From: Katherine Chew <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 13:33:44 -0500

The University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human
Development (CEHD), in partnership with other colleges on campus, is
exploring the use of open textbooks.   The Open Textbook Initiative is
headed by David Ernst, PhD, the director of the Academic Technology
Services.  To quote the webpage" CEHD is creating an online catalog of
open textbooks to help make it easier for faculty to find texts in
their subject areas. Additionally, the catalog will include a review
system so that existing and future texts can be critically reviewed by
peers, making it easier for faculty to gauge the quality of the open
texts. "

CEHD is partnering with the library for help in creating this catalog.
 The initiative was launched at the end of April 2012, so it is still
in it's very infant stages.-- there are only a handful of books in the
catalog, but it is a start.

Katherine Chew
Associate Director
Research, Collections & Access Services
Health Sciences Libraries
University of Minnesota

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 9:51 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:39:02 +0100
>
> A senior US librarian has raised this question with me: "I do think that
> there  has to be a way devised to look at all the self-published books out
> there and find a way to rate them in some professional way for libraries.
> Maybe it's an opportunity for librarians to take the lead? Do you know of
> any initiatives in that regard?".
>
> I do not know of any initiatives. I know library initiatives have been
> proposed over the years particularly in the seminal Raym Crow case for
> institutional repositories in 2002
> (see:http://works.bepress.com/ir_research/7/)
> but did any involving libraries organising peer review in this way get off the
> ground or are actually going strong?
>
> Anthony