Kellam Ayres is the Library Reserves Coordinator and Liaison to the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She handles print and electronic course materials, consults on copyright, and provides liaison support to Middlebury’s graduate students. She holds graduate degrees in English and poetry writing, and before arriving at Middlebury she worked in publishing.
During the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, she found that conducting outreach to key constituencies to gather student, faculty, and staff perspectives on OER was invaluable. She also had the opportunity to present to two groups of faculty on OER, and these experiences became the foundation of her OER awareness campaign capstone project. She created several resources in order to provide the Middlebury community with an introduction to open education. They include a new OER LibGuide and three “Introduction to Open Resources” slide decks tailored to specific audiences: undergraduate faculty, graduate faculty, and library liaisons. She also created a “How to Use this Resource” document which details how her slide decks can be customized for a particular institution. Many of the resources developed for Kellam’s capstone project were inspired by resources created by others in the open community (including many from previous SPARC cohorts), and she reused and revised materials as needed to make them unique to Middlebury.