Sophie (she/her/hers) began her career in libraries in 2006 with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as Media Librarian in the Music Library and Radio Archives. She transitioned to academic libraries in early 2014 as a music cataloger, working primarily with rare sound recordings housed in the Belfer Audio Archives at Syracuse University Libraries. Sophie joined Virginia Wesleyan University in mid-2015 as Technical Services Librarian. In this role, she oversaw all library cataloging, e-resources, and acquisitions, as well as implementing, managing, and preserving a digital collection, and working on diversity, inclusion, and campus environmental efforts.
Propelled by an interest in contributing to open and affordable initiatives in Virginia, Sophie joined VIVA in January 2019 as the Assessment and E-Resources Program Analyst. Her primary responsibilities include managing the VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal, VIVA Open, the VIVA Course Mapping Project, the Curriculum Driven Acquisitions Program, as well as regular contributions to VIVA Committees and Task Forces. In her assessment role, Sophie collects and analyzes data associated with VIVA’s open and affordable initiatives to share with stakeholders. She has really enjoyed working with VIVA member libraries across the state to further the mission of ‘leveling the academic playing field’ for Virginia students.
Sophie holds a Master’s of Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Master’s of Music in Vocal Performance from the University of Manitoba. She has a Bachelor’s of Music from the University of Manitoba. She also recently completed the Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians. When not working, Sophie enjoys dancing, singing, listening to the birds, exercising, and meditating.
Capstone Project:
Identification and discovery of Open Educational Resources (OER) are significant barriers to faculty adoption. With multiple repositories and referratories to choose from, inconsistent metadata schemas and discovery tools across repositories, and a large number of resources to sort through, instructors already overwhelmed with multiple professional demands may abandon efforts to find suitable OER for their courses. What’s more, commercial publishers are ready to support faculty by sending them free instructor copies of commercial textbooks with the hopes that faculty will adopt them for their classes. Despite sympathies for the costs students face to obtain a post-secondary education, instructors may choose the path of least resistance when selecting their course materials.
Curating course-aligned OER is a strategy library professionals can adopt to ease the burden of discovery on faculty. The Course Mapping Companion Kit is intended to support professionals engaged with open education initiatives in curating OER to courses at their institutions. The Companion Kit accomplishes its goal of supporting curators by providing guidelines and worksheets on collecting syllabi and course descriptions, finding and evaluating OER, a form with course alignment tags for inclusion on VIVA Open, an OER Commons hosted website, and supplementary resources. VIVA Open provides a platform and infrastructure for Virginia non-profit institutions of higher education to tag OER to courses at their institutions. By tagging curated, course-aligned OER to VIVA Open, faculty may discover OER mapped specifically to their courses or equivalent courses at other Virginia institutions of higher education.
Although the Course Mapping Companion Kit is designed with Virginia institutions in mind, the kit can be easily adapted to other contexts.