11 A Participatory and Multi-Format Approach to Introducing Undergraduates to Archival Research

Introduction

You are thrilled to get an instruction request to teach archival literacy to a beginning History class. Armed with the frameworks, competency standards, and guidelines, you are ready to use best practices to combat what Morris, Myykytiuk, and Weiner describe as “archival anxiety, or the intimidation students feel using archives,”^[1] because you know that “providing real-world experiences for students to conduct research in an archival repository resulted in reduced anxiety and increased students’ confidence in their research abilities.”^[2] But what if the class is too big for your reading room or Special Collections classroom space to accommodate? How can you simulate that real-world experience when you cannot bring original materials to an outside classroom? Or what if the class must be taught remotely? How can you still convey the breadth of materials and types of sources in different series within a collection, and have students practice analyzing primary sources contained in the collection? The Special Collections faculty at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), have developed a flexible introductory archival literacy lesson plan that can be adapted for different types and sizes of physical spaces and classes, as well as for remote/hybrid contexts. The lesson introduces undergraduate History majors to the Special Collections environment and original research by using an archival collection with multiple formats to examine and analyze the physicality and content of primary sources.

The Special Collections faculty at UMBC frequently work with the arts, humanities, and social sciences departments to present archival and visual literacy sessions. These classes provide our students the opportunity to work directly with rare, unique, or historical items in a structured setting while they practice primary source analysis. We regularly reach out to departments and instructors by giving presentations at faculty meetings to encourage collaboration and Special Collections instruction, email professors who have previously worked with us, introduce our services to professors who are teaching classes that have visited Special Collections before, and have a web page devoted to our instruction that describes the topics and types of classes we teach and includes a link to easily schedule a class.^[3] Four faculty librarians, archivists, and curators taught 29 classes in FY23, and worked frequently with the History, American Studies, Public Humanities, Visual Arts, English, Media and Communication Studies, and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWST) faculty and students. Most classes only meet with Special Collections once during the semester, a format frequently referred to as a “one-shot.” We have had success developing multi-session instruction lessons with English and GWST faculty, as well as semester-long archival research projects focused on Special Collections archives and book collections with the English, GWST, and History departments. Special Collections has also been an annual partner with the Interdisciplinary CoLab, hosting a 4-week intensive research course with a rotating faculty-student team each summer since 2018.^[4]

In each of these classes, one of our principal goals as instructors is to emphasize and demonstrate relationships in archives—how items in a collection relate to and inform each other and how different series contain items connected to those in other series. Another main goal is to provide a space where students can discuss their experience using archival collections and primary sources with each other, with their professors, and with us as librarians and archivists. As Dreyer and Nofziger note in their article “Reducing Barriers to Access in Archival and Special Collections Public Services,” “archives and special collections libraries are not intuitive spaces.”^[5] With this in mind, we have created an engaging and effective lesson that demystifies archives and provides students with hands-on practice in a low-stakes, welcoming environment. This exercise was developed as a portable activity brought to the classroom and has since been adapted as an asynchronous online exercise and a small group hands-on exercise in the Special Collections reading room. In this chapter, we will share our lesson plan and learning objectives. Then we will discuss how we have adapted the original class for use on different instructional platforms and how we envision future iterations for upper-level undergraduate classes.

Collection Overview

We chose to use the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project collection for this lesson to illustrate the variety of formats that can be found within a collection. The collection contains archival documents, photographs, and oral histories.^[6] The East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project was undertaken by three women photographers in Baltimore, MD, Linda Rich, Elinor Cahn, and Joan Netherwood, from 1975–1980, and sought to document the people, businesses, and social activities of the primarily working-class, largely white ethnic and immigrant population of East Baltimore. Their project started out as a college class assignment and then grew into a years-long, grant-funded endeavor to photograph and interview the residents of East Baltimore, culminating in several exhibitions and a book, Neighborhood, A State of Mind.^[7] The photographers were granted unique, personal access to the community members’ homes, lives, and celebrations. They produced thousands of black-and-white documentary photographs and sixty-two oral history interviews as part of this project; the archival collection also includes extensive project files about the progression of the project, funding requests, partnerships, exhibitions, and production files for the resulting book. The diverse formats that are included in the collection make this an appealing selection for introducing primary source research to students. Because of our university’s proximity to Baltimore, we have had students with familial ties to the neighborhoods and communities documented in this collection in several classes. This personal relationship and familiarity is another way to humanize and demystify archival collections—they are not just records of large organizations but also stories of everyday people, sometimes just like you or people that you know.

Class Exercise

Learning Objectives

One of the first steps in preparing for an archival literacy class is reviewing the instruction request and the provided syllabus, if available, to identify specific learning objectives for the class session. Learning objectives help librarians and archivists to focus on specific goals for instruction sessions, which tend to be limited to one 50–85 minute class. At UMBC, we use several professional standards for learning objectives including the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education,^[8] the Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,^[9] and the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy,^[10] which is the source that we used for this class session and exercise. The professor requested a general introduction to Special Collections, and in our lesson planning we chose to focus on section three of the Guidelines because we wanted the students to gain experience reading and analyzing primary sources:

III. Read, Understand, and Summarize

1. Examine a primary source, which may require the ability to read a particular script, font, or language, to understand or operate a particular technology, or to comprehend vocabulary, syntax, and communication norms of the time period and location where the source was created.
2. Identify and communicate information found in primary sources, including summarizing the content of the source and identifying and reporting key components such as what it is, how it was created, when, and by whom.
3. Understand that a primary source may exist in a variety of iterations, including excerpts, transcriptions, and translations, due to publication, copying, and other transformations.

Exercise summary

This exercise follows a general introduction to Special Collections and archival research, which includes reading room rules and expectations, how to search for archival collections, and primary source analysis. For this exercise we selected four primary source items of varying physical formats from one archival collection. The students self-select small working groups of 2–3 and examine each item individually in a designated order. They use a provided worksheet to read, examine, summarize, and contextualize the items. A class discussion following the exercise is guided by the worksheet but is ultimately driven by the reflections and comments of the students.

Detailed Overview

We developed this exercise specifically as an archival literacy instruction option for when the students are not able to work directly with the original archival collection materials, i.e., when the instruction session is held outside of the Special Collections reading room, in another classroom, or remotely. We identified four primary source items in the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project collection: a funding request letter with an attached project proposal, a photographic print with an information card, a typewritten oral history transcript with handwritten corrections, and the audio recording of the same oral history interview. We scanned the first three items and copies were printed and assembled into packets that could be distributed to the students. The audio recording was digitized and played from our laptop in the classroom. Links to all items are included at the end of this lesson plan.

The provided worksheet guides the students as they analyze and summarize the collection items. The questions direct students to key components of the items that they should consider when working with historical resources and primary sources. We ask the students to describe the format of the item and locate the date(s) created. If item level descriptive records are available for each item, then one modification could be to ask the students to write a citation for each item, a key part of scholarly research that requires practice. We then ask the students to identify key terms, names, or dates included on the item that could help with further research, placing the item within the context of a larger research project or assignment.

For the second item, the photographic print with an information card, we ask the students to consider the original intended audience for the item when it was created. This question encourages students to think about how the creator used this item originally and who would have seen or read the item in its original context. This can be a difficult question for students if they are unfamiliar with the people or the project that created the item. The first item the students examine, a funding request and project proposal, provides a detailed project overview and the students can use this item to help answer questions about the other three items.

As the students work through the first three sections of the worksheet, corresponding to the distributed items, the instructors circulate through the room talking to the students about the items and answering any questions. We give cues to the students when they should have moved on to the next sections but otherwise let them work through this exercise at their own pace within a twenty-minute period. At the end of this time, we call the students back together as a class and play a digital audio clip from the oral history interview using our laptop and the classroom sound system. The transcript includes the full interview but the audio clip is only two and a half minutes long. The students can listen and follow along using the transcript. We play the audio clip twice and the students complete the fourth and final section of the worksheet. This last section asks the students to compare their experience working with the printed transcript and audio recording—did the audio recording provide any additional information or context, and were there unique challenges or benefits for either format?

Throughout this exercise we highlight the social nature of research and show the students how they can work with and learn from their classmates and peers, professors, and librarians and archivists as they work through their individual research projects. This is one of the benefits of having the students work in small groups and why we talk to the groups during their work time.

We always include at least ten minutes for discussion following in-class exercises like this one. Discussion with the full class not only allows us to check their comprehension of the exercise but also gives students another outlet for their analysis, in addition to the provided worksheet. We use the worksheet questions as a guide for the discussion but encourage follow-up questions and let the students lead where the discussion goes. Many times, when they first see the photographs of East Baltimore residents Lea Leach and Elizabeth O’Brien, the students are puzzled as to why an older woman is holding a doll. After hearing and reading their interview, they have witnessed their senses of humor, personalities, and playfulness. They also see what the people being interviewed look like, in the photographs. Their experience is enriched by the extra context and meaning that items from different series give each other.

Meeting Learning Objectives

The students demonstrate meeting the three target learning objectives from the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy in three ways: during their small group discussions, through their written responses on the provided worksheet, and in the larger class discussion that follows. They examine four primary sources and need to “read” several data types including typewritten text, handwritten text, a photograph, and an audio interview. They are not told the format of the items in advance and for each item they are asked to describe the format on their worksheet. Then they need to “identify and communicate information found in primary sources”; on the worksheet we ask the students to point out the creator of each item, the dates it was created, the original intended audience, and important names, keywords, and dates. This work not only helps the students identify “key components” but also places the items within the context of their research process.

Finally, we discuss the different research experiences that they had with the oral history transcript and the original audio recording. Although the content is the same, the students are easily able to identify advantages and disadvantages when comparing their experience reading the transcript and listening to the audio recording. We always emphasize that we are not advocating for use of one format over the other, but the students tend to have a very active discussion about which format they preferred and for what reasons.

Exercise Adjustments

This exercise was initially developed as a way to provide archival literacy instruction with collection items outside of the Special Collections reading room. Most archival literacy classes taught by Special Collections faculty are held in the Special Collections reading room so that the students can work directly with collection items, but sometimes this is not an option due to a scheduling conflict or a larger class size. We have developed two archival literacy exercises that can be completed in the academic classroom. For this exercise, we scanned the sample collection items and created packets of the worksheets and collection item facsimiles, and then digitized the audio oral history interview using available in-house equipment.

When UMBC closed during the COVID-19 quarantine in 2020, we developed an asynchronous, online LibGuide to replicate the general Special Collections class instruction.^[11] We also adapted some of our existing in-class exercises for remote learning, including five online and asynchronous document analysis exercises.^[12] To adapt this exercise we embedded the collection item files into the worksheet, which is available as a PDF or a Google Form. We did not include the audio oral history interview in the online component.

When we originally devised this exercise, we used the project proposal, a photograph of an East Baltimore resident, and an oral history of a different resident. While this approach is still successful, we decided to switch the items so that the photograph is of the same people who are interviewed in the oral history. This way, students can get a better understanding of the richness of the collection and have a clearer idea of how items from one series connect and relate to each other. Photographs may be in one series, but you can find information about the person depicted in the image in the oral histories as well. It shows the different representations present in the archival collection and illustrates how to make those connections physically and not just intellectually.

Future Iterations

For a 300- or 400-level class still somewhat new to archival research and hands-on work, we intend to dive deeper into archival literacy and relationships by doing more focused work with the finding aid to help students understand how the description in the finding aid relates to the actual items, and how archival description and organization differs from that of library books. Reviewing the series descriptions, we could present the class with items from Series I. Project (two photographs and accompanying captions), Series II. Book (funding request and project proposal), and Series V. Interviews (a transcript and recording of an oral history interview with the people depicted in the two photographs). We would show where they would find the particular item in the finding aid—how it only shows the folder information and not necessarily the item-level information—and how they would request that item with the collection number, box number, and folder number, demonstrating how the physical items are represented in the finding aid. We know from other scholars that it is difficult for beginning students to conceptualize how items are described in archival collections, so we would want to make a point of showing them a practical example.^[13]

We have successfully used this adapted exercise as a hands-on exercise for a small class of three students in the Special Collections reading room, working with the original collection materials and the collection finding aid. For a larger class to work with the original collection materials, we would need to identify several sets of corresponding photographs and oral history interviews.

Conclusion

Using archival collections is not always instinctual—it involves a set of skills that you must learn, frequently through hands-on experience. Beginning researchers face several challenges when confronting archival research for the first time. The reading room can feel daunting, using unfamiliar formats and one-of-a-kind materials can be unnerving, and understanding how archives are organized and described can seem complicated. This one-shot lesson helps ease the discomfort of conducting primary source research while providing a hands-on experience where students use surrogates of archival materials to make connections between different items within a collection. The class session and exercise provide a safe space where the students can talk to each other about what they learned, what they preferred, and to give and get feedback on the research process. It is also easily adaptable and suitable for different instruction platforms, whether in person, in a space other than the reading room, or as an online, asynchronous exercise. We hope that you try it out with your collections and see the difference that emphasizing relationships in archives makes in your instruction.

Archival collection items

1. Letter: Coll278_B2_F5-001.pdf , also available: https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/585/rec/1^[14]
2. Photos (rectos and versos): Coll278_B21_F23-009 & Coll278_B21_F23-009_v; Coll278_B21_F23-005 & Coll278_B21_F23-005_v, also available: https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/580/rec/7^[15]; https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/584/rec/8^[16]; https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/579/rec/1^[17]; https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/583/rec/2^[18]
3. Transcript: Coll278_B9_F36_Leach_OBrien.pdf, also available: https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/545/rec/10^[19]
4. Audio recording:  coll278_cassette32_side2_Leach_OBrien.mp3, also available: https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/586/rec/11^[20]

endnotes

[1] Sammie Morris, Lawrence J. Mykytiuk, and Sharon A. Weiner, “Archival Literacy for History Students: Identifying Faculty Expectations of Archival Research Skills,” The American Archivist 77, no. 2 (2014): 394–424, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.77.2.j270637g8q11p460.

[2] Morris, Mykytiuk, and Weiner, “Archival Literacy,” 394–424.

[3] “Instruction,” Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD), last modified September 2023, https://library.umbc.edu/specialcollections/visit/instruction/ archived October 15, 2023, at https://web.archive.org/web/20231015115300/https://library.umbc.edu/specialcollections/visit/instruction/

[4] “Interdisciplinary CoLab,” Interdisciplinary Activities Advisory Committee, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD), last modified October 2023, https://iaac.umbc.edu/co-lab/ archived October 2, 2023, at https://web.archive.org/web/20231002204104/https://iaac.umbc.edu/co-lab/

[5] Rachael Dreyer and Cinda Nofziger, “Reducing Barriers to Access in Archival and Special Collections Public Services,” Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice 9, no. 1 (2021): 37–48, http://palrap.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/palrap/article/view/237, archived July 24, 2024 at https://web.archive.org/web/20240724173606/http://palrap.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/palrap/article/view/237

[6] East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project collection, Collection 278, Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD).

[7] Linda G. Rich, Joan Clark Netherwood, and Elinor B. Cahn, Neighborhood, a State of Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

[8] Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education,” last modified January 2016, https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework, archived January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240105080500/https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework

[9] Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), “ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,” last modified October 2011, https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy archived January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20230822152859/https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy

[10] SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on the Development of Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy (JTF-PSL), “Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy,” last modified 2018, https://acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/guidelines-for-primary-source-literacy/ archived January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110192941/https://acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/guidelines-for-primary-source-literacy/

[11] “Visiting Special Collections,” Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD), last modified October 2022, https://lib.guides.umbc.edu/specialcollections archived June 9, 2023, at https://web.archive.org/web/20230609040413/https://lib.guides.umbc.edu/specialcollections

[12] “Document Analysis,” Special Collections, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Baltimore, MD), last modified October 2022, https://lib.guides.umbc.edu/specialcollections/documentanalysis archived September 30, 2023, at https://web.archive.org/web/20230930194959/https://lib.guides.umbc.edu/specialcollections/documentanalysis

[13] Elizabeth Yakel, “Listening to Users,” Archival Issues 26, no. 2 (2002): 111–27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41102044.

[14] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201633/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/585/rec/1

[15] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201532/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/580/rec/7

[16] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201509/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/584/rec/8

[17] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201259/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/579/rec/1

[18] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201557/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/583/rec/2

[19] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201230/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/545/rec/10

[20] Archived on January 10, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240110201703/https://contentdm.ad.umbc.edu/digital/collection/p16629coll12/id/586/rec/11

About the authors

name: Lindsy Loeper

institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Lindsey Loeper has served as the Reference and Instruction Archivist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) since 2019, following her role as the Special Collections Archivist since 2007. In this position she coordinates the Special Collections reading room, reference and researcher services, instruction and archival literacy, and serves as the primary student supervisor. She has previously written and presented on EAD-XML finding aids, participatory learning in archival literacy instruction, and team-based instruction portfolios. She has co-authored book chapters for Exploring Inclusive & Equitable Pedagogies: Creating Space for All Learners (ACRL, 2023), Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Academic Spaces (ACRL, 2023), and the Archives and Primary Source Handbook (New Prairie Press, 2024).

name: Susan Graham, MLS

Susan Graham, MLS (sgraha1@umbc.edu) is the special collections librarian at the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she works with the photography, popular culture, rare books, alternative press, comics, radical literature, and digital collections. She also teaches archival, visual, and information literacy in the Special Collections. She holds BAs in visual arts (concentration in photography) and anthropology from UMBC. She obtained her MLS in 2007 from the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a graduate assistant in the conservation lab and Preservation Department of the University of Maryland Libraries. She is the co-author with Lindsey Loeper of the chapters “Content and Context in a Single Image: Multi-format Analysis of Lewis Hine Photographs at UMBC” in Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces (Association of College and Research Libraries Press; 2024) and “A Participatory and Multi-Format Approach to Introducing Undergraduates to Archival Research” in Archives and Primary Source Handbook (New Prairie Press, estimated publication 2024); and the forthcoming chapter with Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci, “Building Digital Cruikshank: A Case Study in Special Collections Collaboration” in Students in the Archives (University of Illinois Press, estimated publication 2025). She has been the recipient and PI or Co-PI of several grants including NEH Preservation Assistance, Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) Preservation Needs Assessment, and Hrabowski Innovation.