Assignments

The following assignments are coming your way:

Finding aid comparison: Due Feb. 13

Put yourself in the position of a researcher — an academic historian, say — who is in the early stages of a research project. In threshing the web to find manuscript collections that may be of use you soon discover that while standards such as EAD and DACS are now widely used, they do not lead to uniformity.

In the course of your research, you have located finding aids for five collections that may be of interest, but you feel the need to communicate with THOSE people — the archivists — to convey your thoughts on how effective their finding aids are at meeting your research needs. In five pages or less, consider the following questions and, in the end, identify one finding aid (with or without modification) as your beau ideal:

Does the finding aid convey all the information necessary for you to assess whether you might wish to use this collection?

Is any critical information lacking? Are there parts of the finding aid that could be usefully expanded? Are there parts that could be reduced? Would a MARC record in an OPAC suffice? Defend your conclusions!

How effective is the design of the finding aid at conveying the information? What do you like and dislike about the display? In what ways does the display enhance or detract from your ability to locate the information you need?

Is a finding aid the best way to inform you about the contents of the collection or would something else do better?

What other considerations should archivists take into account when thinking about the efficacy of their finding aids?

The following be ye pigeons:

Internship

Students will complete a sixty (60) hour internship at an archival institution. Projects are expected to be more advanced than those undertaken in LIS 438, and may include preparing online finding aids or constructing digital collections.

Wk 2: Feb. 6-9 Review the list of available internships posted on the Archives site and select three. The site will open on Feb. 6 at 9:00 am. It will close on Feb. 9 at noon.
Wk 3: Feb. 10-12 Internship site is closed. Student’s assigned to internships by GSLIS faculty. Students will be notified of their assignments and internship assignments are posted on Archives VISTA. Internship supervisors will be notified of their interns. Note that your assignment to a site is not necessarily a guarantee of the internships: the site supervisor must still meet with you and give approval.
Wk 3: Feb. 12 Students and site supervisors notified of internship assignments. Upon notification, students should contact their site supervisors to set up interviews.
Wk 4: Feb. 21 After meeting with your supervisor and agreeing on a project, submit a two to three paragraph project proposal to me.
Wk 14: May 2 Submit the following:
  1. Any work you may have produced during the internship (e.g. finding aids, guides)
  2. A two page (2p.) summary of what you did for your internship and what experience you gained
  3. A two page (2p.) description of the archives that hosted your internship, describing where it sits within its institution, its organization and staff, and a broad overview of its holdings and the services it provides.
Outreach assessment: Due Feb. 20

Write a five page (5p.) paper analyzing the online face of any one of the following collections:

Address the following questions:

  • How well does the archive help novice users learn about the archive, how it works, and what materials it houses?
  • What audience does the archive serve and how well does it provide services for that audience? What about other audiences?
  • How well does the archive publicize its collections and does it present these in a way that will spark the interest of its core audience?
  • How successful is the archive in reaching out to its users?
  • What stands out in the archive’s approach to meeting the needs of its users?

In class, you will be asked to give a five minute presentation, not one second more, on your conclusions.

Description project

Using the finding aid provided

  1. Apply the DACS descriptive standard: Due date: Week 9, Mar. 20
  2. Encode the finding aid in EAD: Due date: Week 10, Apr. 10
Research paper. Proposal due: Mar. 6; Paper due: May 8

In many institutions, archivists are expected to publish and in the future, this expectation is likely only to increase. This is your opportunity to make an effort toward writing a publishable paper on some aspect of archival access and use. This may entail a research project of some sort, an examination of some aspect of archival theory, issues in electronic records management, or anything else that fits within the scope of the course.

Your paper should be approximately fifteen page (15p.) research paper on some aspect of archival use and access. The paper must represent your own thinking on the subject and must demonstrate your familiarity with the relevant literature, and above all, it should entail original thought and analysis and it should be written with the intention of publication.

You are expected to conform to a standard citation and style manual such as the Chicago Manual of Style. Your grade will be based on the quality of the ideas, the quality and persuasiveness of the writing, and your presentation.

Presentation Due: May 8

In the last session of the term, we will organize ourselves like a miniature professional meeting, with each of us responsible for three parts of the day:

  1. The standard talk at a professional meeting is fifteen minutes, no longer, no less. Each participant in the class will give a fifteen minute presentation based on your research paper, highlighting the relevant professional issues and your conclusions.
  2. At many meetings, each talk (or panel of talks) is followed by formal comments by someone in the know. Each of you will provide that commentary for one of your peer’s papers — semi-formally to keep the pressure low.
  3. After the commentary, all of us will take part in an open discussion.

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