By Students, For Students: Developing and Publishing a Student-Written Library Handbook as a Multimedia E-Book

During the 2021-2022 academic year, we mentored a cohort of undergraduate students through the development of a student-written handbook focused on exploring and using the Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. This handbook, titled the Undergraduate Guide to the George A. Smathers Libraries, was published in August 2022 as an open access ebook with the support of LibraryPress@UF using the Pressbooks platform. Our project was unique because we empowered students themselves to serve as experts on the undergraduate experience and to create their own peer-education publication. The student authors were particularly interested in supporting first-year and first-generation college students by sharing knowledge they wished they had learned upon arriving at UF. As faculty mentors, we supported the student authors by providing informational training, offering research assistance, creating structure/timelines, and most importantly, by giving the student authors creative autonomy to develop their guidebook in their own voices. Since its publication, we have received positive feedback for the Undergraduate Guide from student users and from library instructors. In this article, we will provide background information on how this peer-led outreach program began, how we supported the students through their research and writing process, and what publishing considerations were made (authorship, format, multimedia, etc.). We will also give a timeline of ebook development from start to finish and make the case that library publishers should support projects outside the scope of typical academic scholarship.