Heejoung Shin
Clinical Assistant Professor and Digital Scholarship Librarian
Digital Scholarship Hub, University of Illinois Chicago

Abstract

This article attempts to bring academic library makerspaces into conversation with digital scholarship by attending to their shared methods and methodologies: focus on process and labor, iterative making through the mediation of digital technology, interdisciplinary collaboration, and reflective pedagogy and practice. The relationship between academic library makerspaces and digital scholarship has been underexplored, with fabrication activities placed as adjacent to, rather than constitutive of, digital scholarship or treated as separate from discussions of the field, digital scholarship. Using the Digital Fabrication Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago Library, situated in an R1 research university, as a case study, the article aims to demonstrate how makerspaces can operate as indispensable components in library-led digital scholarship when its operations are structured through equity-centered program design and reflective and critical pedagogy and practice. The article first outlines a brief history of the DFL, followed by a review of relevant literature on the relationship between makerspaces and digital scholarship. It then traces the DFL’s strategic evolution, including the development of its governing philosophy, and presents three examples that illustrate digital scholarship in practice in the academic library makerspace. Although grounded in the context of an academic library, the pedagogical model proposed here may also offer useful implications for school and public library makerspaces, particularly because curiosity and habits of inquiry that underpin research often begin well before learners enter higher education.

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