Digital Antiquity and ASU Libraries just submitted a project proposal to the The Knight Foundation Knight News Challenge, and we need your help to get our project funded.
The Challenge poses the question, “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” Our project, Digging Up Data – Teaching and Learning with Digital Repositories like the Digital Archaeological Record, is designed to help teachers and students learn to find and use the information stored online in digital repositories. Many digital repositories provide free and open content to users who are searching for information on a topic, and include everything from documents, to 3D printer files, to photographs, and audio and video collections.
The goal of Digging Up Data is to give teachers and students an incentive to use digital repositories and become familiar with the wealth of information they contain. Libraries understand how to collect, archive and make digital information accessible – in digital repositories. But, if you ask someone “where should I look for information on X” they will likely respond “read a book” or “search Google” but not “search in a digital repository.” The Digging Up Data team want to help teachers and students leverage digital repositories to find the “hidden” information, the new special collections, that libraries and domain repositories are now building and maintaining. Our project employs a contest format to incentivize teachers to design assignments that help students engage with and make use of the amazing digital materials in repositories such as tDAR.
To find out more about our project please check out our proposal at the Knight News Challege Website (direct link to tDAR’s entry here). Submissions are evaluated by a team of outside reviewers, but the projects are visible to the public who are able to show support (via “applause”) and provide feedback. Any comments or suggestions for improvement would be very welcome in the comments section at the end of the proposal, as would your “applause”. Thanks!
tDAR’s Entry to the Knight News Challenge: