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.
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.
This paper examines the potential role of houses of worship as institutions where individuals can acquire civic skills that can be deployed for political participation in the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy: Indonesia.
