Creating and Curating New Knowledge: A North American University Case Study

In the Fall of 2017, a cross disciplinary team at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, USA worked together to identify ways of creating new knowledge for an undergraduate engineering course titled Building Information Modeling. The team included faculty from the School of Engineering and Computer Science and technical staff from the Cube, a digital makerspace in the library. Students were tasked to design and model a onestory building to house the University of the Pacific Garden Program on campus. The cross-disciplinary team had the students explore an immersive way of seeing the building model by using a Virtual Reality (VR) system. As the University for Business and Technology Knowledge Center concept acknowledges, it is important to curate local knowledge so that future generations can build upon it. At Pacific, the cross disciplinary team was not content with merely producing exemplary student work; they opted to involve the Digital Repository Coordinator in the project and she uploaded all student projects to the University’s digital repository, where they will now serve as proof of concept for students in 2018 to build upon in their own course work.