Book Description

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, and describe efforts to curate student work, explore intellectual property issues, and 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 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 in the classroom and access to primarily text-based resources