The Digital Skills GitBook project: creating an open-source online guide for researchers and the broader academic community

By Dr Sara King, Training and Engagement Lead, AARNet (Australia’s Academic & Research Network); and members of the GitBook project group

It is of critical importance that publicly funded institutions create open knowledge that is available to everyone. So we’re embarking on an adventure to create the Digital Skills GitBook. It will be a living, open-source online guide to ‘modern not-quite-technical computer skills’ for researchers, library staff, and academics, ideally written in a way that will be accessible for everyone. In the spirit of Open Science, the contents of the book are being created so that they will be accessible to all levels of an inquiring society; amateur or professional.  

A figurine of an oktokat in the center, in the background a laptop with the main page of the GitHub open.
Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

CAUL’s Digital Dexterity Champions and their communities have set out to create an online book using static web technology on the GitBook platform. Utilising the connected GitHub notification system, creators and users can submit content, flag issues, and ask questions related to the format and the content via GitHub. The continuing maintenance of the book, to adapt to the ever-changing requirements for updates, is designed to encourage participation as an essential part of the process of creating a truly community-created resource.   

Our progress so far:

  • We submitted a proposal to CAUL with the help of their new Director of Strategy & Analytics, Kate Davis. They approved our project brief and we were launched.  
  • We attended ARDC GitHub training – on Zoom! This was a 3.5-hour workshop where our patient instructors, Matthias and Liz, showed us how to create a repository, how to edit our GitBook ‘from the back end’ in GitHub, and how to make sure that we shared all of our adventures with each other in one space.  
  • We created a test private GitHub repository and GitBook – sharing recipes, recording our steps as we went. This is a place where we could experiment and fail, and help each other.  We learned some important lessons here without damaging our main project! For example – don’t delete branches …  

How we are collaborating:

  • Members from WA all the way to NZ attend fortnightly meetings over Zoom to discuss our progress, barriers, workarounds, and how we can spread the word to our wider communities. 
  • We are making the most of a wide variety of systems and channels to keep track of our progress – Slack, Teams, CloudStor, GitHub issues log, and email.  This is extending our capabilities in digital communication, collaboration and participation – together with stretching our brains! 

Still to come:

  • We have SO MANY new concepts to learn – slugs, merges, pull requests, static web technology… it’s exciting!  
  • We are creating our strategy and content plan, and developing a chapter outline (one idea is to use CAUL’s Digital Dexterity Framework categories as chapter headings to make it relevant for our library communities). 
  • We’re even planning to present at VALA 2022! 
  • We want to extend the project beyond the Digital Dexterity Champions network, to others in our library and university communities. 

This project is part of our own push towards Digital Dexterity and using some of the attributes outlined in the framework, such as agility, collaboration and creativity, in order to produce a useful resource for our broader communities and their own Digital Dexterity. If we get it right, it’ll be a win-win! 

If you are interested in learning more about the Digital Skills GitBook project, please contact sara.king@aarnet.edu.au

Welcome!

Welcome, everyone, to the new Digital Dexterity blog! 

This is actually only my second-ever time writing for a blog, so please bear with me.  Part of Digital Dexterity is trying new things – maybe only one new thing.  But you’ll find that the more things you try (see our forthcoming ’23 Things’ post), the more confident you will be! 

What’s Digital Dexterity? 

In February 2019, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) launched their Digital Dexterity framework.  The framework consists of six elements  

  • digital identity and wellbeing 
  • information, media and data literacies 
  • collaboration, communication and participation 
  • digital creation, problem solving and innovation 
  • Information Communications Technology (ICT) proficiency and productivity 
  • digital learning and development 

More than just Digital Literacy, Digital Dexterity is about developing the skills that are necessary to thrive at all levels in our increasingly digital world. 

Graphic of the Digital Dexterity Framework, including all six elements

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Who are we? 

Sponsored by CAUL and supported by the team at CAVAL, the Digital Dexterity Community of Practice (DigiDex CoP) are a group of enthusiastic, multi-disciplined library professionals from across the tertiary sector with a mission – to build our own capabilities around Digital Dexterity and to share our knowledge with our fellow library professionals and our user communities. 

Why a blog? 

We take a hands-on ‘learning by doing’ approach to Digital Dexterity. Tech is changing all the time, and being able to respond dextrously and leverage all the tools available to us requires us to have a growth mindset, to be adaptable and work collaboratively across our professional communities.   

We want the blog to be like a digital version of the Digital Dexterity Community of Practice, where we can share our ideas, experiences and expertise.  It’s about reflecting the wide variety of activities and knowledge that library professionals demonstrate on a daily basis, and sharing new skills and tools in a practical way so we (and our users!) can benefit.  And, like all our initiatives, it’s about giving members of the Community of Practice the opportunity to work collaboratively, form new professional connections and learn new skills.  

Over the next year we will be posting approximately every month.  Upcoming posts include Open Education Resources (OER) from RMIT Library, Curtin University Library’s ’23 Things’ campaign, a series of Libguide how-tos, and ‘What the heck? Wednesday’ where we explore the weird and wonderful world of digital library tools.  Look out for guest posts from the GLAM sector and other areas of the industry too. 

Want to get involved?  

Great! We come from CAUL and the Council of New Zealand University Librarians (CONZUL) member libraries across New Zealand and Australia. Champions are currently nominated by their organisation and usually receive a time allowance for our obligations to the Community of Practice. 

If you’re interested in becoming a member of the Community of Practice, get in touch with your local Champion to discuss, or if you’re not sure who they are, drop us a line at DigitalDexterity@caval.edu.au to learn more. 

What’s next? 

Watch out for our upcoming ALIA satellite events on February 1, 2, 3, 11 and 12 2021, and keep reading! 

Authors: Ruth Cameron, University of Newcastle, and Emily Pyers, Federation University