The Use of Digital Collections in Undergraduate Teaching

The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) and the educational arm of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley will test a number of models that might prove effective in applying technological solutions to problems of higher educational quality, cost, and access within the context of a major public research university. The focus of this project is a survey and review of use of digital collections in the humanities and social sciences (H/SS) in a variety of undergraduate teaching environments, including those in liberal arts and community colleges.
We have identified a number of challenges confronting those who finance and develop digital collections for classroom use. These include a lack of attention on humanities and social science learning environments, a lack of coordination among developers regarding best practice in user studies, and a lack of knowledge about how different tiers of higher education institutions are using collections in undergraduate education. Our work will include:
1) A survey of current use of select H/SS digital collections, 2)Testing the efficacy of a variety of methods to assess actual use of local H/SS collections,
3) Understanding faculty attitudes about their use or non-use of digital collections in H/SS teaching, and
4) Assembling a cohort of digital collection owners and digital collection evaluation experts to discuss and disseminate best practice in assessing digital collection use in undergraduate educational settings.
An offshoot of this work is a proposed experiment in partnership with the California Digital Library (CDL) that will analyze the quality and quantity of educational use that is made of three distinctive types of digital collection (database, portal, and exhibition). Our hypothesis is that the reference database, although rich in content, is an inadequate collection type for easy classroom use by most faculty. We will compare the relative costs and utility of the database, the portal, and the exhibition in undergraduate learning environments. The work is undertaken to ensure that investment in digital collections and assumptions about their value are informed by real data on both the quantity and quality of their scholarly use. To that end, we will engage in an experiment that first, evaluates faculty use of existing collection types and second, involves faculty from multiple disciplines in the design and classroom testing of entirely new portals and an array of related exhibitions.