The Community Workshop Series: A Case Study for Community-Engaged Learning in LIS

Abstract:For over a decade, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has offered some variation of the Community Workshop Series (CWS), a partnership to provide digital literacy and computer technology classes to community members at local public libraries. Both authors have served as coordinators of the program as library science graduate students at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. We situate this program within existing literature on digital and information literacy, community engagement, and the graduate student experience to show the utility of this program and similar programs for training graduate students, enhancing the graduate student experience, supporting the needs of community members, and bolstering the capacities of public libraries. The authors provide an overview of the program and encourage others to start similar programs. To this end, the authors present a case study of the CWS, including discussion of creating the program and keeping things going, and provide a how-to guide for creating your own. The authors identify four recommendations for creating a similar program to clearly delineate takeaways that might inform readers’ attempts to create similar programs, and they provide additional materials and documentation in appendices to support the creation of new community-engaged programs in LIS.