In conjunction with Iowa City's designation as a UNESCO "City of Literature," an interdisciplinary research team at The University of Iowa collaborated to develop a digital library featuring important Iowa City authors and locations. The "City of Lit" digital library consists of a mobile application for the general public and a set of web-based interfaces for researchers and content creators. This paper explains the motivation and describes the design and implementation of the digital library, its framework, the userside mobile app and our future plans. We also outline a pilot study, in which undergraduate students conducted scholarly research and created content for the digital collection.
In conjunction with Iowa City's 2008 designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, an interdisciplinary team of University of Iowa faculty, graduate and undergraduate student researchers formed UCOL -the University of Iowa UNESCO City of Literature Mobile Application Development Team. The project brings together community partners, faculty, students and staff at the university to develop, record and produce multimedia research about local writers for 'City of Lit', a mobile app now available for mobile devices. During the past year, the project was incorporated into three sections of a general education literature course, giving undergraduate students experience conducting research and creating multimedia content on local authors. Students in this class worked collectively to create multimedia hypertext documents that feature traditional text, photos, graphics, and audio and video content for inclusion in the mobile app. The project encouraged interdisciplinary collaborative undergraduate research. Student reflections and presentations, along with a formal survey designed by the research team, suggest that the project provided valuable learning outcomes through its integration of literary research and analysis, New Media and technology, and local community engagement within team-based learning. The authors' research indicates that the creation of peer-assisted scholarship positively facilitated the peer learning process, particularly with groups of three students.
In 2008, Iowa City was designated as one of only five "Cities of Literature" worldwide by UNESCO. To take advantage of our rich local literary history, an interdisciplinary research team from the University of Iowa collaborated to develop a digital library featuring Iowa City authors and locations. The UNESCO City of Literature digital library (referred to internally as "City of Lit") consists of a mobile application for the general public to access the database and a set of web-based interfaces for researcher and content creators to contribute to the database. Members of the research team have developed undergraduate literature courses to study the feasibility of using young scholars for digital content creation, and the pedagogical effect of including digital research in traditional literary courses. Students in the courses were trained to conduct scholarly research and generate a variety of digital resources to be included in the digital collection. This paper reports our experience building the City of Lit digital library and the results from evaluations and studies of the students in the courses. We also outline the implementation and development of the digital library, its framework, and the client-side mobile application.
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