Washington–Don’t lock your special collections away in neglected corners of the library — use them to teach students about the possibilities and principles of research. Such collections should be put to use as laboratories where students work hands-on with primary documents, incorporate them into original research projects, and even publish the results in institutional repositories.
Panelists at a session on “An Age of Discovery: Special Collections in the Digital Age” — part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s fall forum, co-hosted by the Association of Research Libraries — laid out case studies of what can happen when you turn undergraduates loose in special collections. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library education at Yale University Library, described how students in an urban-studies course, “The Mediated City,” created annotated digital city guides as part of their class work. In a history class, “Otherwise Engaged: Intellectuals, Politics, Education,” undergraduates created online narrative exhibits that illustrated specific moments in time.
“What we discovered is that you set high expectations, and the students tend to live up to them,” Ms. Rockenbach said. She also pointed out that it’s easier to justify the resources your special collections eat up if those collections aren’t just sitting there gathering dust.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students take part in the Ethnography of the University Initiative, creating research projects that investigate campus history and culture. Sarah L. Shreeves, coordinator of Illinois’s Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (Ideals), talked about how the student ethnographers work through the full circle of scholarly communication, beginning with original research and ending with the chance to deposit their work in the Ideals institutional repository alongside the work of other students and faculty members.
Ms. Shreeves mentioned two standout examples of what students have accomplished through the program: an analysis of debates about the Ku Klux Klan and the university, by Stephen Lane, and “University Admissions of Students With Disabilities: Is Equality Really Best?” At some point, Ms. Shreeves said, librarians have to tackle the question of when the digital accumulation of student work becomes a special collection with its own curatorial demands.
5 Responses to Special Collections as Laboratories
katenonymous - October 16, 2009 at 6:19 pm
One of the best lessons I got as an undergrad at a major university was from a seminar professor who took us to Special Collections and showed us primary sources. It was the first time I’d really understood the difference between primary sources and secondary sources, and all of us were really moved by the knowledge that we were seeing and touching items owned and written by a historical figure.All of this served me well when I wrote my masters’ thesis a few years later, of course–but even without that, it was a wonderful experience.
shirley77 - October 19, 2009 at 12:11 pm
It’s always a joke when librarians talk about archives and special collections, which include materials that they’ve neglected for decades. For the most part, these units have been treated as the step children of their own library instutions. Now, all of a sudden they talk about these “hidden collections,” the need to expose them to the scholarly community, and how they may be used by undergraduate and gradaute students. Well, what took them so long.
music_librarian - October 20, 2009 at 9:06 am
I’m a librarian, and for the past two years I’ve been teaching a course that makes use of materials in our Special Collections. I’ve never “neglected” these materials, but it isn’t easy to convince faculty of their educational value.
spindry - October 20, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I’m glad to see this important use of special collections and archives featured in the Chronicle. Special Collections is expensive and esoteric work that primarily supports humanities disciplines, but it is another way that true research universities distinguish themselves. While we have a long way to go to truly incorporate special collections into the fabric of research libraries, we also need to do a better job of attracting external investment and telling our success stories!
aegreer - October 22, 2009 at 10:23 am
We also need to do a better job of teaching faculty how to use the archives and manuscripts collections, so they feel more comfortable encouraging their students to explore them. Ignorance breeds ignorance, and it is the job of archivists and manuscripts librarians to reach out, educate and promote.