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Full-Text Articles in Education

Archives Alive!: Librarian-Faculty Collaboration And An Alternative To The Five-Page Paper, Tom Keegan, Kelly Mcelroy Aug 2015

Archives Alive!: Librarian-Faculty Collaboration And An Alternative To The Five-Page Paper, Tom Keegan, Kelly Mcelroy

Tom Keegan

The short research paper is ubiquitous in undergraduate liberal arts education. But is this assignment type an effective way to assess student learning or writing skills? We argue that it rarely is, and instead serves as an artifact maintained out of instructor familiarity with and unnecessary allegiance to timeworn conceptions of “academia.” As an alternative, we detail the Archives Alive! assignment developed by librarians and faculty at the University of Iowa and designed to bring Rhetoric students into contact with archival collections and digital skills. We also discuss how librarians can collaborate with instructors on new assignment models that build …


Panel: Collaboration And Digital Projects, Matthew Gilchrist, Tom Keegan, Paul Soderdahl, Shannon Davis, Joel Minor Aug 2015

Panel: Collaboration And Digital Projects, Matthew Gilchrist, Tom Keegan, Paul Soderdahl, Shannon Davis, Joel Minor

Tom Keegan

In 2011 the University of Iowa Libraries began crowdsourcing the digital transcription of its manuscript archives. Four years and over 50,000 transcribed pages later, that project, known as DIY History, has garnered considerable internet attention via Buzzfeed, Twitter, Tumblr, and the NBC News blog. At the same time, it has been threaded into undergraduate classrooms at Iowa as a means of introducing students to primary source research, information literacy, and multimodal design. Matt Gilchrist and Tom Keegan will discuss how faculty members and librarians collaborated on an assignment that emphasizes course objectives while strengthening student connections to the UI Libraries. …