Tilting the Lens to Black Lives: Using Public Open Digital Scholarship to Develop Student Skills and Deepen Community Engagement

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Date

2022-10-05

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Indiana University Digital Collections Services

Abstract

Librarians are working to counterbalance collections decisions and priorities that have historically marginalized the histories and experiences of people of color. Critical digital scholars have also highlighted the need to disrupt the replication of this marginalization in the digital sphere. Meanwhile concerns about diversity, cultural competence, and the marginalization of students of color in STEM and librarianship continue. Libraries can use critical digital collections in response. This presentation will focus on an open access digital resource built at Indiana University Bloomington Libraries - Land, Wealth, Liberation: The Making & Unmaking of Black Wealth in the United States - which has seen significant uptake from the campus and community and attracted diverse student workers. Librarians and students built this resource on a Libraries-hosted digital exhibition service based on Omeka S, which allowed for rapid, collaborative and distributed development, and integration of embedded audiovisual content and interactive timelines. The primary timeline spanning 1820-2020 offers an alternate construction of significant historical periods, tying them to events that directly affected black communities, such as the 1921 destruction of Greenwood, Tulsa, and the federal urban renewal policies initiated by the 1949 Housing Act. Librarians actively engaged students in developing their skills in scholarly communication, open access, and digital methods. The success of this project opens new doors for collaborative digital scholarship projects between the Libraries, the campus, and the community, and illustrates that digital collections focusing on the stories of historically marginalized groups can be an important means of addressing multiple concerns.

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Digital scholarship, Critical digital collections, Digital pedagogy

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Presentation