Digitization in the classroom : teaching undergraduates the art of digitizing history

In the fall 2015 semester, a new course was offered at Virginia Wesleyan College (VWC) that involved a unique project collaboration between Professor Richard E. Bond and librarians, Patty Clark and Sophie Rondeau. The course, entitled Digital History 250, provided students with an introduction to how history is made and used in digital environments. Bond presented students with topics related to history and social media, spatial mapping, digital literacy, and the implications of crowd sourcing historical narratives, among others. The students were given a final project that involved creating digital exhibits using curated content from VWC yearbooks housed in the College Archives. Using the Omeka content management system - which provides Dublin Core metadata elements for item description - students were also expected to create metadata to describe each digitized item. Alongside teaching students about digital literacy, librarians Clark and Rondeau provided instruction about metadata, controlled vocabularies, and the intricacies of describing visual resources. What\u27s more, their work involved building content standard guidelines suitable for undergraduate students new to resource description and a guide built of the tools they would need to be successful. This presentation will examine the delivery, approach, and tools they used to teach students about item description, as well as the challenges, successes, and failures of the digitization project from the perspective of all parties involved. What\u27s more, future plans for a Digital History course are underway, and this presentation will discuss how the final digitization project will differ, and why