In the 2013 spring semester, the Albert Gore Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University uploaded material to Historypin, a crowdsource platform for historical materials. Instead of populating the center’s profile with collection highlights selected by staff, the students of Dr. Mary Hoffschwelle’s Tennessee History Honors course created collections and a campus tour. Dr. Hoffschwelle’s desire to engage her undergraduate students in history, as well as to have them understand and work with primary sources, equally matched University Archivist Donna Baker’s desire to promote and make collections more accessible. This led to a continuation of the project in subsequent Tennessee History Honors courses. For three semesters, a team combined of Dr. Hoffschwelle, Ms. Baker, and graduate assistants have helped undergraduates create “collections” on various subjects, from Albert Gore, Sr. to campus history to Tennessee Walking Horses, utilizing only the Center’s holdings. The project has changed in that time, evolving in scope and expanding in creativity of collection themes. It has also demonstrated a greater need for information literacy instruction for some students, not to mention the need to address transliteracy challenges. So while this presentation is on the process behind and successes of this collaboration, it must also address questions of assessment, challenges regarding information literacy skills, navigating technology skills, and how to weigh the benefits of labor-intensive projects. It is a presentation about lessons learned, small successes, and thinking more broadly on the use and purpose of archival holdings.
The Queer Studies program at Denison University has a history that includes: inception in 2000, a close call with dissolution in 2009, and the current re-emergence with many highly engaged students and faculty contributing to the thriving program.
In 2014, a grant was awarded to create a digital environment for the Queer Studies program, establishing a repository for institutional documents, class projects, faculty work, and other materials relating to the historical and contemporary LGBTQ climate at Denison. The project began by collecting interviews with faculty who had been involved in the development of the Queer Studies concentration. These interviews have proven to be an important structural element in thinking about the online presence. They give a contextual framework to the institutional materials and act as an organic timeline, by describing actual events and attitudes from a personal point of view.
Thus far the project has included the collection of interviews by founding Queer Studies faculty and students conducted by faculty member; materials digitized by the Queer Studies Student Fellow; development, interface and design of the site overseen by lead librarian. The ways in which these various strands have informed each other, and also changed throughout this process have been surprising. The interactions between the elements of technology and history will be reflected upon by all three members of the team, as well as how each portion of the project has organically informed the other in the creation of the final product.
