Faculty, Librarian, and Student Collaboration: Enhancing Science Teaching with Digital Collections

In 2009 The Five Colleges of Ohio* initiated a program to integrate digital collections into the curriculum, funded by The Andrew Mellon Foundation.  This poster describes science collections designed to enrich teaching and learning environments of specific courses. These projects also make private collections publicly accessible, with applicability beyond the Five Colleges. Librarians and teaching faculty jointly develop grant proposals, peer reviewed by campus committees comprised of faculty, librarians, and administrators.  Criteria for projects include integration into the curriculum, and enhanced usability and access to materials through effective digitization. An assessment plan for each digital collection is required. The grant supports a full-time Digital Specialist to coordinate technical aspects and help develop institutional repositories at each campus, utilizing DSpace. Over 30 collections across the curricula are in development.  More than a third are in science or impact science education in cross-disciplinary studies.  An example of the latter is a GIS photo archive using GPS devices to geo-tag photographs taken by students in the field. Older pictures are retrospectively geo-tagged so students and researches can track the changes over time. This project has applications in geology, environmental science, history and other disciplines, strengthening collaborations across disciplines and serving the liberal arts focus of the consortium. In addition to IR archiving, the resulting collections will be available in the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons.  They provide unparalleled opportunities for student learning, and make accessible specimens, data, graphs, sound files, and images that were previously available only in one lab or facility.  The collections make students active participants in new scholarly activities and forge important partnerships among faculty, librarians and staff. The Five Colleges consortium includes the College of Wooster (WOO), Denison University (DEN), Kenyon College (KEN), Oberlin College (OBE), and Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU).  The $600,000 Mellon Foundation grant supports the project Next Steps in the Next Generation Library: Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts Curriculum.