THE BENEFITS OF STUDENT INVOLVEMENT IN A DIGITIZATION PROJECT

Many undergraduate students have reaped the benefits of exploring completed digitization projects. Involving them in the creation of the digital collection offers a wider range of practical and educational benefits. In 2012, the Geological Sciences department at SUNY Geneseo began to digitize its petrology teaching collection using the open source software Omeka. The project was originally conceived as a replacement for a card-catalog style filing system, but faculty soon realized that there were educational advantages to involving students in the digitization process. A single student helped lay the groundwork for the digital catalog through a semester-long directed study. Working with support from SUNY Geneseo’s Milne Library and the Geological Sciences Department, the student designed the look and feel of the digital interface and outlined the metadata that would describe each sample. This student shared her knowledge with peers who continued to enhance the digital collection. She also served as a spokesperson about the creation and use of the digital collection. In 2013, Advanced Petrology students continued the digitization. A librarian met with them during class to teach them about metadata, basic HTML markup, and the Omeka platform. Students took pictures of samples and entered descriptive information including rock type, mineralogical description, location, geologic age, sample collector, etc.

While students can serve as an important part of the data entry workforce, they exercise fundamental geological and critical thinking skills while creating the digital catalog. Digitization offers opportunities that the physical organization of the collection does not. As students entered data, they made links between samples based on localities, rock types, and other rock features. They added additional information into the catalog such as thin section images and chemical data. They also supplemented each sample record with references from the scholarly literature or online resources (e.g. the USGS). Without student help, the project at Geneseo would not have progressed so quickly. When students are involved in creating digital records or making new links between existing items, the process becomes an important teaching tool.