Mélanie Brunet is the Copyright Services Librarian at the University of Ottawa since 2016. Her main responsibility is providing copyright education and support to faculty, students, and staff, in English and in French. She developed an interest in the open movement while employed at the International Development Research Centre, a Canadian crown corporation funding applied research in the Global South. This interest has carried over at uOttawa, where she co-authored the Library’s open access policy, and has been actively raising awareness about open educational resources and coordinating #textbookbroke campaigns since 2018.
Before becoming a librarian, Mélanie taught Canadian and gender history at the university level for about a decade. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto, earning a Ph.D. in history in 2005 and a Master of Information in 2011.
Mélanie serves as a member of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ Open Education Working Group since 2019. She coordinated the first uOttawa Library OER Grants in early 2020 and is currently the co-lead for the implementation of the Library’s OER program. She is also a co-author of the openly-licensed Copyright: The Card Game – Canadian Edition and Jeu de cartes du droit d’auteur – version canadienne.
Mélanie’s capstone project was an OER by discipline guide for the University of Ottawa in English and in French, inspired by similar resources created by BCcampus, McMaster University, Ryerson University, and Concordia University. One of the challenges identified by professors and librarians at uOttawa is the difficulty of finding OER. By providing specific examples of OER they could use by mapping them to exiting courses, the objective is to facilitate their discovery and lower the bar for their adoption. The community resource for this capstone includes Version 1.0 of the guide as well as a creation workflow and a communication plan (in the Final Report). The OER by Discipline Guide: University of Ottawa will be updated annually as new resources are identified.
