Building bridges: Bringing communities together through digital narratives

Abstract

The article presents the academic library‘s perspective on a local digital storytelling project of the American University in Bulgaria. Community outreach projects in an international setting require an appropriate set of practical and pedagogical approaches, flexible project skills, advocacy, and cross-departmental collaboration to achieve their goals. The article gives an overview of the emerging digital storytelling method used in academia, shares the challenges, good practices, and results, as well as the empowering opportunities for the library to build capacity for similar digital initiatives in the future and to strengthen its advocacy abilities.

Keywords:

• Digital storytelling
• academic library
• digital archive
• collaboration
• library advocacy
• digital humanities

Notes

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2 Barthes describes the variety of narratives as “oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation.”

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16 Lambert (2007). Digital storytelling cookbook. Digital Diner Press.

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21 AUBG Better Society Club is a student organization with a long charity history in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

22 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). https://gdpr-info.eu/

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