Back in my academia days, I teamed up with an archivist who I worked with at the University of Montana to offer a genealogy class with a side of digital literacy skills. Developed for our campus’ lifelong learning center, we knew that genealogy was a hot topic but that many of those interested encountered barriers around using computers. In particular, my librarian colleagues and I would see over and over older adults come in to use library resources and not know building block skills like:
- Copy and paste – necessary for searching information about titles or authors and then copying and pasting them into the library catalog
- CTRL+F – necessary to word search in large, confusing finding aids or digitized, scanned primary sources.
- Taking a screenshot – essential for technical troubleshooting or capturing information on your screen when you are unsure how to save the page.
- Saving a webpage – Creating a PDF that you can save to your own files instead of storing lists of links.
Here’s our original syllabus!
