Democratizing Digital Scholarship Through Library Instruction, Resources, and Engagement

In this panel discussion, we demonstrate innovative ways in which academic libraries apply digital scholarship methodology in order to transform values on community engagement and impact into community digital scholarship instruction, resources, and engagement opportunities. Instruction Teaching students using digital scholarship tools disrupts lecture- and librarian-oriented narratives in favor of allowing students to understand how the application of digital scholarship can broaden the reach and impact of their coursework and their own research initiatives. Focusing classroom time around community-oriented resources and projects empowers students to uncover new resources and new voices outside traditional scholarship, from food desert maps to maternal health statistics to better engage with the community at large. In turn, faculty whose courses focus on local communities inevitably appreciate opportunities to tie research to relevant scholarly and scholarly-adjacent resources, working alongside librarians to teach students to read, evaluate, and utilize a variety of digital source materials. Resources Digital scholarship platforms provide an opportunity to integrate classrooms, research projects, and community populations with novel tools and information. By utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to enable students and faculty to collaborate on public-facing community recording projects and develop interactive platforms addressing food insecurity in local neighborhoods, our library bridges communities, students, and technology through digital scholarship. The case studies presented in this talk examine how DS tools lower the bar for the creation of and access to resources related to community outreach, social justice, and equitable access to health resources. Engagement A library cross-team have initiated a collaboration with the Case School of Engineering and its alumni association to create an interactive history project using archival documents, GIS, Scalar, and community knowledge. This discussion will detail the evolution of the collaboration and the project, and how the final product contributes to community engagement