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avatar for Anita Walz

Anita Walz

@VTNews
Asst Dir of Open Ed and Scholarly Comm Librarian
USA
Anita Walz is the Assistant Director for Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech. She works with faculty, administrators, and staff on local, state, national and international levels to inspire faculty to choose, adapt, and create learning resources which are more accessible to students. She works in support of student-led projects and is often invited to lead sessions for students and faculty on copyright and the potential of open licensing. Her work experience includes over 20 years in international, government, and academic libraries, including the World Bank and the ERIC Digital Library. She was the project manager and a contributor to Virginia Tech's first open textbook: Fundamentals of Business (2016) and designed and administers the Faculty Open Education Initiative Grant Program at Virginia Tech which provides funds and technical support to faculty who wish to adapt or author and broadly share openly licensed materials for teaching and learning. She was an inaugural member of the advisory board of the Open Textbook Network (Virginia Tech, Founding Member) and currently serves on the Open Virginia Advisory Council of the State Council of Higher Education. She is a System Leader for VIVA's Open Textbook Initiative and has been has been a featured speaker in several SPARC and ACRL Webinars. Her research interests include: economics of higher education, library involvement in open educational resource initiatives, library publishing, and effective teaching practices for college-age and adult learners. She is the author of the Association of Research Libraries' SPEC Kit (351) Affordable Course Content and Open Educational Resources (2016), one journal article, and several book chapters. She served as a Fulbright Specialist on Open Educational Resources (OER) in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) in April 2017.