Welcome and Intro to The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and its Blog!

Welcome!  The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (aka "the DALN") looks forward to sharing and interacting with you in new ways through our social media presence.  We'll start by introducing our project and our blog!

First Things First: What is the DALN and what's a literacy narrative?

The DALN is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change.  Narratives can be uploaded online or submitted via snail mail.  You can find the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives and resources related to it at http://daln.osu.edu/.

A Screenshot of DALN Archive #1652 with 3 Movie Files

A literacy narrative is simply a collection of items that describe how you learned to read, write, and compose. This collection might include a story about learning to read cereal boxes and a story about learning to write plays. Some people will want to record their memories about the bedtime stories their parents read to them, the comics they looked at in the newspaper, or their first library card. Others will want to tell a story about writing a memorable letter, leaning how to write on a computer or taking a photograph; reading the Bible, publishing a 'zine', or sending an e-mail message.

Your literacy narrative can have many smaller parts—but they will all be identified with your name. For instance, you might want to provide a story about learning to read a as a child, a digitized image of one of your old report cards, a story about writing a letter as a teenager, a photograph of you as a young child; a song you learned when you were in school). 

Our Goals for the DALN Blog:

• Provide and highlight resources for anyone interested in telling their own literacy story, or collecting the literacy stories of people and communities that are important to them
• Share some of the the wonderful narratives already archived in the DALN
• Showcase and suggest ways that the DALN might be used in teaching, research, or community building
• Interact with you, our wonderful supporters, contributors, and fans to hear how YOU are using the DALN in your professional and personal lives!
• Profile people, events, and groups that are working with the DALN to broaden and deepen the archive and its uses
• Invite dialogue with other narrative projects, researchers, journalists, everyday folks, and pretty much anyone who wants to "talk shop" with us!

How You Can Help!

• Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter (@dalnarchive), and subscribe to this blog via RSS or have our blog posts delivered to your email!
• Tell your friends about the DALN and its social media presence.  Tweet us, Facebook us, email us, blog us!  We love your support!
• Share your literacy story, or the literacy stories of people in your life and community!  We welcome submissions through the DALN's main page at http://daln.osu.edu/, and we encourage you to browse the Resources section on our main page.