Using IR for CUREs: Collaborating with Educators to Preserve Undergraduate Projects on an Institutional Repository

At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the library’s former head of Special Collections and a professor from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction collaborated on a project to build a collection of original children’s stories and make them available for future teachers on the University’s institutional repository (IR). Elementary and early childhood education majors utilized resources from the Special Collections to craft original folklore, in which exemplars of undergraduate projects were selected for submission to the IR. There is a need to present an opportunity to showcase undergraduate research, not only to use archives, but to allow exceptional undergraduate projects to be reviewed; the IR allows this process to make clear connections for exemplary student work. In this session, presenters will show how the project posed a platform for award-winning undergraduate research and the importance of future impact on course-based undergraduate research experiences (CURE). A collection of original folklore is one way that exposure to IR platforms helps to prepare undergraduates to use qualitative research methodology as a tool for future research and instructional materials.