Harnessing Community Knowledge: Mapathons, Edit-a-thons, and Transcribe-a-thons at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Amanda Henley, Emily Jack, Mireille Djenno – UNC – Chapel Hill

Librarians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have coordinated several events that combine two main objectives: engaging with our local communities and serving the wider world by contributing to the corpus of high-quality, freely available information. At these events, participants contributed to OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, and transcribed handwritten historical documents.
In this session, three librarians involved in hosting mapathons, edit-a-thons, and transcribe-a-thons at UNC will share their experiences in organizing and facilitating the events, as well as strategies and tips for others interested in hosting similar events. Additional event facilitators will be on hand to help answer questions at the end of the presentation.

Library Partners Press: More Choices, More Voices

William Kane – Wake Forest University

Library Partners Press combines cloud-based technology and community-based content to form new (and/or re-booted) digital works to a suddenly global audience of digital consumers and devices. In this post-modern publishing environment where “big publishing” competes for (and loses) control of authors and audiences to “indie/hybrid/small publishers,” content creators are now able to design and distribute beautiful books (in a variety of handy formats) back to libraries, where these monographs (and their inherent ideas) will be preserved and protected in perpetuity – all at little to no cost to the library, or really to anyone. Truly, we live in a digital publishing paradise, and Library Partners Press is living the dream. Are you picking up what LPP is puttin’ down? Real talk!

Libraries Unbounded: Partnering with Carolina ADMIRES to Expose High School Students to Scientific Research in a Library Setting

Amy Oldenburg, Therese Triumph – UNC – Chapel Hill

A unique opportunity affords a science librarian the ability to support Carolina ADMIRES (Assisting in Development and Mentoring an Innovative Research Experience in Science), a grant-funded program designed for 8th and 9th grade students to develop their interest in the STEM disciplines. In this presentation, Professor Oldenburg and I will be discussing how an information literacy program was designed to orient students to information gathering for their semester-long ADMIRES research projects, while using an upcoming visit to a UNC solar energy laboratory as an example topic. We will discuss past successes, and the new changes and findings from this year’s (2016) program.

Book + Art = Snowball (20 minute session)

Josh Hockensmith – UNC – Chapel Hill

In 2010, Duke and UNC library units collaborated to present a semester-long series of events and exhibitions centered on our special collections of artists’ books, called “Book + Art.” A community group called Triangle Book Arts grew directly out of those events and has gone on to expand book arts offerings and awareness in the area, from hands-on workshops to gallery exhibitions. In turn, community members learning about book arts through TBA engage with the libraries’ special collections. As one of the principle coordinators of the original series of events and the ongoing TBA group, I will discuss the snowball effect started by a small library initiative, some benefits for the library and community, and how it might continue to grow into the future.

Archiving for Artists: Outreach and Empowerment (20 minute session)

Elizabeth Grab – UNC – Chapel Hill

Learning from Artists’ Archives at UNC-CH engages future information professionals in developing strategies for artists, archivists, librarians, and curators to maintain artists’ archives. We held a day-long workshop at the NCMA in October 2015 called “Archiving for Artists”. This workshop was designed to empower artists to develop best practices for personal and studio archiving of physical and digital media. It offered hands-on skill development for organization, preservation, and documentation to help make the participants’ archives part of their artistic practices and to increase artist-archivist collaboration at an individual, a community, and an institutional level. A major goal of this program is to provide a model for similar educational initiatives hosted in other locations around the country.

Programming on The Edge: Involving Partners and Expanding Librarians’ Roles

Brittany Wofford, Hannah Rozear, Carson Holloway – Duke University

The Ruppert Commons for Research, Technology and Collaboration (also known as “The Edge”) opened in January of 2015. While demand on spaces in the Edge from outside campus organizations has led to numerous well-attended workshops and lectures, the library had been more of a space provider than a collaborator on these events. In this presentation, we will discuss three new programs, The Long Night Against Procrastination, Edge Lightning Talks, and the History Hackathon. We will explore the goals of each of these programs and how each event was implemented. We will also discuss how these collaborations indicated areas of change in the role of librarians, such as program partner or facilitator, and future directions of these programs and others in the library.

Free, Open-Source Website Creation and Hosting

Todd Stoffer, Alison Blaine – NC State

Well-designed, free websites are often a need within the academic community for blogging and hosting resumes or portfolios. University web hosting can be difficult to obtain and use, and easy-to-use commercial solutions exist but can lock your content into one proprietary platform. This presentation will focus on a tool that NCSU Libraries is developing. An open-source web template, based on simple text files that will be packaged with a tutorial that focuses on using Markdown (a text-to-html conversion tool) to update the content. The template will be optimized for hosting on Github Pages, allowing people with varying degrees of technical abilities to have a freely hosted, professional web presence based on open source technologies.

Researching Reynolda: Teaming up with a Campus Institution to Teach Students Research

Amanda Foster – Wake Forest University

The Reynolda House Museum of American Art is the original home of R.J. and Katherine Reynolds, and now functions as art museum adjacent to the Wake Forest University campus. In the Spring of 2015, one librarian teamed up with the Reynolda House to help students learn to conduct academic research in a credit-bearing information literacy course. After touring the home, student groups chose research topics related to the home, including the history of tobacco in the South, the lives of African-American domestic workers, and the Hudson River School art featured in the home. Students researched scholarly and primary sources and crafted presentations that incorporated their personal knowledge and experiences of the history of Reynolda with their academic research.

BeAM: Partnering to Foster an Interdisciplinary Maker Culture at UNC-Chapel Hill

Danianne Mizzy, Michelle Garst, David Romito, Richard Superfine – UNC – Chapel Hill

BeAM (Be a Maker) is a campus-wide network formed with the goal of fostering an interdisciplinary maker culture at UNC-Chapel Hill. UNC Libraries was a founding member of BeAM. The panel will discuss how BeAM has engaged the UNC community in exploring and adopting maker technology to support research, teaching, learning and entrepreneurship. This has been achieved through providing open access to well-equipped spaces and expert staff and by offering programming and training through outreach events, workshops and course-integrated instruction. Partnerships have been vital to BeAM’s success and we will talk about working with academic departments, the Ackland Museum, Morehead Planetarium, student groups and the UNC innovation and entrepreneurship community.

Using Tinkercad to Solve Real Problems

Colin Nickels – UNC – Chapel Hill

Partnering with Faculty and their Professional Association to Create a Learning Resource

James Cheng, Kristine M. Alpi – NC State

Should We Be Posting This?: Library Neutrality and Social Media Outreach

Madison Sullivan – NC State

Scoring Goals Through Community Engagement

Rachel Goatley, Valerie Szwaya – UNC – Chapel Hill

Library as Digital Health Innovation Hub

Brian Moynihan – UNC – Chapel Hill