The leadership of the College & University Archives (C&UA) Section is very pleased to remind you of an exciting publishing opportunity through SAA as administered by this section. Writing a Campus Case Study is a wonderful way to test the SAA publishing waters and develop your ideas.
The C&UA Section Steering Committee would like to encourage you to consider this publishing opportunity. “The submission process for a Campus Case Study is designed for ease and flexibility of use and obligates authors only to a minimum of required information for submission.”
In fact, if you have been considering publishing via an SAA vehicle such as Archival Outlook or The American Archivist, a Campus Case Study might be the perfect gateway to test your idea, theory, or thesis. We even provide the rubric for evaluating your submission in order to encourage and facilitate your success.
The leadership of the College & University Archives (C&UA) Section is very pleased to remind you of an exciting publishing opportunity through SAA as administered by this section. Writing a Campus Case Study is a wonderful way to test the SAA publishing waters and develop your ideas.
The C&UA Section Steering Committee would like to encourage you to consider this publishing opportunity. “The submission process for a Campus Case Study is designed for ease and flexibility of use and obligates authors only to a minimum of required information for submission.”
In fact, if you have been considering publishing via an SAA vehicle such as Archival Outlook or The American Archivist, a Campus Case Study might be the perfect gateway to test your idea, theory, or thesis. We even provide the rubric for evaluating your submission in order to encourage and facilitate your success.
Since the beginning of 2018, my team and I at Georgia State University worked tirelessly to pull together an exhibit featuring our photographic collections while speaking to the challenges of preserving the over 8 million photographs and negatives in our collections. The idea was to build a donor base and reach a broader audience beyond our traditional subject areas while garnering financial support for photographic conservation efforts.
For some background, many of our collecting areas have an archivist that serves as a curator for those collections. Our photographic collections, however, do not have a full-time professional archivist overseeing them and are heavily used by a multitude of constituencies. Our collections also contain the most comprehensive set of photographs documenting 20th century Atlanta including the photo morgue for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Many of the negatives in our collections are in fair-to-poor condition necessitating extensive conservation work. Without an in-house conservator, we must pay to send these out to a qualified conservator and generally spend $5,000 or more per year on approximately 30 negatives. We will all be dead and gone (and many of our negatives as well), if we continue at this rate.
This boomerang showing a damaged negative that has been restored was used in online promotional materials to demonstrate impact. Courtesy George State University.
In order to address our challenges in preserving these negatives, we decided to try many new ideas, maybe too many, all at once. This exhibit was to be only the second regular exhibit opening for the library in its history and we decided to pull out all the stops. My curatorial team worked on creating two physical exhibits, one to be housed in the exhibit gallery on the 8th floor of Library South, and a smaller “satellite” exhibit in our Clarkston Campus library. In addition to the physical exhibits, they produced a complementary online exhibit to allow us to feature as many photographs from our collections as we could. The online exhibit also functioned as a test ground for Omeka Everywhere. After advocating for over a year I was finally able to purchase technology for our gallery and worked with our administration, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Digital Library Services Unit to purchase a touch screen table top display where we could feature the online exhibit in the gallery alongside our physical exhibit.
As if that weren’t enough, our new Assistant Director of Development for the library wanted to test out some new fundraising ideas: not one, but two! So, we launched the library’s first crowdfunding page to pay for the exhibit and catering for the opening. That campaign ran from July 1 through the exhibit opening on September 23. Besides the crowdfunding campaign, we also decided to have an “adopt-a-negative” fundraising component to raise money to have one or more negatives restored by a professional conservator. The idea was that we could launch the “adopt-a-negative” component with the opening of the physical exhibit (so go from fundraising for the exhibit to fundraising for the collections) by having a room set up with print outs of damaged negatives and examples of negatives that were beyond saving. The adoption process could then be carried on throughout the year through our Omeka exhibit.
Satellite exhibit at the Clarkston campus. Courtesy Georgia State University.
As we have difficulty drawing an audience for events on weekday evenings, due to traffic as well as finding the location of Library South, we decided to try something different. We decided to hold the opening on a Sunday afternoon so that folks could go to church and come downtown for the afternoon. We promoted the exhibit opening wherever we could, including the Decatur Book Festival, at tables in the library, in the university calendar and the Atlanta Celebrates Photography booklet, as well as the student newspaper. Our library marketing staff was set to announce it on the Visix displays across all campuses, in community calendars, etc.
Everything was planned out and the hope was to draw new donors and folks who had never stepped foot through our doors. Now, I had been told that “no one comes downtown on the weekends” and that most people were only downtown during the week because they were there for work and school and were gone on the weekends. But the weekends also mean free parking, which was heavily advertised. We also had activities for guests including free green screen photos where you get to put yourself in a historic Atlanta photograph and either get a postcard print or email it to yourself. And of course, you could adopt a negative and get the digital files for your own personal use. What could possibly go wrong!? Almost everything…
One of the green screen photographs created during the exhibit opening. Visitors could have their photo taken against a green screen and inserted into a historic photograph. Courtesy George State University.
There were things we were aware of and didn’t factor in and then there were things that did not even cross our radar. The biggest mistake? Trying to do all these new things at once. Had we thought more carefully, it would have been better to introduce these new ideas gradually. Not only did our exhibit focus on two things, collections and preservation, we decided to move the event from a weeknight to a weekend, and no, free parking did not draw the masses.
Beyond these issues we ran into other problems. Our marketing staff, as it turns out, did not do all the marketing that was discussed or expected. Our crowdfunding raised more than we had expected ($2,000 out of our $5,500 goal), but still fell short and did not cover all expenses incurred by the exhibit, especially the catering, which cost more than anticipated because it took place on a weekend.
Ultimately, 14 people attended the event; all but two of them were friends or family of the two exhibit curators. There were only two people, both graduate students, who made their way up to the exhibit gallery because they saw the directional signage down in the library. Not one person came to the event as a result of any of our social media or marketing. There were more of us working at the event than attendees, so it was a struggle not to have five people attending to each one person who walked into the gallery.
In the end, we had zero adoptions of negatives in person and to date, none online. We did not grow our donor base as hoped and did not use our existing donor base for the library as leverage. There were several lessons learned:
Focus the exhibit on one topic. In this case, it should have been focused solely on preservation.
Pick one fundraising activity per event. We should have focused solely on the “adopt-a-negative” fundraiser and leveraged our existing donor base by sending out promotional materials to those donors.
There were too many people and activities involving a multitude of deadlines. This led to people dropping the ball, missing deadlines, or failing to follow through on assignments. Had we been more focused on one activity, we would not have overburdened staff members.
With these lessons in mind, we are now planning another exhibit launch in the fall of 2019. We will continue with the two physical exhibits and the Omeka exhibit in response to requests from the library administration, but we will likely drop the fundraising component or will pick one fundraiser. We will also hold the opening from 4-6 pm on a weekday and ensure that it is promoted to all of our donors and to the larger Atlanta metro area. Making these changes should ensure a better turnout and return on investment!
Christina Zamon is the Head of Special Collections and University Archives at Georgia State University, a position she has held since September 2016. Prior to that time, she served as Head of Archives and Special Collections at Emerson College. She is the author of The Lone Arranger: Succeeding in a Small Repository. She is currently a member of the College and University Archives Section’s Steering Committee and previously served as chair of the section (2014-2015).
This blog post is drawn from presentations at the 2017 SAA Research Forum[1] and the 2016 European Conference on Information Literacy[2].
I was intrigued by a question posted by Rebecca Goldman on the Academic Archivist blog to kick start this year’s focus on student workers: “How can we center student workers in this conversation and highlight their accomplishments?”[3] I believe there are two different perspectives that can help answer this question, and that incorporating both perspectives provides the maximum impact towards highlighting student learning in the archives.
The first perspective is that of the student worker, a voice that can be difficult to capture. With that in mind, I designed a pilot study around semi-structured interviews with student workers who interacted with archival materials at work. The interviews included open-ended questions about working in academic libraries and self-perceptions of how their work aligned with professional standards and how they will use what they learned after graduation. While I won’t dive deep into that here (it will be published in the Fall/Winter 2018 American Archivist), I will address the second perspective to the question how we can highlight student learning and their accomplishments.
The second perspective that is equally important to capture is that of archivists (and supervisors). As the head of special collections and archives at a land grant university, I often considered how I could better communicate the department’s impact in the library, university, community, and beyond. One aspect of this was to look at student learning taking place on the job. How do archivists usually convey student success and learning while on the job? The first ways that came to mind were written (evaluations, annual reports, development newsletters, etc.) and verbal (in meetings, donor conversations, etc.). I also wanted to acknowledge the value that archivists bring to teaching and enhancing the student worker experience. Many times, archivists articulate this through evaluations and statistics for annual reports, considering questions such as:
How does the archives/library provide effective learning opportunities for students?
How does student learning align with our professional standards?
How does the academic library align with university learning standards and strategic planning/mission?
One way to consider how archivists communicate student learning and highlight their successes is through an exercise that maps student job responsibilities to professional standards and literacies. As part of the exercise, I mapped functions found in student job descriptions to a corresponding standard or literacy learning outcome. For example, student positions that were heavily involved with physical or digital exhibits mapped well to visual literacy standards[4]; students heavily involved with processing or digitizing collections mapped well to the new primary source literacy standards[5]. This exercise can be broad or narrow; I decided to map functions to both the overarching standard and when appropriate a learning outcome found underneath it. This mapping exercise provides supervisors with more cohesive language that exemplifies both the student learning experience and the archivists’ role in teaching students in the workplace. Table 1 below shows common job duties that can be found in many archives departments.
Table 1: Student Position Job Duties Mapped to Professional Literacies and Standards
A second mapping exercise that I found helpful to articulate learning occurring while at work in the archives was to connect student job descriptions and functions to campus learning outcomes[6]. I found this exercise was effective in communicating with internal and external stakeholders and that I was better able to advocate for additional student opportunities. Academic courses taught at colleges/universities typically include specific learning outcomes for the course that align to campus learning outcomes. While not quite the same, one way to communicate student learning while at work in the archives is to utilize the same language. By making similar connections between learning in the classroom to campus learning outcomes, archivists can connect what students are learning at work to the same campus goals and speak the same language as other academic departments (see an example in Table 2 below). By placing student learning into broader competencies outside of professional standards and literacies, this information can be used by archives and library administrators to communicate the impact on student learning for annual statistics, reports, and accreditation reviews.
Table 2: Student Position Description Mapped to Campus Learning Outcomes.
By reframing and aligning activities of student workers to professional standards, literacies, and campus learning outcomes, archivists can highlight student accomplishments and the value of archivists in a teaching role. Mapping student worker functions is one way to help archivists strategically communicate impacts on learning while working in the archives to our stakeholders at all levels, whether the position is paid, volunteer, or intern. The mapping exercise serves as a helpful tool for administrators to advocate for how the archives or library contributes to campus-wide learning outcomes, as well as help improve the student worker experience.
Erin Passehl-Stoddart is the Strategic Projects and Grants Development Librarian at the University of Oregon. She previously was Associate Professor and Head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Idaho. She holds an MSI with a specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan and a BA in history and political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Erin is a past president of Northwest Archivists and served as SAA key contact for Oregon and Idaho.
[2] Passehl-Stoddart, Erin. “Information Literacy Contributions From Archives and Special Collections.” Presentation at the European Conference on Information Literacy, Prague, Czech Republic, 2016. http://ecil2016.ilconf.org/thursday-13th-october/.
[6] Stoddart, Rick and Beth Hendrix. “Learning at the Reference Desk: A Pilot Project to Align Reference Transactions with University Learning Outcomes.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 43(1), 3-7.
In a perfect world, archivists aspire to partnerships with instructors to promote archival literacy and the beautiful practices of usage with our collections. We strive for best practices, and we dream of measurable outcomes and assessment goals. Even so, there are days when the phone rings, and we’re asked for a “novelty act” – a one-shot instruction interaction, one-off tours, and the dreaded “show and tell.” How should we respond? Rather than relish in disappointment, how can we leverage this experience toward our aspirational pedagogical goals?
Title page of one of the Bibles held by Bluffton’s Special Collections. Image courtesy Carrie Phillips.
For me, one such opportunity surfaced during fall semester 2016 when I was approached by the faculty member teaching two large sections of an Introduction to Biblical Worldview course. This was a required, general education course taken by all Bluffton University students, and all class levels were represented in the class population. She explained that the course examined the Bible through four lenses: biblical studies, ethics, theology, and spirituality. However, the course did not explicitly include content addressing the Bible as an artifact. She wondered, could I create a lesson that would fill this particular curricular gap using Bibles from our Special Collections… AND could I do it on a day when she would be away at a conference and needed a guest speaker.
At first, I briefly hesitated. The instructor had suggested a demonstration approach – the ol’ “show-and-tell” – and I had reservations about that. If I would glovedly remove from the custom-made storage box the giant, centuries-old, folio-size Bible, printed in a language students couldn’t read, show it to them on a table but make them stand back and crane their collective necks to see it, and then put it away after five or ten minutes of me talking at them about it, what significant amount of discovery would really occur? But if I would turn them loose for 50 minutes to explore freely and turn the pages of a seventeenth century book while the sophomore over here finishes his oatmeal that he brought from the dining hall, then there’s no reverence involved. I wanted to create a guided, carefully prepped and framed experience with just the right amount of fear-mongering and awe-inspiring lead-up to make for a memorable learning experience for all involved. I saw an opportunity to interface with the general education curriculum in a way I’d not yet attempted, and the prospect was compelling. So we met for coffee, like good collaborating scholars should, to review more details and see what could be done.
Teaching with rare materials is admittedly scary. So I asked my communities of practice for their wisdom. I queried colleagues from the Ohio Preservation Council, a group of conservators, preservation librarians, special collections curators, and archivists from across Ohio. I checked in with my parallel counterparts from Bluffton’s sister Mennonite institutions. I examined my collection – what raw materials did I have to work with? How was this going to happen in a tiered lecture hall with shallow tabletops? What did I need to bring with me to make this run smoothly? And how could I leverage methods like group work and guided examination and classroom technology?
After considering feedback from a number of colleagues, I chose folio- and quarto- sized Bibles of stable condition which also represented a wide publishing timespan. Since an alternate space was not an option, I considered how best to utilize the tiered classroom space to arrange small groups of students around each Bible. I anticipated needs and props, like pencils, a worksheet to guide the exploration, cradle cushions, and visual aids – bringing everything along so we could isolate the students’ belongings away from the Bibles. I scripted my remarks, and devoted space in the introduction to explicitly emphasize care and handling, demonstrating those techniques (and even so, my colleagues warned me that I should expect some wear). I felt I was aware of potential risks I couldn’t eliminate, and the benefits continued to outweigh those risks. Everything for this roadshow lesson was loaded onto my largest flatbed cart, and I ventured off with the Traveling Rare Bible Petting Zoo to the academic center, where the course met.
To break the ice, of sorts, I’ve employed two different introductory activities to the session. Option A involved asking the students to watch three short, relevant YouTube videos prior to class and using a Kahoot quiz to assess their understanding of those videos. Option B steered the class into a discussion of how a Bible is recognizable by methods other than having the letters BIBLE on the cover, followed by watching a short YouTube video which showed the process of printing and binding a book using methods similar to what created the Bibles the students would examine.
Students engage with their assigned Bible in the classroom. Image courtesy Carrie Phillips.
Then I provided a very deliberate care and handling demonstration, showing exactly how the book should be handled for the activity we were about to begin. Students removed all of their belongings from the desktops to their bags or the floor, excused themselves (if necessary) to wash their hands with soap and water in the restroom, and then formed small groups. Pencils, a worksheet, and a Bible were distributed to each group. Students were encouraged to document interesting features using their smartphone cameras, and some shared those images on Instagram, tagging @blufftonuarchives in their posts so that I could see and comment.
Students began their guided examination by looking at the outside of their Bible. The worksheet offered a checklist of possible materials used (or not) in the construction of the Bible (e.g. paper, plastic, wood, leather, brass, etc.). Students were asked to note any interesting decorative features of the cover boards or spine. Before moving to Part 2, students were asked to make a guess as to the Bible’s age.
Using the handling techniques I demonstrated at the start, students next located the Bible’s title page. Their task here was to discern when and where the Bible was printed. I hadn’t anticipated that students would struggle to read Roman numerals! Students were also asked to make note of any interesting or surprising findings along the way to the title page – handwritten notes, bookplates, and the like. They were eager to report damage they observed, which sometimes led to interesting tangent discussions.
A worksheet utilized in class provides visual cues related to the session. Image courtesy Carrie Phillips.
Perhaps in homage to all the standardized tests I’ve ever taken, I placed a large red stop sign graphic at the bottom of the worksheet’s front page. A note there reminded the students to catch my attention so that I could come to their workspace and open their Bible for them. The Bibles were supported with homemade stuffed sock tubes – easy to transport, and sized to help cradle the Bibles to protect their spines and joints.
Once the Bibles were opened, students were encouraged to explore the contents using proper handling techniques. Students were asked to guess the language of their Bible, and to make note of any interesting illustrations. We discussed how there are parts of a Bible which may be recognizable to them even if they’re not able to read the language present. Some students discovered clippings or pressed plants and flowers between the pages. All were encouraged to note at least one interesting, surprising, or confusing feature to share with the class.
For the final 10-15 minutes of the class period, I displayed slides of each Bible, and asked the groups to share the printing date, printing place, and their chosen feature for their Bible when it appeared on the screen – so that all in the class could see all of the Bibles. I provided an additional piece of trivia for each Bible.
I’ve repeated the experience each semester since, including for students in our Adult Degree Completion program and in our Honors program. Because of the course size, all but two Honors program course students could work alone with a Bible. The level of curiosity expressed by this particular group of students was really surprising, and this time, the instructor was able to be present, which added a lovely layer of subject-matter expertise to what I could offer.
Heidi Buchanan and Beth McDonough, in their essay, “Right on Time: Best Practice in One-Shot Instruction,” note that, “not only is one-shot instruction what academic communities expect from libraries, but it can be highly effective – nimble, purposeful, integrated across the curriculum, and focused on relationships with teaching faculty and students” (85).
Ellen Swain, in her essay, “Best Practices for Teaching with Primary Sources,” suggests that, “The critical component to a successful instruction program is understanding the goals and objectives for the teaching faculty.” Swain continues by suggesting that, “the most successful collaborations are those in which the instructor has buy-in and will work with the students and the archivist to understand and use primary sources in creative ways” (200). While this strikes me as having been intended for a proactive pursuit of classroom connections between curriculum and archival materials or special collections, Swain’s ideas are also useful when planning the “reactive” response to a request for a one-shot instruction session, such as the one I’ve described.
Students work in a small group to examine a Bible. Image courtesy Carrie Phillips.
As I reflected on my experiences with this one-shot teaching opportunity using rare books, I culled a list of surprises, adjustments, and successes. The students surprised me with their higher-than-expected levels of engagement and curiosity. They listened and observed attentively my care and handling demonstration, with the exception, surprisingly, of the adult students, who found their pencils to be useful pointing tools – something I had not anticipated and have accounted for since. Classroom management was sometimes difficult; there was only one of me to work the room, opening Bibles when students were ready, and answering questions. This left a fair amount of downtime during which students had to wait patiently, and in larger groups, these students simply tuned out. In the most recent iterations of the course, the instructor was present, and her presence turned out to be more helpful than I anticipated. Lastly, I was relieved and encouraged to see that the wear-and-tear sacrifice of the experience was minimal; I found very few bits of old Bible left behind on the desktops after students finished handling. I remain very conscious of the need to monitor this particular concern, and I have a plan to rotate additional Bibles into the mix to help avoid extensive damage.
To date, I’ve offered the Petting Zoo on eight different occasions, and each instance offers a chance for my remarks, timing, and worksheet to be retooled and honed. The reward is great – students react positively on formal and informal course evaluations – and instructors are beyond pleased. I look forward to bringing the Petting Zoo to Bluffton students in the future – the instructors and I are already planning for Fall 2018!
Carrie Phillips is completing her thirteenth year as archives and special collections librarian for Bluffton University in northwest Ohio. She oversees Bluffton’s diverse special collections, which are grounded in the institution’s Anabaptist – Mennonite tradition, and she enjoys the challenge of developing innovative instruction opportunities with those collections for audiences ranging from first graders to the adult learner. She is the current chair-elect of the Ohio Preservation Council, and some of her favorite days at work are spent at her workbench, protecting and preserving the traces of history in her care. Carrie earned an MLIS from the University of Washington in 2006 and has a bachelor of arts degree from Bluffton University.
I became the archivist of the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University (NMU) Archives 21 years ago on March 1, 1997. On that fateful morning, ice blocks, towering snow drifts, and frigid temperatures greeted me as I made my way through campus toward the archives. Looking back now, I can see how the classic Upper Peninsula winter setting provided a fitting context and metaphor, since I had inherited an archival program in suspended animation much like the long dead mastodon found frozen in ice.
My predecessor had been gone for nearly a year by the time I arrived. She had fled leaving me with a records management program on life support and a nascent regional historical collection. I was expected to manage and expand both responsibilities without any hope of additional professional staff support. At the same time, I was also a tenure track assistant professor, with all the obligatory service and scholarship demands. Young and naively confident, I brushed aside any worries and brashly galloped off into the fray only to quickly crash into the painful boulder of reality. By the end of my first year, I was an exhausted, broken, and angry lone arranger perched atop a teetering mount, wallowing in self-pity, and nearly in tears. I can vividly remember sitting at a reading room table feeling sorry for myself and wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. At that moment, I looked up through the window into the adjacent hallway and saw scores of students rushing back and forth between classes. For the first time in my life, I suddenly experienced the closest thing to a “religious epiphany.” With a jolt, it dawned on me, “you idiot. There’s the solution to your problem.”
The solution was to hire more student assistants and train them to work as paraprofessionals capable of completing all the basic archival management tasks, such as arrangement and description, reference and reading room assistance, and public outreach programming. To be honest, I wasn’t quite yet thinking of student assistants as paraprofessionals in those early days. That thought came much later after I had read a definition of the term and realized it fit my creation. In essence, a paraprofessional is defined as a trained aid who assists a professional person. The aid is not licensed or credentialed through professional training or a college / university degree.
My idea to use student assistants as paraprofessionals was not unique. In 1992, Barbara L. Floyd and Richard W. Oram conducted a study on the use of undergraduate students in college and university archives.[1] They surveyed 132 archives and found that 72 percent used student assistants extensively in multiple archival tasks with varying degrees of complexity, and 37.3 percent stated that student assistants performed “professional tasks.” Given the demanding nature of archival work, Floyd and Oram made a number of recommendations designed to facilitate recruitment and retention of high quality student assistants. They urged archivists to write position descriptions that reflected graduated levels of specialization and higher levels of pay. They also encouraged archivists to develop appropriate training manuals and commit themselves to intensive training of student assistants. Short of actually using the term, Floyd’s and Oram’s report confirmed that many university and college archival programs were using undergraduate student assistants as paraprofessionals.
At the time of my “epiphany” twenty years ago, I had two student assistants working a few hours each week doing little more than answering the phone, monitoring the reading room, and re-shelving boxes. Today, seven undergraduates work in the NMU Archives on a variety of specialized tasks. They work 10-20 hours per week and are paid according to a wage scale described by each position classification. Each student assistant starts at the entry-level Archives Student Assistant I. Following successful completion of their first year, they are promoted to Archives Student Assistant II. The archives normally hosts 1-2 student interns completing a field experience requirement of the Department of History’s Public History minor. These interns work only one semester and are focused on very specific, “small” projects, such as processing a collection of letters or developing an online exhibit. Currently, the archives has two volunteers; one is the library’s retired cataloger and the other is an expert in genealogical research.
Number One, Stefan Nelson, at his desk. Stefan is a senior majoring in Wildlife Management. Image courtesy Marcus Robyns.
The key to the archives’ student assistant program is the position of senior student assistant (student assistant III), known affectionately as Number One. Number Ones generally work 15-20 hours per week. Candidates for the position must demonstrate a proven record of exceptional maturity, responsibility, professional deportment, interpersonal relationship skills, and the ability to manage increasingly complex tasks. The candidate is normally a veteran staff member, having served at least two years as a student assistant I and II. Number One is the “lead” student assistant and is primarily responsible for basic office management and the recruitment and training of new student assistants. Number One also assists the archivist in supervision and performance evaluations. They also chair the archives’ biweekly staff meetings, including the preparation of agendas and minutes. Most Number Ones serve for one to two years until they graduate.
I do not hire archives student assistants. They hire themselves in a process modeled after professional staff recruitment and hiring at NMU. Generally, the archives hires one or two new student assistants at the beginning of each academic year, depending upon how many graduated or left service the previous spring. Number One forms a “Search Committee,” comprised of Number One as chair and usually two other student assistants. The search committee writes the position announcements (based on the position descriptions), conducts publicity, manages the incoming applications, and conducts interviews. Number One submits to me a written recommendation ranking the applicants. Unless I see something glaringly wrong, I generally “rubber stamp” the search committee’s recommendation.
The search committee makes every effort to recruit a diverse workforce but struggles because of the small number of students of color at NMU. For example, NMU currently has only 150 students identified as African-American, barely 2 percent of the undergraduate population. Regardless, the current staff does include one African-American student assistant, Kyleigh Sapp, who recently gave an outstanding Evening at the Archives presentation on the history of black student protest on campus for Black History Month.
Once hired, new student assistants begin a six month “probationary period.” Number One conducts basic training in reading room procedures and file management. I introduce and train the new assistants in basic reference, accessioning, and arrangement and description work. The training includes an initial presentation, selected readings, one-on-one guidance, and practical exercises that culminate in a final project.
Lydia Henning working on book mending project. Lydia is a senior majoring in Spanish with a minor in Art and Design. Lydia is also responsible for maintain the Archives’ web site, designing online exhibitions, educational outreach publicity flyers. Image courtesy Marcus Robyns.
During new student assistant training, I develop a better understanding of each student’s personal and professional goals and abilities. This knowledge helps me identify the area of archival work best suited to them. I assign each student assistant a “specialization” in accessioning, arrangement and description, reference/reading room, or digitization and web site design. Each student assistant receives a formal title, such as arrangement and description specialist, reference and reading room coordinator, or digitization specialist. These titles look much more impressive on a resume than the simple and colorless, “Archives Student Assistant.” Number One adds each student assistant’s picture, title, and a very brief biographical statement to the staff page on the Archives web site.
As paraprofessionals, the student assistants are fully integrated into the management and operations of the archives. Aside from their area of specialization, each student assistant participates in bi-weekly staff meetings, where they report on the progress of their assignments and contribute to decisions on policies and procedures. Student assistants also participate in public outreach by contributing to social media posts, writing blog posts (The Northern Tradition), creating online exhibitions, and giving public presentations. If a student assistant has an idea for improving a policy or procedure, nine times out of ten I will try the idea. Sometimes the idea fails, but we always review what went wrong and try to learn from the experience.
NMU Archives student assistants receive a formal, in-person and written evaluation at the end of each semester. If serious difficulties develop, I may call for a mid-semester evaluation or initiate the established Disciplinary Actions Procedure. At the end of each semester, each student assistant has the opportunity to submit to Number One a confidential written evaluation of myself. They may also submit to me a confidential written evaluation of Number One. Number One and I review my evaluations, and Number One responds with an email summarizing how I will do my best to address any problems. I want the student assistants to know that I have honestly read and considered their evaluations of me. Over the years, I have found the student assistants’ evaluations of me to be extremely helpful and include them in my professional annual evaluations.
Lucas Knapp working on a reference query. Lucas is a junior majoring in Mathematics and Environmental Studies. Image courtesy Marcus Robyns.
A carefully defined and structured evaluation process is essential for a successful student assistant, paraprofessional program. Archivists lacking in supervisory training and experience may find it difficult to work with student paraprofessionals. For the most part, undergraduates require a heightened level of supervision and guidance that can be a time-consuming distraction for a lone arranger facing multiple demands and responsibilities. In general, an undergraduate’s developing maturity and emerging self-confidence can result in frequent mistakes and difficulties dealing with challenging patrons or overbearing faculty. Undergraduates are still developing their problem-solving skills. Sometimes, their earnestness to please and do well will cause them to make decisions or take actions “beyond their paygrade” that can cause real havoc. In my experience, fortunately, I have found these problems to be manageable and infrequent. In fact, I have only implemented the Archives’ disciplinary procedure twice in my career at NMU.
The advantages of a paraprofessional, student assistant program far outweigh the disadvantages, and these advantages accrue to the students as well as to the archives. As college and university archivists, we have a responsibility to support and enhance our undergraduates’ education. The NMU Archives provides each student assistant with a unique experiential learning opportunity and the experience necessary to compete for post-graduate professional jobs and graduate school applications. NMU Archives student assistants have conducted digitization projects and created the digital object metadata for ArchivesSpace; they have designed and created web sites and online exhibitions; conducted public presentations; and created DACS-compliant collection finding aids. Although NMU does not have a graduate archival program, five former student assistants are now professional archivists and records managers. Two others have completed their PhDs in history; one is a PhD microbiologist; one is ABD in linguistic anthropology; and another is ABD in Medieval literature. The remainder have gone on to successful professional careers related to their major degree program.
The Archives student assistant program did not spring to life overnight according to a well-defined blueprint. It was a collaborative effort between me and the student assistants that, for the most part, was a halting, piecemeal process of trial and error.
Libby Serra digitizing a collection of oral histories and creating ArchivesSpace digital object metadata. Libby is a junior majoring in Digital Cinema. Image courtesy Marcus Robyns.
Naturally, all archival programs should be fully staffed by professionally trained archivists. One should not misconstrue the NMU Archives’ student assistant program as evidence to support staffing cutbacks, or as an excuse for administrations to continue their exploitation of adjunct faculty and part-time staff. For the struggling college or university lone arranger, however, the program’s success provides a possible solution to the problem of meager budgets and burgeoning demand for archival resources and services. Archivists in higher education are fortunate to have at their disposal a ready crop of inexpensive, smart, skillful, and highly motivated undergraduate students. To reap the benefits of this harvest, all we have to do is acknowledge and treat our student assistants with the respect they deserve as paraprofessionals. With just a bit of effort, an enterprising lone arranger can identify and mold these young people into effective and productive staff members.
[1] Barbara L. Floyd and Richard W. Oram, “Learning by Doing: Undergraduates as Employees in Archives,” The American Archivist 55 (Summer, 1992): 440-452.
Marcus Robyns is professor and University Archivist at Northern Michigan University. He worked professionally in Texas and Oregon before landing at NMU in 1997. Marcus is the author of numerous publications, including Functional Analysis in Archival Appraisal: A Practical and Effective Alternative to Traditional Appraisal Methodologies (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) and is a former Regent for Exam Administration, Academy of Certified Archivists.
As you can imagine, when an undergraduate liberal arts institution like Union College is more than 200 years old, it generates and receives an astonishing amount of information about its alumni: newspaper clippings, notes, letters, and ephemera related to centuries of graduates.
In an attempt to maintain active relationships with its alumni, Union’s College Relations department established a series of alumni files. Several decades ago, files dating from 1795 to 1929 were transferred to the Schaffer Library’s Special Collections and Archives department for research purposes and safekeeping (the materials are currently stored in a secured climate controlled environment).
The files are a rich and valuable resource for documenting the history of Union College, and Special Collections receives frequent requests from students, faculty, and researchers who seek information pertaining to its alumni.
When I arrived as head of Special Collections & Archives in 2014, the alumni files were stored on shelves in the library’s basement. This arrangement meant that student workers and library staff descended three flights of stairs to pull files. Aside from the amount of time it took to retrieve and return the files, frequent handling put the materials at risk for damage. I immediately recognized the need to relocate the alumni files into the Special Collections & Archives department and began developing a way to scan the contents of each folder for long term preservation and access.
Union College is like most small undergraduate liberal arts institutions: we currently lack a sophisticated digital lab and have limited resources for outsourcing large digital scanning projects. So I determined that the best way to tackle scanning hundreds of alumni files would be to utilize student workers. In 2015, through a generous bequest, the library acquired a Zeutschel OS12002 overhead scanner. The Zeutschel makes it possible to customize scanning settings, which allowed us to streamline the digitization process. This feature also allows students to be quickly trained to scan the alumni files using basic Photoshop commands.
Explanation of and example of file naming structure employed throughout the project.
In order to capture the necessary metadata, Special Collections & Archives collaborated with the Technical Services department to create protocols for assigning numbers for each item within a folder. The metadata naming schema uses the surname and first initial of the alum (as shown in image at right).
Training The Technical Services department trains students on how to use the Zeutschel. The Special Collections & Archives staff also train students on handling and handwriting the metadata (using a #2 pencil) on each document. More experienced students have also acted as trainers by teaching each other how to scan and code the documents. So far, the students have successfully scanned folders dating from 1795 to 1866.
Challenges
It turns out that the more recent folders require additional time to complete, as they contain more information. This has slowed the pace of scanning considerably.
As students graduate, it’s imperative that the Special Collections & Archives department hire new student workers each year and provide training in order to continue the project.
Folders post-1900 are likely to contain confidential information since the College Relations department began sending questionnaires to alumni. These questionnaires requested information about their personal lives (names and birthdates of children, home addresses, etc.). Therefore, it may be necessary to restrict post-1900 alumni files because of confidentiality concerns.
As of this writing, scanned alumni files are only accessible via an in-house server. Special Collections & Archives staff are authorized to reference these files for researchers. Patrons may receive copies of the digitized files upon request. The Schaffer Library recently launched an institutional repository called Union Digital Works. This platform will likely serve as the online access point for digitized alumni files. Once online, researchers will have full access to the pre-1900 alumni files via the internet.
Student worker Anouk, poses next to the scanner.
Anouk works with the Zeutschel scanner
Anouk makes an adjustment on the Zeutschel scanner.
Student engagement While the coding and scanning process can be tedious, students have surprisingly embraced these tasks. More than once, they have commented that coding and digitizing the documents provides an opportunity to listen to music on their headphones, relax, and escape their rigorous schedules.
Anouk, a senior majoring in environmental sciences, has worked on the project for two years. I asked her what she likes about coding and scanning the documents. She responded that she felt a sense of ownership of the project and commented that the project has taught her a great deal about the history of Union College and the importance of preserving historical documents for the future.
Quality assurance (QA) The student work is overseen and checked by an Archives Assistant. This includes retrieving the saved digital files and spot checking everyone tenth one. Should a digital file need to be corrected or modified, the Archives Assistant consults with the student to fix the problem. Once QA is complete, the finished digital files are stored on a secured “Library dark archive” or L: drive while access copies are made available to authorized staff via the “Library preservation” or M: drive.
Preserving the originals After the folders are scanned and quality assurance is complete, they are filed in acid-free boxes for long-term storage. At the beginning of the project, we decided to keep the original manilla folders rather than re-house the documents into acid-free folders due to time and funding constraints.
Timeline and follow up Because scanning the alumni files is an in-house project, there is no set timeline for completion. However, the department dedicates several students each year to scan the files. The post-1929 alumni files continue to be stored at College Relations. As this phase of the scanning project moves toward completion, efforts will be made to reach out and acquire the more recent alumni files for scanning and long-term storage.
Conclusion While this project not only preserves the alumni files, it has also made it possible to eventually make the alumni files virtually accessible to researchers worldwide. By incorporating student workers into the process, the project has been able to move forward because of their enthusiasm and dedication. The students have also embraced the opportunity to work with historical documents and learn about Union College’s unique history while acquiring new technical skills that will serve them in the future.
India Spartz is the Head of Special Collections and Archives at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She holds an B.A. from the University of Alaska (her home state), MLIS from UC Berkeley, and M.A. in Museum Studies from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She’s a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and serves on SAA’s College & University Archives Steering Committee.
This blog post is drawn from one case study shared during a talk given at the 2017 SAA annual conference during Session 106 Active Learning for Archival Institutions: From Theory to Practice. Coincidently, as it relates to immigration it also ties in nicely to the last post Meet Your Vice-Chair: Ellen Engseth.
While I’ve been a full-time staff member of the IU Archives for almost 10 years now, in the summer of 2015 I moved into the new position of Outreach and Public Services Archivist and was tasked with developing our instruction program. This year our program served over 1,100 students in 70 separate sessions in 21 departments.
Like most archivists, I received no formal training on instruction during library school. Admittedly, looking back at my very early forays in instruction around 2011 I am a little embarrassed. These were often very passive sessions for the students, with me lecturing and leaving them little opportunity to interact with our collections. Over the years my teaching has been heavily influenced by a couple of professional development opportunities including the 2012 Midwest Archives Conference Symposium – Engaging Students and Teachers: Integrating Primary Sources in Curricula (in particular a session on Primary Sources in the College Classroom with Peter Carini, Dartmouth College), and in 2016 the first Librarians Active Learning Institute for Archives and Special Collections (LALI-ASC) at Dartmouth College. Both emphasized the importance of integrating active-learning techniques into the classroom, and the power that a strong story can have as our brains are built to process information as narrative. Furthermore, learning is enhanced when that story is authentic and relatable to the learners’ life.
COLL-S103 – Becoming “American”: Immigration and American Literature Immediately following my return from LALI-ASC, a relatively new faculty member who was teaching an Intensive Freshman Seminar (IFS) course at Indiana University contacted me. IFS classes are two-week 3-credit classes intended to introduce “freshman to the rigors of college life” two weeks prior to the start of fall semester. IFS classes typically enroll about 20 students. While planning the instruction session the professor noted that he anticipated the course would attract a large percentage of international students, and this may be their first time in the United States. Ultimately, we choose to target three learning objectives from the ACRL RBMS – SAA Joint Task Forces – Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy:
that students understand that they can “draw on primary sources to generate and refine research questions.” (I. Conceptualize; C.)
that students “recognize and understand the policies and procedures that affect access to primary sources” specifically in regards to handling and necessity for usage in a secure reading room (II. Find and Access; E. )
that students can “identify and communicate information found in primary sources, including summarizing the content of the source and identifying and reporting key components such as how it was created, by whom, when, and what it is.” (III. Read, Understand, Summarize; B.)
Page 1 of letter used in classroom discussion. Image courtesy the author.
Using a flipped classroom model to free up in-class time at the archives for active-learning activities, prior to their visit to the IU Archives the students were assigned to read this letter written in September 1940, by then IU student Charlotte (Lotte) Lederer, a Viennese Jewish refugee to the IU President and Board of Trustees. In the letter, she thanks the Trustees for supporting her studies, talks about her upbringing and about how her parents wanted an education for her equal to that of her brother, the start of the war, and her father’s support of the ill-fated Austrian government. She also goes on to mention that she recently applied for her first citizenship papers and hopes to always live in Indiana. Today’s readers are left with a LOT of hanging questions, which are perfect for demonstrating the above learning objectives. Prior to class, the students are simply asked to come prepared with a list of questions they have about the letter.
During their 90-minute session at the archives, as a group we first compile a list of questions: Did she graduate? Was she Jewish? What happened to her family? Based upon inflation, what would the cost of tuition be compared to that of today? Etc. I use this letter with multiple classes, and based upon their backgrounds the students ask different things and always add questions that I have yet to consider. I use this as an opportunity to share with students the number of directions that a single primary source can take them.
The students are then divided into 6 groups for a think-pair-share activity featuring other documents that fill in details of Ms. Lederer’s life and answer some of the questions they have generated. Included are a New York passenger ship log found through Ancestry.com, a dormitory scrapbook, newspaper clippings about a student refugee committee on campus, a wedding announcement found in the President’s office records, and a letter to the Alumni Association written while she was working as a classification analyst at the Pentagon. Students are then asked to fill out a simple worksheet answering questions such as What is it? When was it made? Where was it made? Who made it and why? What part of Lotte’s story does your item fill in? And does it raise any new questions? Then as a group, I ask the students to report back in a certain order on their documents so as to continue the suspense of the narrative for a while longer.
Students examine a scrapbook during an archives session. Image courtesy the author.
For the second half of the session, in order to reinforce these new skills I pull out another group of items from our collection that are completely unrelated to the Lederer story. For example, oral history interviews from Indiana immigrant communities, records from the Cosmopolitan Club, an early student group formed to support international students, examples of Polish ethnic jokes from the Folklore Institute student papers, and photos and notebooks from our Charles Cushman collection of a Polish Independence Day parade in Chicago in the 1940s. Again in pairs the students work through a similar set of questions as with the Lederer activity (What is it? Who made it? And finally – what’s one question that you have?). The students then come back together as a group to share their findings with their classmates. I also remind them that now they have each generated a research question that they could further develop into a project.
Offered again this fall, a second iteration of this course was expanded into a full sixteen-week course. With each, the professor shared that many of the students expressed that the Charlotte Lederer activity really resonated with them, in particular because she was a college student at Indiana University such as themselves. There is something quite powerful when you can use historical documents which refer to places and spaces intimately familiar to students.
To conclude, I will admit that it took a good amount of time (multiple hours) to develop this activity, most of the time going towards doing the research to find the pieces of Charlotte’s story that were present in our collection. This process actually proves helpful during the instruction session however, as I can share with the students my own research hurdles in an authentic way.
Furthermore, I certainly can’t create a new exercise like this for every instruction session that I teach. This one exercise is quite adaptable for a range of learning objectives and subjects. I use this letter for classes in the History department, Gender Studies, and even recently a School of Education Social Studies for Elementary Schools class. The key is finding an engaging document, which raises a TON of questions. Perhaps it relates to a local mystery, or scandal, or simply something that will draw an emotional response – every archive has that!
Are you wondering how to find engaging documents for use in instruction? Just keep an eye out for ideas while providing reference services, processing new collections, or looking for social media content. My position involves doing a ton of reference so when I run across something interesting that makes me ask questions, I make a quick photocopy and add it to my file of instruction ideas.
If you would like to know more about Charlotte Lederer’s story, see this post at the IU Archives’ Blogging Hoosier History.
Carrie Schwier is the Outreach and Public Services Archivist at the Indiana University Archives. In addition to instruction, she also manages public services, oversees exhibits and outreach initiatives, and supervises lots of graduate students. She holds an M.A. in Art History and M.L.S. with Archives Specialization from Indiana University, and a B.A. from Hanover College.
CMU Stop Hate Walkout, November 15, 2016. Image courtesy of Steve Jessmore, Central Michigan University.
Activism is nothing new among the students on college campuses. As the cycle goes at colleges and universities, those activists will hopefully become degree-holding alumni. With this constant turnover, one hurdle that pops up for archivists is how to document campus activism as people leave for the next chapter in their lives. In the attempt to capture today’s activist movements, there are some benefits to be had by working with other campus activists, even decades after they left the institution. At Central Michigan University (CMU), a fruitful relationship with alumni who participated in a variety of groups and movements during the Vietnam War-era not only helped the archives round out the information about that time of activism at CMU, but has been of use to build a relationship with today’s activist students.
Freedom Hall at Central Michigan University, ca. May 6, 1970. Image courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library.
In 2016, some members of the robust activist community that existed in and around Central Michigan University in the late 1960s and early 1970s decided to get together in what they deemed a “No-Class Reunion.” This was perfect opportunity for the Clarke Historical Library to get involved. While the Clarke has relatively complete holdings of “official” records from that era, documents from the activist movement are far from complete. This No-Class Reunion gave the archivists a chance to speak to the publishers of the underground papers, the organizers of the marches, and those who pushed through the doors to occupy the ROTC building and deem it Freedom Hall.
Out of the 180 or so “No-Classers,” about 20 took the Clarke up on the offer to visit the archives. These alumni were impressed and excited to see the vast amount of materials already collected about their activism, and they were delighted to think of how they could contribute more to the holdings. Some of them also agreed to participate in a recorded discussion about their experiences, which would be added to the historical documents.
“No-Class Reunion” participants, 2016. Image courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library.
Before turning this relationship into a positive tool for connecting with current activist students, staff at the Clarke learned some interesting facts about the activist alumni that could be true beyond the Mount Pleasant campus. First, the No-Classers did not have much contact with the university in the traditional ways other alumni do. This could possibly be explained though their student life experiences, which did not include what are normally deemed traditional activities like Greek life, athletics, clubs, and such. Regardless, the No-Classers did not arrange the event with the Alumni Association, but they did reach out to the archives. It seems that the archives and, more likely, the chance for activists to document the history of the change-making in which they were involved, may be the best link a University has with activist students.
The second bit of information learned from the No-Class Reunion is about building trust and forming bonds between activists and an official university entity, like the archives. For the No Class-ers, the trust was built easily, most likely because their age and geographic distribution meant there were few to no negative consequences to be had for contributing to the historic record. On the one hand, time and distance make trust-building come easy. On the other, the strong bonds formed with the No-Class-ers gave the archives credibility with some current activist students. The Clarke has since been working with a few very active students to add historic context to their documentary project exploring activism at CMU.
Central Michigan University students during an anti-Vietnam War Rally, ca. 1969. Image courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library.
In an effort to have as complete a record of campus activism as possible, the Clarke found that working with alumni from decades passed payed off. The benefits were not only found in adding to the historical record and helping forge bonds with today’s activists. There were also lessons learned including the fact that the opportunity to document change-making could make the archives the best point of contact activist students will have with institution as alumni. Even so, it may take time – nearly five decades for the No-Class-ers – before activist alumni are ready to share their stories and part with their records.
Bryan Whitledge is the Archivist for University Digital Records at Central Michigan University. During his time at the Clarke Historical Library, he has worked in multiple reference, access, and outreach capacities.
This blog post is a summary of a lightning talk given at the 2017 SAA annual conference during session 406 – Sympathizing with Sisyphus: Dealing with Inherited or Intransigent Problems in College and University Archives.
Introduction Western Carolina University (WCU) is located is the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, 52 miles west of Asheville and 25 miles east of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a regional comprehensive university in the UNC system and has just over 10,000 students.
View of the Western Carolina University campus. Image courtesy the author.
The Special Collections unit at WCU began collecting materials in the mid-1960s and had approximately one filing cabinet worth of materials in 1966. Special Collections got its first official reading room in 1976, had 900 linear feet of materials in 1982, and today has over 3,000 linear feet of materials.
Resources, namely staff, had been slim for much of this time. It wasn’t until 2016 when the Digital Initiatives unit merged with Special Collections and more staff were hired that there was time and manpower to address some long-standing descriptive issues. Concurrent to the merger was an effort to migrate Special Collections finding aids into ArchivesSpace, which would us to make finding aids available online for the first time.
Collection abbreviations used at WCU. Image courtesy the author.
Definitions
So what are the collections? The largest is designated UAs for “university archives.” However, calling them university archives is a misnomer as the university has no archives and the Special Collections unit, although we do have historic records of the university, is not responsible for records across campus. This collection consists solely of photographs of university buildings and events. The second collection is referred to as PDs, or “Printed Documents.” PDs contains ephemera such brochures, maps, and fliers, among other things. There is duplication of this content with a small vertical file but that’s a mystery for another time. Lastly, we have the RPs, our regional photograph and postcard collection.
The Good The Printed Documents (PDs) collection was the most straightforward to migrate into ArchivesSpace. The inventory for the PDs was a Word document, divided topically with items described individually. In fact, “Printed Documents” was not a unified collection in any sense, but rather has been a catch-all for ephemera, newspapers, and even telephone directories. The contents of the section are described in three separate finding aids: “Printed Documents,” “Newspapers,” and “PD Maps.”
Except from the document outlining the structure of the Printed Documents collections. Image courtesy the author.The first step was to visualize the structure of these collections. We used a Word document to capture the hierarchy to use as a guide for migrating the data into ArchivesSpace. This document also helped us to choose which sections would be a stand-alone Collection/Series set.
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Because these disparate collections aren’t linked by a manuscript number, we are using the prefix “Printed Documents” in the title and the prefix “PD” in the inventory numbers. Doing this will allow us to quickly identify and pull together these collections if we feel the need to export or change this descriptive practice.
There are still some issues with display in ArchivesSpace but overall this has been a simple solution for making these collections widely accessible.
The Bad
Screenshot showing three versions of the inventory document for the Regional Photographs collection. Image courtesy the author.
The Regional Photographs (RPs) inventory was a 171-page Word document with item-level description. The inventory itself was quite useful, however, there were at least three copies of the inventory document. Each said “Updated April 30, 2012” on the first page and each document was titled “Regional Photographs July 2016,” yet the documents were updated in 2014, 2016, and 2017. Which is the authoritative copy is likely a long-gone piece of institutional knowledge.
Sample of image descriptions from the Regional Photographs Collection. Image courtesy the author.
Sample of topics in the index to the University Archives collection. Image courtesy the author.
The Ugly The 20,000 photographs of the university, known as the UAs or University Archives, was the third Word document inventory. Like the others, there were consistency issues. The document said it listed university photographs to 12,500, although the last entry on the document was 13,923. Furthermore, there were nearly 18,000 photographs on the shelves. The document itself was difficult to use. Initially organized as an index, at some point descriptions switched to item level. Some of this work was done by student workers who had little information about the photographs, resulting in descriptions that were nearly useless.While the UAs are heavily used, navigating and finding what you’re looking for can be daunting. Luckily, our staff has a good sense of humor.
Post-It note with a message for those using the university photos collection. Image courtesy the author.
Slide indicating the shift in knowledge and work product over the course of the project. Image courtesy the author.
What’s next? We are steadily making progress on updating, consolidating, and improving access to these three collections. The PDs are being moved into ArchivesSpace, RPs are currently being migrated, and we’re exploring hosting a computer science intern this spring to help with a database for the UAs. We’ll be relying heavily on the controlled vocabularies we developed for our digital collections to structure our descriptive work moving forward and plan to leave documentation of our decisions.
Liz Skene is the Special and Digital Collections Librarian at Western Carolina University. She previously served as a Curator of Collections at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, MI. She holds an MSI in Archives & Records Management and Community Informatics from the University of Michigan and BA in English from Spring Arbor University. You can send thoughts, ideas, or commiserations to Liz at emskene@wcu.edu.
The Academic Archivist 