On Friday, April 17th, DEAR Lab members (pictured right), Dr. Colin Rhinesmith along with Elliot Barber (on Zoom), Isabel Braico, Mads Christiansen, and Bashi Hariharan Yasodha, joined our community partner, Anne Slaughter, RAILS Director of Technology Service at the Public Engagement Summit.
During the Summit, we presented our case study titled “Building the Digital Equity Capacity of Illinois Public Libraries.” As our abstract describes,
This presentation will cover the key findings and strategic directions for a research initiative in partnership between the Digital Equity Research Lab at Illinois and the Reaching Across Illinois Library System to investigate the capacity of public libraries to address the digital equity needs of their communities.
As we described in our presentation, Boyer’s (1996) “scholarship of engagement,” along with Barker’s (2004) “taxonomy of engaged scholarship” were particularly useful in describing our approach to engaged research with Anne and her team at RAILS. It was also wonderful to join Anne to co-present on our work together and future plans moving forward. The full presentation slides can be found here on IDEALS.