CreateUK: A Review and Recommendations for Growing and Enhancing Campus Collaborations

In 2017, University of Kentucky (UK) Libraries formed the Digital Scholarship Center Task Force (DSCTF) to identify current services that address digital scholarship teaching and learning needs, explore opportunities to strengthen existing services, and recommend new initiatives. The task force findings confirmed a significant gap in equitable access to web-hosting options. Thus, UK Libraries recognized a strategic opportunity in piloting CreateUK, a web-hosting service. In our first year of this pilot (2019-2020), CreateUK became more than a web-hosting service for campus. It provided an entrée to building new and meaningful relationships with colleges, departments, and campus services for whom common purpose with the libraries is not always easily visible or determined. To nurture these relationships and to support this work we developed a suite of workshops, online tutorials, and consultations. Offering a web-hosting platform with built-in open source applications ready to use that is sufficiently flexible enough to accommodate diverse usage, positioned UK Libraries as not only a service provider but also a collaborator in digital pedagogical practices and projects with faculty, staff, and students. With the pilot ending in June 2022, this presentation provides a review of our assessments, project and curricular examples, and recommendations for next steps.