Empowering student voices: The active role of libraries in preserving student digital content

The opportunities for academic libraries to participate as an equal partner in the creation of educational digital projects are expanding significantly. The traditional focus on digitization, preservation and dissemination of collections has developed considerably, bringing new strategies for adequately serving the changed academic needs, as well as building and utilizing different set of professional skills. Active engagement in the learning dynamics, cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaboration, synchronicity, and reassuring projects’ sustainability are among the mandatory conditions for keeping the relevancy of the academic libraries. The goal of this session is to elaborate on these strategic topics by presenting two of the library’s newest digital collections projects, thus opening the subject for discussion and guiding fellow colleagues through the practical process. One of the showcased projects is the AUBG Sound Library, which is a digital sound archive of 118 sound files on open access, created in collaboration with a senior student. The second project is the AUBG Multimedia Projects Library that contains the best course projects of JMC students.

The two projects represent a completely new focus of Panitza Library at the American University in Bulgaria. They concern students’ academic output that has normally not been a scope of interest to preserve or disseminate. The library not only did that, but also went further in collaboratively structuring, designing, sustaining, as well as building the grounds for other new projects to develop in partnership with faculty and students.