Contribute to The Living Book of Digital Skills

This post was written by Dr Sara King, Training and Engagement Lead, AARNET

For the last year, CAUL’s Digital Dexterity Champions have been developing The Living Book of Digital Skills (you never knew you needed until now) (aka the GitBook). The book is a living, open source online guide to ‘modern not-quite-technical computer skills’ for researchers and the broader academic community.  

The Digital Dexterity Champions help realise the goals of CAUL’s Digital Dexterity framework in university libraries through creating and sharing resources across the network, and GitBook is an extension of this work. The Champions identified a need for professional learning for themselves and the research and academic communities they serve related to an ever changing, wide ranging set of digital skills that are needed for library, teaching and research practice.  While there are online instructions in various forms for just about any skill, the academic community uses these skills in particular contexts. The GitBook aims to fill this gap in professional learning for  ‘not-quite-technical’ digital skills. These are the kinds of skills that are not specifically addressed in formal courses or training, but simply expected by the nature of the digital workplace and data-driven research, and ones that library staff are often approached to be able to address.

Our vision for the book is that it is made by everyone, for everyone. We want it to be accessible to both amateurs and professionals, creators and users. For this reason, we are keen to draw on the academic library community to contribute to the creation of this resource as a way to build our collective capacity to support academics working in this space.

The GitBook team has worked together to create the chapter outline, a code of conduct, instructions for contributors and a copyright statement.  

Now, we need you! We’re looking for contributions large and small to build out the book.

A contribution doesn’t have to be anything complex, and you can choose to submit parts of a topic too. 

Here is a sample article. You’ll notice that the text is simple and accessible to everyone, with as little jargon as possible. Where there is specialist language, it is explained and can be added to the glossary.  

We’d like to invite you to contribute to the project. Here is a list of suggested articles. You can use that or if you have some other relevant content that you would like to share, please do! You can use one of the following options for submitting your contribution:

1. To contribute directly via GitHub account, use these instructions.
2. You can also use our contributor form, OR 
3. Email us (digidexlibrarians+gitbook@gmail.com)

For more information about copyright, please see our Copyright Statement.

If you would like to meet the group, we meet on Friday afternoons and we are all super friendly, and welcoming to all. Please write to sara.king@aarnet.edu.au for a meeting invite.