During a Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute Open House, Library staff share primary source materials and program informaiton with K-12 educators.

Over the summer, we were pleased to participate in a number of “Open House” programs that our colleagues in Education Outreach hosted for their Summer Teacher Institutes.  Each summer, over 100 K-12 educators take part in week-long immersion programs to learn strategies for the classroom use of Library of Congress digitized primary sources.  The use of primary sources is growing and the Library is helping teachers across the country meet that demand.

This year, the Education Outreach staff added an open house component so that participants could gain a greater understanding of all the Library has to offer K-12 educators and their students. During the Open Houses, representatives from the Library’s various curatorial divisions and programs shared materials and information teachers would be interested in learning about.  Staff were encouraged to show off primary sources from the collections, that are also available online, and ideas for how the materials could be used in a K-12 classroom or library.

Unlike other Library divisions, NDIIPP doesn’t steward collections or materials; we’re about collaborative partnerships to help preserve important digital content, build new tools and develop best practices.  In support of this, we’ve developed a rich collection of information and resources on our website, digitalpreservation.gov, which we use, among other things, to develop programs and presentations about digital preservation for various audiences.

Screenshot from the K-12 Web Archiving: Preserving the Present video.

In the past, we’ve put on a couple of programs geared toward students and shared information about the K-12 Web Archiving Program so we’ve had some experience providing information to the K-12 educator audience.  For our contribution to the Open House programs, we took a closer look at the videos we produced for our Digital Preservation Video Series and we created a list of videos(PDF) teachers would find most relevant.

In the “back to school” spirit, I thought it would be useful to share those videos with our readers (and educators) here.

• Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation: This video looks at the views teenagers have about the permanence of digital information.
• Why Digital Preservation is Important for You: A good “explainer” video that offers some basic digital preservation strategies.  We also offer this video with Spanish captions.
• Adding Descriptions to Digital Photos: Your Gift to the Future: This video explains the value of adding descriptions and tags to digital photos in order to make it easier to organize and search your collection.
• America’s Young Archivists: The K-12 Web Archiving Program: This video profiles a group of eight-grade students who participated in the program.
• K-12 Web Archiving: Preserving the Present: This video is an interview with Paul Bogush, teacher at the Moran Middle School in Wallingford, CT, about his class’s participation in the program.
• Bridging Physical and Digital Preservation: This video compares the physical and digital preservation of the Waldseemüller Map.