Pathways: For Librarians/Archivists

Discovering Your Pathway 

This track is targeted to librarians and archivists interested in contributing to the Pathways to Diversity website. The workshop experience will focus on the processes, procedures, and policies required to build a digital collection of materials that can effectively highlight the history of campus diversity in an online collection space.

Who should attend: Librarians and archivists as well as digital collections specialists of any kind may find this track most meaningful and rewarding.

What to expect: Benefiting from a practical and skills-based approach, attendees will learn… 

(a)    how to gather relevant archival materials that speak to diversity in its many forms;

(b)    how to digitize these items for the web;

(c)    how to describe them in a standards-driven way;

(d)    and how to share content in a way that supports open access and public dialog.

All these learning goals help attendees develop their own readiness to contribute unique campus history artifacts to the Pathway to Diversity digital collection, therein expanding and adding richness to site’s corpus of historic materials for the benefit of researchers and the general public.  

More details:

• Workshop attendees will bring their own archival items from their home campuses (physical or digitally) to work with and upload as a hand-on training experience.

• Participants will be provided with a step-by-step worksheet in the form of a workshop “packet,” which will cover in detail each component of the digital artifact creation process and offer lots of tips and extra resources for future consideration.

• In addition to technical implementation considerations, workshop attendees will also get the chance to think on a big picture scale about useful campus partners and collaborators who can be an asset to this kind of work.

• A sizable section of the workshop instruction will focus on metadata creation during which attendees will be able to develop their own metadata, with the help of instructors, and consider appropriate baseline metadata standards that they would like to utilize for similar projects in the future.

• Instructors will also offer insights on identifying key individuals to contact for oral histories, facilitating these oral histories, and the digitizing and sustaining of oral histories.

• Participants will be coached on policy documentation and policy writing and provided a series of working template documents for guidance in this area.

The ultimate goal is for participants to leave the workshop with a completed “packet,” useful digital content, and some new skills that will enable them to begin work immediately at their home campus or to grow work that has already begun there in the area of diversity and inclusion.