Creating a Digital Archive for Students’ Research in a Credit Library Course

Tiffany R. Walsh and Christopher V. Hollister

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Using wiki technology in a credit library course, the authors created an online exhibit for students’ research titled the Digital Archive. The purpose of the Digital Archive is to showcase students’ final projects from the course and to demonstrate research skills developed during the semester. It is an ongoing and evolving endeavor between students and instructors, and it will continue as a source of scholarly communication. The authors discuss the use of wiki technology, students’ reactions, and lessons learned. Derived from student surveys, course evaluations, and instructor observations, the authors also present an assessment of the usefulness and effectiveness of using wiki technology to showcase coursework.

The University at Buffalo’s (UB’s) Arts and Sciences Libraries offers the semester-long, credit-bearing course ULC-257: Introduction to Library Research Methods. The course attracts students from their freshman through their senior years and from widely diverse academic disciplines. Teaching ULC-257 is an increasingly popular and effective way for instruction librarians to integrate themselves into educational curricula and to continue the advancement of information literacy on campus. Librarians teaching this course have the opportunity to use more creative, effective, and research-proven instructional methods than they are accustomed to using for traditional one-shot library instruction classes.

The course is designed to introduce students to the research process and also to library information sources at UB. Objectives for the course include the following:

• Students will become effective and efficient researchers and library users.
• Students will hone their abilities to analyze and critically evaluate information.
• Students will develop the skills necessary for becoming information savvy and for becoming lifelong learners.¹

The ULC-257 course has been offered since the fall semester of 2003. The structure and content of the course, however, have changed only incrementally since its inception. The authors felt it was necessary to revise and revitalize ULC-257, and they began that process prior to the spring semester of 2008. Placing more emphasis on the students’ final research projects was central to all of the changes implemented. Historically, librarians teaching the course suffuse their own creative ideas into the final project, though the basic template of it has remained unchanged. Details of the final project are provided later.

For the spring semester of 2008, the authors seized the opportunity to employ an emerging technology that would revitalize the course and, in particular, the final project. The intent of employing a new technology would be to address students’ educational expectations and also meet their diverse and increasingly sophisticated learning styles. For reasons discussed below, the authors opted to create an online showcase of students’ final research projects using wiki technology, and they named it the ULC-257 Digital Archive.

Literature Review

The literature is increasingly populated by works about the professional use of Internet-based communication tools. As a suite, these tools are commonly referred to as Web 2.0 applications, and they include blogs, podcasts, social networking spaces, and wikis. Together, the innovative nature of these applications and their popularity among students provide unique opportunities for library use, especially for teaching and learning. Ragains writes, “It seems incumbent on instructional librarians to use Web 2.0 effectively in educating students.”²

Pedagogical literature from various disciplines provides a modest, though growing, body of evidence that wikis in particular are being used for creative teaching and learning activities. Still, Achterman writes, “The potential for wikis as an educational tool remains largely untapped.”³ Elgort et al. discuss this shortcoming and assert, “Research that addresses pedagogical benefits and pitfalls of using wikis as a collaborative learning tool … are still rather limited.”⁴

The opportunities provided by wikis are manifold. Lamb lists the features of wiki technology that facilitate creative teaching and learning:

• They provide an opportunity to share unique information.
• They are collaborative.
• They allow for open editing.
• They do not require sophisticated coding.
• They are ever-evolving.⁵

Their collaborative nature is most often cited as the primary reason for adopting wikis. From library literature, Allan discusses the use of wikis for “sharing information and new experiences” gained during library instruction sessions, and also for the collaborative “creation of general library information handouts and subject-specific resource guides.”⁶ Baldwin suggests the usefulness of wikis for librarians to share instructional resources.⁷ Still, library literature provides little evidence in terms of wikis and collaborative teaching and learning. From educational literature, Parker and Chao describe the wiki as a “collaboration tool that can be used to engage students in learning with others within a collaborative environment.”⁸ Beldarrain expounds, “Instructional design frameworks must be adapted to purposely integrate student interaction using technology tools. This requires using flexible models that allow designers to begin at any given point in the process, anchoring the use of technology on collaborative instructional strategies that lead the student toward achieving the desired learning outcomes.”⁹

Skiba touts wikis for enabling students to transmit knowledge, collaborate in the creation of new knowledge, and become subject matter experts.¹⁰ Matthies et al. refer to this as collaborative discovery learning: “Discovery learning takes place most notably in problem solving situations where the student draws on his/her own experience and prior knowledge to discover the truths that are to be learned.”¹¹ Traditionally, this concept is associated with constructivist learning theory, which holds that learning is a personal, internal process. Beldarrain writes, “The versatility of social software and other collaboration tools available today support constructivist environments that seek to motivate, cultivate, and meet the needs of the 21st-century learner.”¹² However, Matthies et al. assert that “wikis have the ability to make this process very interpersonal, collaborative, and dynamic.”¹³

The flexibility of wiki technology is put forth as a unique and useful feature. McPherson explains, “Students can use wikis to insert music, graphics, video, and photos in their writing and to communicate meanings that were once inaccessible or not fully expressed through the printed word.”¹⁴ Additionally, the ability for students and instructors to track progress of wiki projects is touted. Achterman describes this function:

Wikis have a “History” option that allows users to view each change that has been made to an entry since its creation. This makes it possible for the teacher-librarian and classroom teacher to chart progress and identify places in the learning process that require more or less intervention—a useful feedback tool in instructional design.¹⁵

The notion of wikis and authorship is often discussed. Yan asserts, “Teachers who want their students to be able to work together in an online publishing environment and need collaborative editing tools for students look to the wiki.”¹⁶ He continues: “Giving students the ability to share their work in this way transforms them into authors and publishers.”¹⁷ Building on this, McPherson writes, “Knowing that real people will be reading and possibly responding to their writing is often the impetus to motivate students to write with much more enthusiasm than they would when composing traditional research essays, in which the classroom teacher or teacher-librarian is the only audience.”¹⁸

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