New from ACRL - “Scholarship in the Sandbox”

CHICAGO – The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announces the publication of “Scholarship in the Sandbox: Academic Libraries as Laboratories, Forums, and Archives for Student Work,” edited by Amy S. Jackson, Cindy Pierard, and Suzanne M. Schadl. This collection of case studies and discussions describes efforts to curate student work, explores intellectual property issues, and provides tips for promoting and preserving access to this production through new programming and services that affirm libraries’ roles in intellectual processes. 

Students are emerging scholars whose work should be recognized and shared along with work created by established scholars. Libraries are actively engaged with student-created content and encourage students to see themselves as producers, not just consumers, of information. By shifting priorities, libraries should include student-created content in their spaces and become participants in high-impact educational practices, increasing students’ investment in their learning, their engagement with scholarship at the institutional level, and their success and retention. These new priorities also open the library to new campus partnerships, making student scholarship and content a common goal.

"Scholarship in the Sandbox" is broken into four sections—Library as Laboratory, Library as Forum, Library as Archive, and Articulating the Value of Student Work—containing case studies that address the innovative ways libraries are actively occupying more central space on campus as practical laboratories outside of the classroom. They demonstrate collective learning in a sandbox environment where the answers are far less important than the multiplicity of prospective solutions, and present several models for providing a supportive environment in which students, teaching faculty, and librarians can practice, explore, fail at, and refine their academic work through collaboration.

Whether students share their scholarly production with their professors on library platforms via blogs, performances, repositories, zines, makerspaces, galleries, or spect-acting, the experience is transformative because production ties classroom learning into research and practice done outside of the classroom. This enables students to employ their own academic or creative practices, establish stronger footholds in their disciplines, prepare for a career, and publicly display competence. "Scholarship in the Sandbox" provides multiple ways that the library can support experimentation, productive failure, and amazing successes outside of our traditional roles of teaching and providing access to resources.

“Scholarship in the Sandbox: Academic Libraries as Laboratories, Forums, and Archives for Student Work” is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the U.S. or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.
    
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The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for academic libraries and library workers. Representing nearly 10,500 individuals and libraries, ACRL (a division of the American Library Association) develops programs, products, and services to help those working in academic and research libraries learn, innovate, and lead within the academic community. Founded in 1940, ACRL is committed to advancing learning and transforming scholarship. Find ACRL on the web, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.