Scholarship in the Sandbox : Academic Libraries As Laboratories, Forums, and Archives for Student Work

Addresses the innovative ways that libraries are actively occupying more central space on campus as practical laboratories outside of the classroom. Authors describe efforts to curate student work, explore intellectual property issues, and provide tips for promoting and preserving access to this production through new programming and services.

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 student 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 and discussions from diverse perspectives including students, classroom professors, academic staff, and librarians from across North America. These studies address the innovative ways that libraries are actively occupying more central space on campus as practical laboratories outside of the classroom. Authors describe efforts to curate student work, explore intellectual property issues, and provide tips for promoting and preserving access to this production through new programming and services that affirm libraries’ roles in intellectual processes. 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.