ALIA Schools: Curation for your Community
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An ALIA school presentation on digital content curation for school libraries.
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ALIA Schools: Curation for your Community
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- 29. Six standard CC licences by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence 2.0 at https://creativecommons.org.au/materials/factsheets/cc-licences.pdf
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- 38. Bhargava, Rohit. (2009, September 30). Manifesto for the content curator: The next big social media job of the future? The non-obvious insights blog. Good, R. (n.d.). Why to curate information. In Content curation official guide. https://medium.com/content-curation-official-guide/why-to-curate- information-73ecb47b98a5#.7u43snicy Kanter, Beth. (2011, October 4). Content curation primer. Beth Kanter. http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/ Oddone, K. (2016, August 3). Digital content curation: More important than ever! Linking Learning http://www.linkinglearning.com.au/digital-content- curation-more-important-than-ever/ Oddone, K. (2016, March 13). Learning the art of Digital Content Curation. Linking Learning. https://www.linkinglearning.com.au/learning-the-ar t-of- digital-content-curation-2/ Oddone, K. (2020, April 3). Digital content curation: How to do it right! SCIS. https://scis.edublogs.org/2020/04/03/digital-conte nt-curation-how-to-do-it-right/ Parsons, M. (n.d.). Open Educational Resources (OERs). Library learning and teaching guides. https://rmit.libguides.com/c.php?g=924918&p=6682926 Seitzinger, J. (2011). Digital curation: What kind of curator are you? [Powerpoint Slides]. https://www.slideshare.net/catspyjamas/digital-curation- what-kind-of-curator-are-you-converge11/2-Joyce_Seitzinger_aka_catspyjamasnz_Say Smartcopying. (2021, March 01). Introduction to OER. Smartcopying. https://smartcopying.edu.au/introduction-to-oer/ Smartcopying. (2021). Where to Find OER Materials. Smartcopying. https://smartcopying.edu.au/where-to-find-oer-materials/ Tate. (n.d.). Curator. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/curator UNESCO. (2017). Open Educational Resources (OER). UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer Valenza, J. K. (2012). Curation. School Library Monthly, 29(1). Weigerber, C. (2011, November 16). Building thought leadership through content curation. [Powerpoint Slides]. https://www.slideshare.net/corinnew/building-thought-leadership-through-content-curation
Editor's Notes
- 20. 3. 2022
- When I trained to be a teacher librarian in the early 1990s there was no mention of the internet and the world wide web. As a graduate I worked at one of the libraries at the University of Melbourne and got the opportunity to be trained in using the world wide web. This kick started my interest in digital technologies and how they could be used in education. Around 2007 I did the 23 Things Online Learning program which was a series of self-paced online lessons on emerging technologies such as blogs, wikis, social media, YouTube, podcasts, social bookmarking and tagging. This is where I first encountered Delicious, a social bookmarking tool. Over the next few years I experimented with a variety of web 2.0 tools, including curation tools as they evolved. Around this time my school library didn’t have full control over their own website (not through lack of trying) so I experimented with a tool called ScoopIt. Scoop.It provided the flexibility I needed to quickly create and update links for a variety of subjects. Personally and professionally I was using Pinterest to discover and collect resources, ideas, recipes, holiday destinations etc. In 2015 I attended an ALIA Schools seminar on curation by the fabulous Kay Oddone. At the time Kay was a Librarian for Brisbane Catholic Education. After this seminar, my goal was to move beyond being an aggregator where I simply listed links to resources to becoming a curator who added value by describing and contextualising the resources for the students. I was determined to go back to school and improve my digital curation efforts. My post graduate studies allowed me to delve even further and I gravitated towards the areas of digital curation, open educational resources and digital citizenship. It was about this time that our school started to use a learning management system, Schoolbox. With some basic training and the will to independently learn more, I started to create research guides using Schoolbox. I have since moved schools but I am still curating resources using Schoolbox and trying to apply what I have learned from my studies and my library mentors, such as Kay Oddone and Joyce Valenza. So as you can see, I have been interested in curating digital resources for many, many years. I am continually improving my practice as I learn more. I can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn. I will also display my contact details at the end of the presentation.
- In this webinar I will define curation in relation to libraries, discuss online learning tools I have used personally and in school libraries, outline ways to deliver and promote online learning tools, explain how to identify tools best suited to your community, share my own experiences of curating digital resources and provide some hints and tips for beginner and more experienced digital curators. I will also define and discuss Open Educational Resources and how they fit into digital curation. To cover all of this, I have divided the presentation into why & how, tools and OER. To try and build some interactivity into the webinar, I will pause and ask for your thoughts in the chat box. I will do my best to address any questions you have at the end of the presentation. I will speak from the perspective of a teacher librarian who has mostly worked in secondary settings and will often use the term teacher librarian, however I hope that whatever title you have in your workplace, or year levels you cater for, that you will find something of value in this presentation on the curation of digital resources. Digital content curation can be done in different ways but there are some common principles that apply regardless of the tools you use. I will share my experiences with digital content curation, including the use of Open Educational Resources so that you can reflect and consider your own context.
- To model curation in practice, I have curated all the links and resources mentioned in this presentation using a tool called Padlet. You can use the QR code on the screen or the link in the chat to access the Padlet. Padlet is a digital notice board that is able to feature text, images, links, videos and documents. While it is probably best known as a digital tool that is perfect for collaborative brainstorming, it also serves as an easy to use curation tool. Some of you will be familiar with Padlet through other webinars and its use in the classroom, especially during remote learning. The free version allows you to have up to 3 padlets with 20MB upload and paid plans allow for more padlets and higher upload limits. I am currently using the free version. I like Padlet for its ease of use, visual appeal and flexibility in the way you can present and share boards. I will give you a quick demonstration of this tool and some others towards the end of the presentation. I have also included hyperlinks wherever possible in the slide deck and will share the slides with ALIA Schools. The images used in the slide deck are from Canva, my own or attributed to their creator.
- For the past 3 and a bit years I have been the Manager of Library Services at Melbourne Girls Grammar at the Merton Hall campus. Our campus caters for Years 5-12 and the Early Learning Centre with a population of approximately 946 students. Library staffing includes 2 full time library technicians, a teacher librarian 3 days a week and myself as manager and teacher librarian. I have a teaching load outside of the library of 7 periods per fortnight. MGGS has another campus for P-4 at Morris Hall with a population of 163 that has its own library and one teacher librarian. The libraries run independently of each other, however we share the same library management system, Infiniti and use the learning management system, Schoolbox for our “library website”. While both libraries share these systems, I manage the Merton Hall side and the Morris Hall side is managed by the teacher librarian at Morris Hall. Library staff collaborate and support each other but recognise that staff at each campus knows the needs of their campus best. Schoolbox is branded as eVI at our school and is integral to the everyday workings of the school community including staff, students and parents. Therefore each library has its own eVI entry point suited to the community it serves. Fortunately for us, eVi and our library's presence on eVI was established before the pandemic and remote learning. Both libraries subscribe to digital products suitable for their users. At Merton Hall we currently have access to Britannica School, Worldbook, selected EBSCO and Gale databases, several Oxford products and Clickview. We have some non fiction ebooks such as Issues in Society and several online magazines. Most of these subscriptions were in place before I arrived and are being reviewed annually. Today I will be sharing my experiences related to the Merton Hall campus. I understand that many of you will be working solo in your libraries or with a small team and may wonder how on earth you could add another task such as digital curation to your workload. I ask you to keep your mind open to the possibilities, recognise what you may already be doing in this area and look for situations where curation could be of value. My philosophy when attending professional learning is to take-away at least one idea, big or small and determine how it could be applicable to my own context.
- What educational context are you working in? Enter your response in the chat.
- Why should you consider curation for your community? What does curation mean for school libraries and how do you do it? Are you already doing it? Could you improve your practice? Consider your context, your community.
- The word curator originates from the Latin Cura to care or give attention. You are probably most familiar with the term curator in the context of an art curator, who acquires, cares for, manages and displays artworks to educate and inspire visitors to an art gallery. A content curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organises and shares the most relevant content on a specific issue online" (Bhargava, 2009). Does this definition sound familiar to you? This is something libraries and librarians have been doing for a very long time. Developing, building and sharing collections with their communities. Content curation is not new but the abundance of information and the variety of mediums in which it is disseminated has made the role of content curator more important. Content curators exist in many different contexts such as marketing, social media, digital media, organisations and of course the GLAM sector, galleries, libraries and museums.
- Joyce Valenza, a US school librarian and academic, refers to digital curators as human filters and asserts that “librarians are uniquely qualified to curate”. We are used to selecting, evaluating, organising and sharing physical resources so we can do the same with digital resources. We are the experts who know the curriculum and our communities. With information, misinformation and disinformation coming from a multitude of channels, we can assist our communities by taming the flood and reducing information overload. The idea is not to add more noise but present the most important and add meaning for our communities.
- In addition to filtering information, content curation can provide scaffolds for our learners and allow for differentiation. Age and reading level appropriate resources can be presented to students to get them started with their inquiry and guide their search for information. This is especially important for our younger learners who haven’t yet developed critical thinking skills to evaluate sources. It is about supporting diverse learning needs and giving each student a solid foundation for inquiry and research. This leads on to another reason for content curation - providing credible sources of information. Content curation is an opportunity to direct students to our online encyclopedias, databases and other digital resources that often get ignored. Content curation is a way of advertising what the library has and provides another entry point for users. Essentially you are providing a “face-out” display for your digital resources. Content curation isn’t just for digital material, it can also be used to promote your print resources. Again, providing an additional entry point to materials that could be overlooked. Library collections can be daunting for some of our users so try and make it as easy as possible for students to find books on the shelves and access digital materials.
- Are you already curating resources in your school? Enter your thoughts in the chat.
- Now that we understand why content curation is valuable, how do we do it? Corinne Weisberger identifies these steps: find, select, editorialise, create and share. Editorialising or annotating is a vital step in the curation process.
- It is easy to provide a list of links for students to use but this is not content curation but aggregation. “Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into context with organisation, annotation and presentation” Curation presents the best and most relevant resources in an organised way and adds meaning by providing contextual information. At the beginning of the pandemic, as we moved to remote learning, there were many examples of aggregated lists of resources circulating in education and school library circles. In the rush to be helpful and share information, many of these lists added to the noise, rather than taming the flow. The move to remote learning was experienced differently by each of us depending on our school’s circumstances. We had to absorb and act on communications from our administration, the government, set up home work spaces, make adjustments to family lives, deal with the stress of the virus and the 24/7 news cycle. That is information overload! I made the decision not to share these lists with my community, instead I put my skills as a content curator to work and selected only the resources relevant to my community. I identified the different audiences within the community and then targeted the “remote learning” pages or communications accordingly. Links to resources were organised into meaningful categories and then annotated to describe the resource in more detail. Where necessary, annotations included navigational or instructional tips to guide the user.
- At the beginning of the pandemic, Kay Oddone revisited her earlier work on digital content curation and wrote an article for SCIS’s Connections newsletter called Digital content curation: How to do it right. In this article she spoke of content curation pitfalls. She drew on the work of Joyce Seitziger to identify the following types of curators. I have included links to Kay’s article and the original presentation by Joyce in the Padlet. The hoarder collects everything, doesn’t discriminate, doesn’t organise and doesn’t share. The Scrooge also hoards and doesn’t share but does organise what they hoard The National Enquirer (insert any Tabloid publication) collates everything, doesn’t discriminate and shares it whether it is wanted or not. The robot uses tools to automatically share without providing context or adding value. Keep these pitfalls in mind as you start (or continue) to curate information for your communities.
- Take a moment to reflect on your past practices. Can you identify with the hoarder, scrooge, National Enquirer or robot? Early in my curation practice I was definitely a robot.
- To be a good content curator you must consider the needs of your target audience. Consult with the teacher, obtain curriculum, project or assessment details to guide you. Ask for feedback from staff and students so that you can continue to improve. Provide context through organisation, annotation and presentation. Consider meaningful headings, chunk information and avoid big slabs of text by using white space and images or other media. The annotation of resources is essential. Annotation describes the resource and why it is useful. Annotation can also instruct and aid navigation of sometimes complex websites or databases. Remember that what you leave out is as important as what you include. Resist those hoarder tendencies and only include the most relevant resources for the purpose. The way you present curated resources will depend on the situation and your community. Not every curation project needs an elaborate website or library guide. Sometimes a basic word document will suffice. Collaborate with teachers to determine information needs and the best delivery method. Good curators always act ethically by embedding digital resources where possible or linking to the original source. Embedding a resource or linking to a resource doesn’t involve making a copy so it is the safest way to avoid copyright infringement. Always credit sources and provide attribution as required by open licences. More on open licences later.
- As I mentioned earlier, I have used and abandoned many curation tools over the years on a personal and professional level. Some of the tools I use are more like bookmarking tools where I gather useful websites and resources to then include in the curated research guides I create for a particular audience. For example, in preparing this presentation I referred to Evernote, the tool I used during my academic studies to store papers, website clippings and PDFs. I visited Pearltrees, a collaborative visual bookmarking tool, similar to Pinterest where I collect professional and education related materials. I then selected the most relevant resources to include in the presentation slides and accompanying Padlet. I chose to use Padlet because it is widely used in education and previous webinars I have attended have utilised it to share resources. Padlet offers flexibility in the way you can organise and present. Visitors to the Padlet do not need to register or login to view it. The Padlet can be shared using a link, QR code and can be embedded into websites and blogs. There are a range of privacy settings to choose from. For these reasons, I thought it was a suitable tool for this audience. In curating the Padlet, I chose to organise the resources into appropriate groupings. I annotated each resource to provide context and a reason to use it . Each resource is linked to its original source so that the original creator is acknowledged.
- The tools you choose to use (or already use) will depend on your context and may vary according to your audience or the situation. I currently use Schoolbox to author research guides for our students. This is the environment they are always working in and are familiar with. I know how to use the platform and I have the support of the wonderful Sam Rozek, our Learning Technologies Manager who advises and troubleshoots for me. Schoolbox has its constraints but it can handle text, video, images and integrations with Infiniti. For those of you with LibGuides or an equivalent platform such as LibPaths and LearnPath, you have lots of flexibility in presenting curated information. Now that we are using Infiniti as our Library Management System and have the LibPaths module, I am beginning to explore how I could use this as an alternative to Schoolbox. LibPaths offers some versatility I don't currently have with Schoolbox and it has seamless integration with the library catalogue. My goal next term is to get in the sandbox and play with LibPaths to determine which direction we will take our library’s digital presence in the future. I plan on involving students and staff in the process so that we can achieve the best possible user experience. Some of you might have a library website and use this to curate resources and research guides. Something as simple as a Word or Google document can be used to curate resources. I have done this many times to meet the needs of a teacher or class, especially when the deadline is tight. When communicating a curated resource with staff, an email might suffice. To communicate with the wider school community such as parents, an article in the school newsletter (online or print) may be the right solution. For example you could write an article about the benefits of reading and include curated resources relevant to parents. Other solutions include blog posts, infographics and web tools such as Padlet and Wakelet. Be mindful of your school’s policy when using web tools as most are designed for users aged 13 and over. Most web tools offer free versions but paid plans unlock more features. You can utilise curation tools as part of your professional workflow. Tools such as Pinterest, Pearltrees and Diigo can be used to collect and gather resources for later inclusion in carefully curated guides for students or for your own professional learning. These tools are social so you can discover resources by following other librarians, organisations and institutions. These tools also offer handy widgets that can be added to your web browser to make pinning or adding a webpage quick and easy.
- The most common way I practice digital content curation for our school community is by creating research guides for a project or assessment task. I develop research guides in collaboration with the teachers. The teacher provides me with a copy or link to the project/assessment and we have a discussion about what the students may need assistance with. Wherever possible the class visits the library or I visit the classroom to go through the research guide, suggest search techniques, demonstrate how to use databases, encyclopedias and digital resources and offer any other research tips that are relevant. During remote learning this was more challenging and was sometimes achieved via Zoom or the research guide had to stand alone with the option to email me with any questions. I use Schoolbox to author the research guides and have to work within the constraints it presents. I use categories to chunk information, embed media wherever possible and hyperlink to sources. Images and videos are used to illustrate and instruct. A link to the research guide is added to the class project page in eVI for easy access. It is also possible to email all students in the class with the link to the page. I don’t claim that these research guides are perfect and I am always looking at ways to improve them. I always ask the teachers for feedback before finalising them and after they are used by students. My experience so far is that teachers are very appreciative of the extra help. They sometimes comment that they also learned about new resources or search techniques. The last two years have made it difficult to get feedback from students and I intend to do this from now on. The Schoolbox statistics help but I would like to talk to students. This is an example of a research guide I created this term to support a project for Year 10 Latin. I was fortunate to be able to present this guide to the class during a library visit and expand on the resources contained in it. However, the guide should be able to stand on its own so that students can use it independently. With this project, students were given a range of options to choose from about Alexandria so the guide is more general than others I have created where I have linked to specific articles or resources. The guide is organised into categories: keywords, MGGS digital resources, Books in the library, external online resources and tips. Within these categories there are online encyclopedias, physical books (integrating an Infiniti widget that leads back to the library catalogue), online resources - including open access material via JSTOR, and video and images to illustrate independent search techniques. Schoolbox provides statistics on page views so I could see that every student in the class visited this page and some students on several occasions.
- All project pages must contain a link to the library’s digital resources (research support) but I also added a link directly to this research guide so that students could easily access the curated resources.
- Here is an example of a Year 7 research guide where the intention was to provide scaffolding with credible sources of information. Where possible I include direct or deep links to encyclopedia or database entries. Most products allow this but some do not unfortunately. This helps to remove barriers to using encyclopedias and databases and provides an easy entry point for students. Hopefully once in the encyclopedia or database they will explore further using the links within the article and the additional resources tabs. I provide additional information about the content and how to navigate the encyclopedia, database entry or website.
- Here is a snippet from a research guide for a Year 10 Roman Empire project. This one includes guidance on using MGGS and State Library of Victoria resources. The guide was made during remote learning so I included search tutorials for the databases and encyclopedias. Sometimes you may want to create your own bespoke tutorials but to avoid reinventing the wheel, investigate whether there are already tutorials available online. State Library Victoria is free to join for Victorian residents and I encourage staff and senior students to join and take advantage of their extensive resources. For those of you in other states, visit your own state library and see what they offer. Most public libraries also have digital resources so it is worth contacting the public library in your school’s area for more information. Many public libraries are keen to partner with local schools to promote their services and collections.
- My top tips relating to tools are: Use a tool or presentation method your audience is familiar with. For students this may be the learning management system, the library website, Libguides or a simple word document. Include direct links, also known as deep links to encyclopedia articles, database entries, webpages or documents. Categorise and chunk information and sources by leveraging the editing and presentation features of the platform or application. Add visual appeal, provide instruction and differentiation by embedding media where possible - video, audio, images and infographics. Get feedback from your audience and view statistics if they are available. Identify ways of improving your practice for next time.
- What tools could you use for curation in your school or for your own workflow? Enter your comments in the chat box.
- Digital content curation has the advantage of bringing diverse and distributed resources together in one place. Resources from the library catalogue - print and digital, subscription databases and encyclopedias, state or public library resources, websites, videos and openly licensed materials. Open Educational Resources or OER are not new, they have existed in analog formats for many years. Teachers have shared lessons, worksheets and other resources with their colleagues. The growth in OER was facilitated by web 2.0 technologies and the use of open licences.
- Here is the UNESCO definition of OER. They are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no limited restrictions.
- Digital resources are now abundant because they are easier to create and share with others. Open Educational Resources include lessons, courses, activities, experiments, video, audio, images, interactive simulations, textbooks and ebooks. They can be created and shared by individuals, cultural institutions, educational institutions, non-profit organisations and government departments.
- OER meet the 5Rs framework whereby users can, at the very least, reuse a resource. The most open resources will allow you to do all 5, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute and retain. Other resources will stipulate certain Rs through the licence or conditions of use.
- The most common framework for open licensing is Creative Commons. What you can and cannot do with a resource is made clear by the Creative Commons licence. Attribution of the work and the Creative Commons licence is a condition of use. The creator gets to decide how their resource can be used and applies the licence accordingly. This slide shows the six licences. At the top, Attribution (BY) is the least restrictive and allows others to copy, adapt or modify, distribute and licence to others. At the bottom is a more restrictive licence Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND) and only allows others to copy and distribute verbatim copies only for non commercial applications and licence to others. I have chosen to apply an Attribution Noncommercial licence to this slide deck. A big advantage of Creative Commons licence works is that the user already has permission from the creator and does not have to go to great lengths to obtain permission or risk breaching copyright conditions. Public domain works are often old works where the copyright period has expired. Creators can also choose to put their own work in the public domain. Attribution is not a requirement of works in the public domain. Museums, galleries, libraries and other cultural institutions often provide access to public domain works. Trove, state libraries, museums and galleries often contain both copyright and public domain works so always check the licensing conditions. Free public domain images are available from Photos for Class, Pixabay, Unsplash and Openverse (formerly creative commons search).
- The benefits to using OER are outlined in Smartcopying’s Introduction to OER. This valuable guide is included in the padlet and the link is on the slide. I would encourage you to read this. OER are: Safer with less risk of breaching complex copyright exceptions and rules. Internet compatible: better adapted to the freedoms of sharing that the internet provides. Enabler: The copyright owner has already given permission via an open licence. Accessible: Materials can be found using searchable online databases Collaborative: creates communities based on sharing Cheaper: Free or low-cost alternatives to traditional resources. Saves national copyright fees and administrative costs in seeking permission. Equitable: offers equal access to knowledge and the ability to adapt resources for all abilities.
- In a case study I did as part of my Master of Education studies in 2017, I found that there were challenges to the adoption of OER by teachers and librarians. Lack of awareness of OER and what they can offer was seen as a barrier to adoption. Time constraints were considered the most significant barrier to the adoption of OER by teachers. The time it takes to find and carefully evaluate resources can be daunting and traditional resources such as textbooks are often seen as an easier option because they have already been through a review process. Searching for Open Educational Resources online and navigating OER repositories can be challenging. This is where teacher librarians and their unique skill set comes in. Teacher librarians are educators and information specialists. We have the skills to find, evaluate, organise, curate and present information in a meaningful way for our community. Librarians are also experts in copyright and the ethical use of information and can be leaders in this complex area for their community.
- While OER has had a presence in higher education since 2001, OER in K-12 is still evolving. It is a global movement but much of the material is concentrated in certain countries such as the USA. In Australia, all Australian Departments of Education have licenced their websites CC BY 4.0 (Attribution) and are applying CC licences to their publications. Other Australian initiatives include Scootle, the Australian Curriculum and the Digital Technologies Hub. In the Padlet I have included a curated list by Smartcopy on how to find a wide variety of OER, including Australian sources. The top 5 repositories they name are: OER Commons, Curriki, CK-12, Connections and Khan Academy. Google allows you to refine images and videos by usage rights using the tools button and advanced search. OER, Creative Commons and public domain resources can be valuable additions to your digital collections. The next time you are asked to resource a topic, consider how you could incorporate openly licensed resources into your curation practice.
- Have you used or promoted OER to your community? Enter your thoughts in the chat.
- In the words of Joyce Valenza “Libraries are about facilitating physical and intellectual access to information and learning. Curation is an opportunity for librarians to scale out their practice, to reach community members 24/7 at the point of need, to maximize the use of digital purchases, and to point to our value”. What do you need to do to become the best content curator for your community?
- Blank - allow for demonstration of Padlet, Pearltrees, Diigo etc.
- Thank you for being here today. If you have any further questions you can contact me via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.