Experiential Learning and Technical Debt

Experimental student projects provide a low-barrier opportunity for research universities to both support student learning and to pilot novel presentations of institutional research and data. This is particularly advantageous when students of a minority community are enabled to tell the stories of the research data of that minority community. The unresolved risk, however, is the ongoing stewardship of this work, as such an experimental or pilot project represents an inherited technical debt after the students have graduated.

This presentation will describe one such student endeavor as a case study. At the University of Pittsburgh, the University Library System and the School of Computing and Information Science partnered to create a query/visualization tool highlighting a distinctive-collections deposit within the University's institutional repository of transcriptions of a substantial Chinese village gazetteer collection. The presenter will reflect on successes and challenges of this project and will invite conversation on similar technical management of experimental/pilot student projects which highlight institutional repositories' research and datasets.