Using Digital Library Collections in the Classroom
Submission Type
20-minute Presentation
Abstract
The digitization of library collections not only enhances discoverability of library resources but also suggests new uses for those resources in teaching and learning. Princeton University has a long tradition of bringing students into library and museum archives to gain first-hand experience with collections. But as collections become digitized, platforms can be developed that encourage other forms of student interaction with those materials and allow for new types of creative assignments. This presentation will highlight two recent courses supported by Princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in which students were involved in the crowd-sourced tagging, categorizing, and annotating of digitized books from library collections.
Start Date
5-23-2018 3:00 PM
Description
While Princeton University has a long history of bringing students into the Library archives and Art Museum to experience objects in the University collections first-hand, two recent courses have augmented these activities with classroom assignments centered on digital representations of these collections, involving students in the curation, annotation, and interpretation of these collections. With assistance from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, faculty members from Slavic Languages and Literatures and English departments developed websites that not only showcase library collections, but also give students opportunities to impact the way these collections are used by future students. The Playing Soviet archive, a website created for the course, 'Soviet Culture, Above and Below Ground', presents students with a growing collection of children's books from Soviet-era Russia and asks them to add annotations to specific locations in the page image illustrations. Additionally, page images are organized by subject, artistic style, and color. The ABCBooks archive, an online collection of ABC books culled from Firestone's Cotsen Children's Library and used this year for the third time in the very popular 'Children's Literature' course, allows for crowd-sourced tagging and categorization. Course assignments ask students to generate ‘word clouds’ associated with the imagery contained within the books in the archive and to vote on book categorization schemas. The work done in these courses not only encourages students to formulate their own interpretations of the works, but also to contribute to the future functionality and metadata of the archive. This session will present these two evolving projects, cover the pedagogical considerations that went into their development, the impact on student motivation of contributing to long-term digital projects, and the technologies and platforms used to make these projects possible.
Ben Johnston is Senior Educational Technologist at Princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
Using Digital Library Collections in the Classroom
The digitization of library collections not only enhances discoverability of library resources but also suggests new uses for those resources in teaching and learning. Princeton University has a long tradition of bringing students into library and museum archives to gain first-hand experience with collections. But as collections become digitized, platforms can be developed that encourage other forms of student interaction with those materials and allow for new types of creative assignments. This presentation will highlight two recent courses supported by Princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in which students were involved in the crowd-sourced tagging, categorizing, and annotating of digitized books from library collections.