ABOUT
We are piloting an online national collaborative network of educators and practitioners to enable the sharing and dissemination of computational case studies and lesson plans through a Jupyter Notebook interactive computational learning platform. (through a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (LB21) National Digital Infrastructures and Initiative (NDII) Project grant)
We focus on Master’s-level education in order to target professional development of future practitioners across the nation. We intend to enhance education and training programs related to Collections as Data, an approach predicated on the computational use of cultural heritage collections. We build on an earlier IMLS-funded Symposium grant to test the impact of teaching computational thinking (see: final report).
This virtual network is really a network of networks with eighteen collaborators dedicated to mapping Computational Thinking to Archival and Library practices. This Network includes:
| 1. Core Network (CN) of seven experts in digital archives, lesson plan evaluation, project management, computational thinking, library software integration, and ethics and representation in digital collections. |  |
| 2. Educator Network (EN) of four educators from MLIS programs (at all ranks). |  |
| 3. Practitioner Network (PN) of eight librarians / archivists representing four diverse and under-represented American collections of African, Asian, and Puerto Rican -American lineage: * Maryland State Archives Legacy of Slavery Project * Spelman College Department of Drama and Dance Photographs * Densho’s WWII Japanese American Camps Collections * 2019 Puerto Rican Summer Protests (“RickyRenuncia”) |
 We are calling this cluster of Practitioner Network collections “Re-presenting America,” to emphasize its significance and impact of training future MLIS students and exposing them to the full diversity of the American experience. |
Finally, we work with an Advisory Network (AN) consisting of:
| 1. Five US experts [three Practitioners at Cultural Institutions: Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Harvard Library, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and two iSchool Educators from UCLA and Drexel]. |  |
| 2. International experts from all six continents, many of whom attended our April 2019 IMLS Symposium workshop and who are eager to contribute. |  |
This grant is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through a
Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (LB21)
National Digital Infrastructures and Initiative (NDII) Project grant: RE-246334-OLS-20.
