, universities, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Research on the use of OER, teaching, learning, and research materials that are freely accessible and openly licensed for reuse, adaptation, and redistribution, has shown that student outcomes using OER are often comparable to or better than those achieved with traditional commercial materials. They also offer significant potential to expand access to knowledge and reduce the cost of education. Yet, search and discovery of OER is fragmented, and these open library platforms operate in silos, which results in:

• Duplicated efforts to discover, tag, and curate similar materials across platforms
• Limited visibility into relevant resources held by other libraries
• Metadata inconsistencies that make cross-platform cataloging cumbersome

The OME addresses these challenges by making it easier for libraries to share, discover, and reuse metadata while maintaining local standards and control. The infrastructure of the OME harnesses and makes use of the curatorial expertise of librarians who have invested significant time and effort in cataloging and evaluating resources within individual libraries. Some salient features of the OME include:

• Voluntary Participation: Libraries and repositories can choose to join the OME network and become a participating “node” in the network. They independently decide what metadata they share and under what conditions.
• Share Metadata/Resources: Participating institutions publish metadata about their resources in their preferred structure. The OME network will help map this to the metadata structures across libraries.
• Cross-Library Discovery: Other connected libraries can search, subscribe to, and access shared metadata across the network.
• Flexible Cataloging: Libraries can import relevant metadata and associated resources into their local systems while maintaining their own cataloging standards.
• Decentralized, Community-Governed Network: OME operates as a decentralized system governed by a representative body of participating organizations and institutions. ISKME will steward the governance framework in the early stages, with the intention of transitioning ownership and decision-making to participating libraries as the network matures.

The initial part of the workshop will elaborate on the functioning of the OME, with a focus on what it means for a library or OER platform to participate in the metadata exchange.

We envision the OME architecture as a system that is collectively stewarded by the open source and open education communities. In that spirit, the workshop will engage the conference participants in small group discussions designed to invite participants to collaboratively explore how to ensure that the OME benefits an inclusive and broad open education ecosystem. It will also identify ways in which they can participate or contribute to the development of the OME and the operational and governing principles of the commons-based model that the OME seeks to advance. Some of the guiding questions for the discussion include:

• What strategies can help sustain the development and utilization of this system?
• What barriers to participation must be addressed?
• What governance policies are needed to enable high-quality, open exchange of OER across participating libraries?