The Digital Literacy Partnership Website: Promoting Interdisciplinary Scholarship Between Faculty, Students, and Librarians

ABSTRACT

In 2013, the Center for Digital Scholarship at Miami University was established and coincided with the redesign of the Children's Picture Book Database, which had a successful web presence for nearly 20 years. We developed the Digital Literacy Partnership (DLP) website project in order to upgrade the project to Omeka as a new digital management tool and to establish a second resource called the Health Literacy Database. Over time, the project grew to include three databases with the mission to promote the contributions of literacy, health, and technology on learning. In this case study, we describe the role of academic libraries in supporting faculty and student design projects; share the history and mission of the DLP project; and explain the digital team of faculty, librarians, and undergraduate students. We also outline the production of public health eBooks targeted to children and adults with low literacy skills; the social marketing decisions we made from web usage statistics; and the technical lessons learned throughout this collaborative digital project.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital literacy
• undergraduate scholarship
• digital scholarship
• digital publishing

Notes

¹ Pre-K is a class that prepares children, typically 5 or 6 years old, for first grade.