Biography
Talea Anderson currently works as the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Washington State University. In this role, she manages the university’s institutional repository and supports initiatives university-wide that make research and educational materials more openly accessible. Her research interests include discourses around open access, the impact of open educational resources (OER) in higher education, and web accessibility in digital humanities. In 2017-2018, she was an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group.
Leadership Portfolio
Talea participated in SPARC’s Open Education Leadership Program in 2017-2018. As a fellow in the program, she chose to focus on opportunities for library consortia to collaborate in support of open education. In 2016-2018, she served as chair and co-chair for Orbis Cascade Alliance’s OER Standing Group—an exploratory group established to identify opportunities for this library consortium comprising 39 colleges and universities in the Pacific Northwest. The group produced a report for the alliance’s board and council, with a core focus on OER discovery. In sum, the group recommended collaboration amongst library consortia to identify appropriate metadata standards and controlled vocabularies that libraries might leverage to improve discovery of open educational resources.
The report and initiatives proposed by the OER Standing Group are as yet under consideration by Orbis Cascade Alliance. The group is hopeful that the investigative work involved in producing these materials initiated conversations that will prove fruitful in the future.
