This presentation will describe an ongoing collaboration with an undergraduate course “The Exceptional Child.” Students in the course create a children’s book for and about students with a range of abilities as their final project. In 2018, the liaison librarian for the Child Study and Human Development department connected the presenter with the course instructor, initially as part of a conversation about digitizing the children’s books to share via the institutional repository. A digitization project was completed and the library hosted an end-of-the-semester book launch party for the course. In 2019 we recognized the need to expand the collaboration to offer an in-course workshop led by the presenter. This would help students better understand the idea of contributing their work to the institutional repository, provide guidance on incorporating others’ work into their finished books, and provide a unique opportunity to talk to undergraduates about foundational skills in scholarly communication in the frame of a real-world project.

The presentation will describe the collaboration, offering attendees an example of a multi-year partnership working with faculty & students to share and preserve unique undergraduate scholarship in an IR. It will offer a framework for working with students on sharing their work, including highlighting skills such as copyright & fair use; licensing of the students’ own work and using others’ licensed work; open access and the opportunity to improve the diversity and representation of children’s books; and the idea of students as creators, rather than consumers, of information. Finally, it will reflect on the students’ response to the optional opportunity to digitize and share their work and lessons learned (by the presenter) throughout the process.