Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Did you hear about these two University of Virginia grad students who rescued a long-standing academic relic from imminent destruction? Their institution’s expansive and outdated library card catalog -- which enjoyed a heyday as a bona fide workhorse before it was decommissioned 31 years ago -- grew to consume an unwieldy 68 cabinets’ worth of space. When it was determined that digital archiving would be too costly, Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley, both Ph.D. candidates in literature, devised a more economical storage option to allow future researchers and historians to access the rich low-tech data that otherwise would have been destroyed.

The librarians feel that student use of this Holmes Ancient Objects Collection to interact with history facilitates outstanding information literacy education, especially when it comes to the relationship with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which encourages lifelong learning. More than one frame within the Framework concentrates on the experiential relationship between students, objects, and creation. The faculty involved with this project took the guidelines of “Information Creation as a Process” and “Scholarship as Conversation” to create an assignment that gave students the ability to become the authorities, thus establishing a stronger connection to history as a living process.