When working with faculty, students, and staff on digital projects, librarians at the Grinnell College Libraries need to provide these constituents with tools to create robust metadata for these digital projects. The Grinnell College Libraries sought to create a user-friendly alternative. The landed on using Google Forms and Sheets to facilitate metadata creation.
A poster used at the 2013 ACRL conference in Indianapolis, IN, briefly describing the opportunities and merits of student employment in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Grinnell College.
Librarians Kevin Engel, Liz Rodrigues, and Rebecca Ciota discuss the library instruction session portion of the Grinnell Science Project, a program to promote diversity in STEM majors at Grinnell College.
Working with faculty and staff to create digital projects requires a complex group of skills and activities. Potential collaborators often jump to the end vision without fully grasping the need for proper description & metadata. Using Google Forms & Sheets is perceived as neutral and less frightening than working in a repository platform or using other proprietary productivity software.
Many institutions digitize their physical collections. Unfortunately, once these items are digitized, they reside in a repository and act merely as digital representations of their physical counterparts. I discuss how libraries can make greater use of their homegrown electronic resources through collaborations between scholars, students, and the general community.
