Five kinds of resource that spell BLOOM: badges, lessons, objects, outreach and media. Search and filter to find what fits. Everything is openly licensed (CC BY 4.0, except where noted) and editor-checked. Leave field notes, build on others' work and volunteer to peer review.
About BLOOM
Common ground to share, adapt and cultivate our craft together.
A space to question, test and teach new tools, because none of us can keep up alone. BLOOM is an openly licensed repository, a community and a tool shed, made by an instruction librarian for other librarians, knowledge workers and educators who are constantly asked to do more with less. A community garden we tend together lasts longer than a single clipped stem.
About the name
Badges
Lessons
Objects
Outreach
Media
It's also a nod to Bloom's Taxonomy, the framework behind how we write learning outcomes, which climbs from remembering and understanding, through applying, analyzing and evaluating, to creating. There's a plainer meaning too: to bloom is to come into your own, and that's what the badges and lessons here are meant to help with. Other blooms are tucked in the name as well, the glow effect that lights up a scene in a video game, and the open-access language model that shares the name.
How it works
Three places that work together: where the resources live, where the people are and where the tools are kept.
Where the people are: communities of practice, groups and associations, each with a member roster, a discussion space, shared opportunities and a group Zotero library, plus a profile of your own. A smaller, focused place to share your work, get feedback and grow together, instead of broad, disconnected professional networks.
A collection of ready-to-use tools, curated and relevant to our work, so you don't waste time and energy rebuilding from scratch. Suggest your own builds and get credited for them.
New to GitHub? It’s a free place to store files, track changes over time and share your work. Some of BLOOM’s own tools and badge packages live in GitHub repositories, and it’s one way to host your own resources for BLOOM to link to, or to share a repository of your own work with others. A plain “GitHub for beginners” lesson is on my list.
Contribute
You're welcome here at every level, from a quick share with your group to your best work in the repository.
Share it in your communities
Post lessons, activities and works in progress straight to your communities of practice and groups. No review and no formal submission, just your work in front of people doing the same thing. It's the easiest way to start.
Two ways into the repository
1
Host it yourself
Keep your work and its files on your own site, and BLOOM can point to it so more people find it. A linked resource stays as you made it; if it carries an appropriate open license, an editor may later adapt it into a full BLOOM.
2
Submit it to BLOOM
Submit your best work as a proposal for an editor to review and adapt into BLOOM's style. If it's a fit, it finds a home in the BLOOM repository, openly licensed and credited to you. You keep authorship; BLOOM gives it an audience.
Browsing and using the resources needs no account. Posting to the communities, contributing a resource or serving as a peer reviewer needs an account and a quick check that you work in education: an institutional e-mail, an ORCID or a vouch from an editor. To share or submit, use the submission form or get in touch. Credited guest contributions are welcome.
Editors keep BLOOM tidy
They vet each submission, confirm its licensing and credit, and check that it's accessible. Right now that's just me. A project like this should be run by a team, and I'm looking for editors, especially people who know accessibility, teaching and learning, open education or web design. A formal call will go out once things are up and running; for now, just reach out.
Who does what
- Editors
- Review submissions, confirm licensing and credit, check accessibility, and decide what enters the repository.
- Contributors
- Share and submit lessons, activities and other resources, whether posting to a community or proposing work for the repository.
- CoP / group moderators
- Keep a specific community of practice or group running: welcome members, moderate discussion and share opportunities.
Why BLOOM · the longer read
Why I built it
I built BLOOM. I'm Christina Rose Hilburger, Research and Information Literacy Services Librarian at the Daniel A. Reed Library, SUNY Fredonia, and I teach information literacy and lead our open educational resources work. I came to all of this as a first-generation college student, and I don't take that road for granted. Education is a public good, and it should be affordable for everyone. There's more about me and my other work at my personal site, windandpages.com, including my CV.
For years, well before generative AI, I kept running into the same frustration: how rarely we share the instructional work we make. Some of that I understand: so much of our work is tied to tenure, promotion and our livelihoods. But we build the same lessons, the same activities, the same worksheets, each of us alone, and then we hold onto them. We're mostly trying to teach the same things.
Wouldn't we all be better off building the good versions together and sharing them, instead of everyone starting from scratch?
I've wanted something like this since I started working in libraries, and now I can build it instead of thinking about it for another decade.
What stood in the way was institutional capacity and bureaucracy. I didn't want to wait on grant money to build something I already needed. And I'm not tied to expensive vendors anymore, with their slow upgrades and the long waits for the features you need. If I need to add something, I can build it myself now.
I've spent years advocating for open educational practices, OER and open pedagogy, and I've watched the slow shift toward acceptance. Now it matters more than it used to. Most repositories I know are missing what matters most: clear provenance, real attribution and real collaboration. If we keep our goal in view (student success, in all the ways it shows up in a life), it's clear where the work should go.
I've done a lot of thinking and writing about AI, and built carefully with it. I'm still finding my footing in what may be one of the biggest shifts of our working lives, and I try to help students, faculty and staff find theirs. Whether we like it or not, we have to keep adapting and guiding. Librarians and knowledge workers always have, from the card catalog to microfilm to the OPAC to Web 2.0, and we'll keep doing it through whatever comes next.
How I think about AI
I'm not here to sell anyone on AI, or to tell anyone they shouldn't use it. Use it when it helps, skip it when it doesn't, weigh the real costs along the way, and know that choosing not to use it is a perfectly good answer.
The use I care about most is building a tool once so it runs without AI afterward, then sharing it so the next person doesn't start from scratch. That's the whole idea behind BLOOM. I've written the longer version, about AI, expertise and what I think it's for:
Read “build it once, then give it away”Acknowledgements
BLOOM runs on open tools and openly licensed work. Each BLOOM, tool and other resource carries its own credits; these are the site's.
How it was built. Made with Claude Code and Claude Design, by Anthropic.
Type. “Baloo 2” and “Nunito Sans” (self-hosted), under the SIL Open Font License.
Accessibility checker. The page checker runs axe-core, the open accessibility engine from Deque Systems, under the MPL 2.0.
Icons. Openly licensed icon sets, including Tabler Icons (MIT) and Simple Icons (CC0).