Building Bridges
02 April 2024
Denmark is a land of bridges, linking the various islands, prominent peninsula, and archipelagos together through roadways, rail lines, and other infrastructure that can stand the Baltic’s winds. We, the representatives of the UKH Baltic in Copenhagen, Denmark, have taken up this national practice metaphorically speaking. Our library, the Faculty Library of Social Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, works in partnership with the university to provide resources and instruction to students and researchers alike. In this project, we are hoping to build up a new as well as remixed portfolio of services and tools to help build up the competencies of students who are struggling to adjust to student life with a special consideration for digital competencies. To this end, we are working diligently in making connections with the pedagogical center, whose institutional aims compliment what we are trying to achieve. We are hoping these connections will help us to connect with the students, as well as ensure the robustness of our offerings.
One key point we have learned in fostering these relationships has been the general feeling of burnout amongst the student population. We will try to reach these students by employing a digital tool called Twine to walk students through where and how they can build up their competencies and connect with helpful groups and institutions along the way. Twine is typically used as a choose-your-own-adventure story telling tool, but is being mobilized in this context to fill in students’ information horizons: if they have a task that requires a certain competency or resource, how do they go about finding that resource or encountering the people and materials to build that competency. We hope by opening students’ information horizons up in this way, that we will concomitantly build more confident and energized students, to say nothing of a generally more competent student.