Open Educational Resources (OER) have changed the higher education landscape today by providing scalable, low-cost, and legally safe alternatives to traditional, proprietary educational content. The micro-level structural mechanics of institutional uptake of OER, in particular the role of academic libraries and information professionals, have not been explored as much. The micro level of the workings of OER in institutions has been studied less, the roles of academic libraries and information professionals.

This research paper is an extensive empirical study on the inner dynamics influencing OER integration in academic libraries. This study uses a strong sample of N=317 academic librarians and information gatekeepers to examine the multi-faceted connections between organizational awareness, behavioural deployment, content production processes, collaborative sharing projects, infrastructures, individual skill competencies, systematic barriers, and the long-term institutional impacts of OER.

In methodologically terms, this paper applies a well-designed statistical design that links the classical approach to modern Bayesian inference methodology to assess latent constructs. To assess the internal consistency, reliability diagnostics confirmed that our structural instruments had a high internal consistency (Cronbach's α=0.883 for a total of 35 scale items). The Pearson correlation analyses showed an extremely high and very significant positive linear correlation between the pre-existing level of professional OER awareness and the actual administrative use of OER (r=0.736, p<0.001).

Because the structural limitations of the p-value, Bayesian one-sample mean estimations were performed for all operational variables with non-informative diffuse priors, to generate 95% Credible Intervals. Posterior distribution summaries pointed to high performance with fundamental variables (i.e., overall awareness: Posterior Mean=3.6979, and functional use: Posterior Mean=3.4511). At the same time, they revealed high structural drops in advanced execution areas, such as OER-based content creation (Posterior Mean=2.8927) and institutional support/budget policies (Posterior Mean=2.9582).