This month’s Resource Highlight was contributed by Anne Marie Gruber, Instruction & Liaison Librarian at University of Northern Iowa.

Our December 2020 blog post highlighted the OASIS metafinder and mentioned another OER search tool, the Mason OER Metafinder (MOM). This post will focus on MOM in more detail. 

What is it?

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) is an integrated search tool for finding open educational resources. It searches 20+ repositories, including some that may be familiar to you already, such as Open Textbook Library, OpenStax, MERLOT, OER Commons, Project Gutenberg, American Memory Project (Library of Congress), New York Public Library Digital Collections, and more.

Because of the wide range of collections MOM searches at once, it can be a powerful tool for searching a wide range of open content (both OER and public domain materials) all in one place. 

MOM’s strength, its coverage of so many key collections, is also its weakness. It can return many results for some searches, requiring filtering. Because of the search scope being so large, there is sometimes a short delay in all results being shown; however, this should not be a deterrent to using the tool altogether.

The Advanced Search option, the default on the MOM webpage, allows you to search for content by author, title, or date range, as well as limiting to particular OER collections. You might want to remove the “Deeper Search” options from your first search, for example, if you want to focus on OER rather than open access or public domain content.

Useful tools

For librarians and OER website administrators in our community, you can embed a MOM search box directly into your Library Guide or website with the Mason OER Metafinder search widget.

Here is an example LibGuide with a MOM widget embedded on it: UNI OER Library Guide 

Another neat feature, MOM’s visual search results allow you to see your results broken out into categories and subcategories. Alongside these categories are numbers indicating which areas have the most resources related to your search. For example, a keyword search for “climate science” led this this visual search result:

Finally, similar to other databases, MOM includes tools for saving sources in a folder, emailing your search results, and setting up search alerts. You can visit the About the Mason OER Metafinder webpage for more details about the tool.

Get Involved!

How are you using MOM or other metasearch tools to find OER? We’d love to hear from you via the Iowa OER listserv or in a future Iowa OER webinar.