If you have ever visited the DePaul Art Museum, you know that its collection and staff play a critical role in teaching, learning, and scholarship on our campus. If you haven’t considered the museum’s role in promoting the DePaul mission outside the classroom, let me point you to the University Museums Group, which has identified six ways in which museums housed in institutions of higher education contribute to the academic mission, including teaching and learning, research, public engagement, and the development of transferrable skills for student employees. Like the DePaul University Library, the DePaul Art Museum (DPAM) is especially notable for its direct engagement in teaching and learning, with over 90 class visits to the museum in 2014-15 allowing DePaul faculty to make use of the museum’s permanent collection as part of their classes. DPAM and the Library have been partners in the Division of Teaching and Learning Resources for years, but we continue to explore new opportunities for collaboration that will enhance and extend the contributions that our curators, librarians, and archivists make to the broader goals of the institution.
For example, DPAM staff and library staff worked together over the summer to provide digital access to DPAM catalogs and publications such as 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago (2008). Using DePaul’s institutional repository, Via Sapientiae, we are now able to provide open access to these resources to students and scholars around the world in the same way that we provide access to other examples of DePaul scholarship, including undergraduate research journals, theses and dissertations, law reviews, peer-reviewed journals edited by DePaul faculty, and more. We are currently working to further extend the reach of DPAM’s Chicago-focused collections through our work with area libraries, archives, and museums in the Chicago Collections consortium.
In the Spring, library materials will be included as part of a DPAM exhibition, “Dianna Frid & Richard Rezac: Split Complementary” (January 28 – April 24, 2016). Knowing that many DePaul students begin their study of topics in art, design, and history through class visits to DPAM exhibitions, librarians will begin working with DPAM staff to develop research guides that will help students to extend the academic engagement with DPAM materials by exploring related research topics through library collections. While we are currently planning how best to provide access to these jointly-authored instructional materials, a similar approach to collaboration between the library and another program focused on learning outside the classroom can be seen in our President’s Book Club research guides.
Finally, we are looking forward to working together to further define the undergraduate learning outcomes addressed through co-curricular learning. The library’s work with the Office for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment over the past year has concluded with the articulation of learning goals including the ability to take a strategic view of information needs, evaluate a variety of information sources to determine their suitability to meeting those needs, and to engage and extend the scholarly conversation through their own efforts. The library’s Department of Special Collections and Archives is currently undertaking work to define how these learning goals may be met through student engagement with primary source materials, and this work may inform similar thinking about the impact on student learning of engagement with materials housed in the DPAM collection or made available to the DePaul community through DPAM exhibitions.
The first goal established for DePaul’s Vision 2018 strategic plan is to enhance academic quality and support educational innovation. Working together, the Museum and the Library contribute to DePaul’s distinctive strength in the use of primary source materials in undergraduate education and its focus on articulating and promoting learning outside the classroom, and we look forward to continuing this collaboration and working with our faculty colleagues to keep the library and museum in the classroom.