University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, School of Information)

The University of Maryland iSchool will scale an existing piloting network to a national network that will help train the next generation of digital library and archives leaders. The project team will launch the TALENT Network as a collaboration of 19 experts (including archivists, librarians, library and information science educators, historians, learning scientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and software engineers). They will double the current piloting network of iSchools, engage students at historically Black colleges and universities, conduct curriculum development and review, and address the social and ethical concerns that arise from computational and algorithmic thinking. Project results will include a rich library of repurposable and integrated lesson plans and projects based on an Archival Science and Computational Thinking framework. The project will create a durable, diverse, and multidisciplinary national community focused on developing archival and library educators and practitioners who can be future digital leaders. Subrecipient, UCLA Center for Information as Evidence, will be responsible for uncovering the types of social and ethical issues that computational and algorithmic thinking elicit in library and archival contexts.