Digital Collections in the University Classroom: Inspiring your faculty with regional content

This presentation explores a model collaboration between the Digital Collections Center of the library and the History Department that has been highly successful in introducing students to researching with digital collections. We consider the use of history department undergraduate and graduate interns in the library and discuss the benefits and challenges to both parties. Dr. Christopher Davis shares the research project that was embedded in his course syllabus, highlighting various relevant digital collections and the results of student research. He also discusses what aspect of the collections he found intriguing and inspired him to create a research project and his expectations of students. The hope is that this presentation will help librarians view their collections as the potential research projects they could be. In this presentation, librarians will learn to assess their collections for unique content that may be particularly well-suited for research projects. Additionally, we help librarians, directors, and supervisors evaluate whether the use of history students in their department would be beneficial for them by exploring elements such as time spent on training, the effectiveness of history interns as metadata specialists, and space and technology concerns. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to provide attendees with a model of collaboration that should result in broader discovery and use of their digital collections in the classroom