Discovering Digital Scholarship

For the next two semesters I am excited to intern with Nathan Sleeter creating content for World History Commons (WHC). I was unaware of this website before beginning this internship, but I very much wish it had been on my radar. The site aggregates reviews of websites dedicated to providing access to primary sources and teaching material and aids that incorporate those primary sources. Reviews are relatively short – under 1000 words – but metadata attached to each review helps organize sites. Teachers that need specific material, like from a certain country, time period, or subject, can easily filter site reviews by these parameters. WHC also compiles a small selection of primary sources from these sites to use as examples for interested users. These are usually static visual media, like photographs, objects, or documents, but there are some videos and audio files, and can also be sorted by time period, region, and subject.

My initial role at WHC is to find and review sites that would be appropriate for inclusion in their database. So far, I have completed two such reviews – one for the Jane Addams Papers (JAPP), and one for OER Commons (OERC). I started with JAPP because it is familiar to me as my former place of work, which I hoped would help understand the flow of work. OERC is a collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) for educators created by and shared with the public. Resources can range from in-class activities, to entire semester-long course plans. Both of these sites add a small piece of information to the large number of aggregated sites in the WHC database, but I feel they are valuable because they are wholly unique. There is information contained within them that can be found nowhere else and could be useful to a struggling educator.

I absolutely love research for the sake of research – it’s why I love my job as an academic librarian. Being able to throw out a net and find fascinating websites to share with interested users is like a dream come true. But just because I’m not using the sources that I unearth doesn’t mean I don’t learn anything from them, which is also something I love about research. To describe these sites and create a meaningful review, it’s necessary to pay close attention to large features as well as small items. The more I explore a site, the more I learn about things like UX, metadata organization, historical topics, and the needs of educators from kindergarten to college. As an academic librarian, I am very used to helping college aged students and their professors – I am very excited to be able to broaden my skills and understand what a varied pool of professionals need to be able to effectively teach with primary sources.