Describing the incorporation, assessment, and revision of a multimodal project partnership between a first-year writing program and a studio library, this webtext argues for more in-depth partnerships between writing programs and libraries.

This webtext reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University in the summer of 2017 about source evaluation methods used by first-year writing students. Librarians used several methods to study how students rate online source reliability including voice recordings, screen recordings, and open response tests. This webtext provides a visual landscape of how students interacted with the articles we asked them to evaluate.

Our concern with the interaction and interplay between writers, writing instructors and assessors, and technology is part of our interest in understanding the complexities of infrastructure through this ecosystemic frame. In this text, we consider the foundational structures, the architectural supports, of our current writing ecology and then move on to survey the larger landscape of research and debate how to build and sustain a thriving ecosystem of writing and writing instruction and assessment.

This study is intended to explore the learning outcomes of an English course in which digital texts become both the object of study and the means of assessment. The authors suggest the web project serves as a possible example of a transitional pedagogy where two ways of organizing and presenting information — of writing — are used simultaneously and toward mutually enhancing ends.