Community Engaged Digital Initiatives: Building Academic Library Services and Infrastructure with Faculty and Community Collaborators

Abstract

Community collaborations have become key drivers for the development of our library’s digital initiatives (DI) program. While collaborative partnerships can complicate the process of getting DI work completed, they can also positively contribute to decision making around digitization projects, metadata use, user interface (UI) design, and infrastructure development. This presentation outlines possibilities for iteratively developing digital infrastructure and service offerings to support community-engaged research and discusses key issues to consider when developing such a program. We will describe how we have adapted DI systems to support a range of projects from photography collections to oral histories, to locally created open educational resources (OER). The roles for community groups, other galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), disciplinary faculty, and students will be explored and we will describe how their contributions strengthen our DI program.