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Matthew Martin, Heather Murray, Deborah J. Tucker, and Lothar Spang 

Digital commons inspires 
chapbook project for urban high 
school poets 
A Wayne State University Libraries community outreach program 

The focus of the Digital Commons Chap­book Project at Wayne State Libraries, 
which began in March 2006, is to introduce 
students to digital technology and to promote 
appreciation of the written word in order to 
aid in developing information-literate youth 
and young adults for the 21st century. Murray-
Wright Senior High School, Detroit, Michigan, 
was the first school to participate in the Chap­
book Information Literacy Initiative. 

This project, hosted by Wayne State Uni­
versity (WSU) Libraries, included four team 
members: Matthew Martin, a WSU digital 
projects librarian; Heather Murray, a library 
and information science graduate student 
with a master’s degree in Creative Writing; 
Deborah J. Tucker, the WSU community 
outreach librarian, who is currently working 
on a doctorate in instructional technology; 
and Lothar Spang, the senior librarian for 
the project. Murray-Wright High School Me­
dia Specialist Ernestine Carroll worked with 
the school’s English teachers to organize the 
students interested in writing poetry. Twenty-
five students began the project. 

The goal of this outreach project is to 
provide students with an opportunity to 
create and digitize their own written artis­
tic works. The students’ poetry resides on 
Digital Commons, an institutional repository 
service. Historically, chapbooks have been 
informal self-published books of poetry 
collections, family stories, short stories, and 
story novellas. In this project, the chapbook 

was transformed into digital format to make 
it available in print on demand. 

The project’s fi ve sessions 
The WSU planning team, working in conjunc­
tion with Murray-Wright’s media specialist, 
and Principal Robert Jones, agreed that the 
Chapbook Project would be completed in fi ve 
sessions (one per week, ending March 31). 
Sessions 1 to 3 were held at Murray-Wright. 
Students were selected from grades 9 to 12. 
Each session held at Murray-Wright was to last 
55 minutes, a normal class period, during the 
second hour of the school day. 

Session 1: Students were introduced to the 
project and the basics of word processing. 
Students then began to input their poetry. 

Session 2: Students learned about poetry 
formatting. 

Session 3: Students were helped to scan 
images to accompany their poems and given 
further instruction on the digitizing process 
and technologies. 

Session 4: Held at the WSU Libraries Tech­
nology Resource Center (TRC), this half-day 

Matthew Martin is the former digital projects librarian 
at Wayne State University, e-mail: atomaton@gmail. 
com; Heather Murray is teen librarian at Baldwin Public 
Library, e-mail: murrayhe@baldwinlib.org; Deborah J. 
Tucker is community outreach/information services 
librarian at Wayne State University, e-mail: deborah. 
tucker@wayne.edu; and Lothar Spang is librarian at 
Wayne State University, e-mail: ab1116@wayne.edu 
© 2007 Matthew Martin, Heather Murray, Deborah J. Tucker, and Lothar 
Spang 

160C&RL News March 2007

mailto:ab1116@wayne.edu
mailto:tucker@wayne.edu
mailto:murrayhe@baldwinlib.org


  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

 
 

session included finalizing poetry, image 
layout and formatting. 

Session 5: Chapbook Poetry Slam. 
Matthew Martin led the first three work­

shops held at Murray-Wright High School. 
His role was to introduce the students to 
the institutional repository and to train the 
students on how to use this tool to digitally 
publish their poetry. The WSU institutional 
repository uses Depress technology and 
is hosted by Proquest (www.umi.com 
/products_umi/digitalcommons/). 

These workshops included assisting the 
students with creating text documents digi­
tally, leading the students through the steps 
required for storage of the documents, and, 
by using various search terms to access the 
students’ own poems, demonstrating the 
importance of metadata for accessibility and 
retrieval. Thirty laptops were brought to the 
high school, which was a special accom­
modation for this particular site. A team of 
computer-support technicians made it pos­
sible for a successful set up at the site and 
were available for troubleshooting during 
the workshops. Having this support staff was 
critical for the success of the workshop at this 
remote location. 

The first workshop was an introduction to 
WSU’s institutional repository, Digital Com­
mons (digitalcommons.wayne.edu/), which 
explored how an institutional repository can 
be used to preserve information and to make 
this information easily accessible to the world. 
Once the students were familiar with the re­
pository, the WSU team helped each student 
capture his or her poetry using Microsoft 
Word.1 The students were also introduced to 
the Macintosh operating system and shown 
how to digitize documents and images using 
a scanner. This workshop included digital 
imaging standards and a demonstration on 
enhancing images using professional imaging 
software (Photoshop 9.0).2 

Once the poetry was captured, Martin cre­
ated instructions on how to upload their po­
etry into the repository where the documents 
were converted to PDF.3 After the poetry 
was uploaded into the repository, it became 

searchable via Google Scholar and thus ac­
cessible to a world-wide audience. 

In the session at TRC, led by LIS graduate 
student Heather Murray, students were led 
through the process of adding other poems 
to their digital chapbook directly through the 
Digital Commons. Continuous changes can be 
made to the Murray-Wright Chapbook by the 
poets themselves, making it a unique living 
environment. 

Each student created a personal account 
with Digital Commons. Using this account, 
the participating students are able to upload 
new poetry to the Murray-Wright Chapbook 
from any computer with Internet access. 
Registration with Digital Commons requires 
an e-mail address to retrieve account informa­
tion. Students who did not possess an e-mail 
address were walked through the process of 
obtaining a free Web-based e-mail account via 
Yahoo! Other students were able to use their 
time searching the Murray-Wright chapbook 
to look at their poetry and to learn how to 
navigate the Digital Commons. 

During this time the differences between 
students’ technology skill levels became ap­
parent. Many had prior experience with the 
use of online forms and learned the process 
of uploading their poetry very quickly. The 
walk-through of the process seemed to 
benefit everyone, however. The uploading 
process allows students to assign their own 
keywords to each document before it is add­
ed to the chapbook. Besides these keywords 
the chapbook is searchable by individual poet 
names, poem titles, the high school’s name, 
and some general keywords. For this project, 
all works to be added are stored in a “holding 
file” until they are approved by the school’s 
media specialist. 

Celebrating a job well done 
The conclusion of the program was celebrat­
ed March 31, when the students took part in a 
poetry slam. The term poetry slam often refers 
to an open mike poetry or rap contest among 
young poets, although the Chapbook Poetry 
Slam was not in contest format. The students 
recited one or two poems from the stage of 

March 2007  161 C&RL News 

http:digitalcommons.wayne.edu
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the Kresge Library auditorium at WSU, while 
their poems were simultaneously projected 
from the Digital Commons Chapbook site 
onto a large screen behind them. 

The WSU team decided to go all out and 
invite the students’ teachers and families and 
the dean of WSU Libraries, as well as WSU 
colleagues and WSU students to the poetry 
slam. With a solid audience, the poetry slam 
went into full swing, first with a computer 
lab demonstration in the library’s TRC, and 
later with the student’s poetry readings in the 
auditorium. The demonstration of the Digital 
Commons was of especially high interest to 
WSU librarian colleagues. 

Everyone was impressed by the quality of 
creative verse written by the young authors. 
Some in the audience said they were drawn 
to tears by the depth, sincerity, and serious 
nature of the students’ work. Both the read­
ings and the Digital Commons demonstrations 
were video-recorded and added as a link to 
the repository and are Google searchable 
under “Murray-Wright High School.” 

Already the WSU Libraries team is pre­
paring to introduce the technology to an 
elementary school and to two other Detroit 
high schools. The Digital Commons technol­
ogy provides an exciting opportunity to reach 
out to the local community, interface with 
future students, and help build assets of the 
institutional depository. 

Notes 
1. Heather S. Murray and Marisa Conte, 

Word Basics. 2006. Available at www. 
lib.wayne.edu/resources/digital_library 
/digitalcommons/chapbooks/WordBasic.pdf 
and Heather S. Murray and Marisa Conte, 
Fun with Formatting in MS Word. 2006. 
Available at www.lib.wayne.edu/resources 
/digital_library/digitalcommons/chapbooks 
/FunwithFormatting.pdf. 

2. Matthew A. Martin, Digital Images. 
2006. Available at www.lib.wayne.edu 
/resources/digital_library/digitalcommons 
/chapbooks/DigitalImageHandout.pdf. 

3. Matthew A. Martin, Adding to the 
Murray Wright Chapbook. 2006. Avail­

able at www.lib.wayne.edu/resources 
/digital_library/digitalcommons/chapbooks 
/ a d d i n g t o t h e m u r r a y w r i g h t c h a p b o o k .  
pdf. 

(“New librarians . . .” cont. from page 158) 
archival rights analysis for researchers at UW-
Madison. 

With increased collaboration among librar­
ians and others across campus, we can effect a 
transformation in the landscape of scholarship. 
Leadership and activism are needed from the 
newest members of the library profession; to 
make a difference, we urge you to contribute 
new ideas and enthusiasm to help change the 
system for the better. 

Notes 
1. Association of Research Libraries, ARL 

Statistics 2004–05. Washington, D.C.: Associa­
tion of Research Libraries, 2005: 11. 

2. Karla Hahn, “New Tools for New Times: 
Remodeling the Scholarly Communication 
System,” C&RL News 67, no. 10 (November 
2006): 608–14. 

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162C&RL News March 2007

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