Project Updates

Last week, the project team had the opportunity to pilot the curricular materials they have been developing at two workshops held at Indiana University and the University of Illinois on April 12th and 14th, respectively. The workshops were held in the universities’ libraries, and they were open to librarians and graduate students in library and information science. About a dozen people attended each workshop. We think they were a success overall, but we did learn a few lessons about computer lab policies (more restrictive than expected!) and pacing (don’t throw out too many tool names!). Over the next two months, we’ll be refining the curriculum to share with the partners at the University of North Carolina, Lafayette College, and Northwestern University.

The project’s curriculum working group has developed a preliminary draft of the learning materials to be used in the Digging Deeper, Reaching Further workshops. They shared it with partner institutions this week.

Much of the time in pulling together the preliminary content was devoted to planning, such as thinking about how to meet the needs of the librarian audience and outlining learning objectives. Over the last month, project staff also had the opportunity to speak with organizers of other library training initiatives, including the University of Rochester’s Digital Humanities Institute for Mid-Career Librarians and North Carolina State University’s Data and Visualization Institute for Librarians. These fruitful conversations with other organizers gave the curriculum group some great ideas that they are now integrating into their own plans.

Going forward, the curriculum group will use feedback from the partner institutions to finalize the first draft content for workshops to be piloted at the University of Illinois and Indiana University in mid-April.