Finding OER
Repositories and Search Tools
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Identify search tools for finding open educational resources.
- Identify search tools for finding openly licensed media.
- Understand how to find assistance for locating OER at the University of Manitoba.
Below, a set of available repositories, search tools, and resources are listed to help you find the right OER for you. University of Manitoba Libraries staff can also help you identify suitable OER textbooks for your courses. Contact your subject librarian for more information.
Best Bets
When starting your search for OER, it’s best to begin in a place with a wide variety of options. The websites listed below each have a different focus, but they are good places to start if you aren’t sure what to look for.
- Manitoba Open Textbook Catalogue is a collection of textbooks that have all been adapted, revised, or created by post-secondary faculty.
- BCCampus Open Collection collects resources created, reviewed, or adopted by instructors at British Columbia universities. Materials can be filtered by Accessibility as well as whether they have been adopted in BC post-secondary courses, include ancillary materials, or have been reviewed by faculty.
- The Open Textbook Library is a great resource for finding open textbooks. If you want a textbook and nothing more, this is the place to start.
- Curated lists of OER, like the University of Manitoba’s OER by Discipline Guide, can be useful for exploring a selection of open content in your subject area.
Federated Search Tools
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) links to a wide array of open content, including open access books and articles, documents in the public domain, and OER. Because of its large breadth of resources, we recommend that you start your MOM search with only a selection of the “OER-specific sites” checked, rather than all the materials it can include.
MERLOT is a project that was started in 1997 by the California State University system. The repository includes thousands of resources contributed by members, including original content and links to resources found through other platforms.
Based at SUNY, OASIS is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching multiple sources for OER and other open content at once. OASIS currently searches for open content from 79 different sources and contains approximately 330,000 records.
OERSI is a search index for open educational resources in higher education. It draws its collection internationally from institutional repositories of universities and libraries and other subject-specialized repositories.
Institutional Collections
Institutional repositories (IRs) aren’t just for sharing copies of research articles and student theses. They can also be used to store and share OER. Although not every college shares OER through their institutional repository, the colleges below do share collections of OER specific to the