Towards a new library of resources for higher education learning and teaching

The online Resource Library of the Australian Federal Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT; www.olt.gov.au/resource-library) contains many valuable resources that are the product of hundreds of learning and teaching research projects funded in the past two decades by the OLT and its predecessors, including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the Carrick Institute. However, the Resource Library is not systematically organised and the most relevant resources in the database, for any given topic, can be very hard to find. The National Learning and Teaching Resource Audit and Classification is itself an OLT-funded project with a brief to re-organise the materials in the OLT Resource Library so as to optimise its use, as well as to identify gaps and strengths in its coverage. This paper reports on the main outcomes of the project to date, with a focus on the selection, and adaptation, of a suitable subject thesaurus to be used in the re-indexing. It also provides an analysis of the ICT-related content in the Resource Library, as indicated by the existing keywords, comparing these with the themes of recent THETA conferences and topics covered by the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Higher Education reports.