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A growing body of literature has developed around critical archival instruction and archivists as educators. This development demonstrates the pedagogical evolution beyond show-and-tell sessions to critical approaches in archival instruction and specific standards in archival literacy. This article provides a cross-disciplinary discussion of an approach to archival instruction. Also included is a reimagined instruction session using a fragmentary collection from the Saint-Domingue/Haiti colonial administration. Stories of the enslaved are usually marked by death and brutality. But Haiti's is a story of triumph; though fleeting, a victory nonetheless. When instructors decolonize archival instruction, they bring the past into the present and the future. The Haitian Revolution was a large-scale revolt by enslaved Africans, and it was also directly connected to the expansion of the United States. Archival instructors should encourage students to reimagine the stories told from the Saint-Domingue colonial administration collection and from any colonial collections that may be under their care.

Virtual reality has recently transformed from a complex and expensive technology that was not a practical educational tool for archives to one that is easily affordable and easy to use in a variety of archival and special collection situations. This case study discusses the use of virtual reality technology to make a special collection at Emporia State University accessible 24/7 to a global audience of classrooms and individuals. Without complex coding or high cost overhead, the design of high-quality virtual reality experiences is now accessible to any organization and can be carried out by a student assistant or intern without causing a great amount of additional work for the busy archivist. The article discusses the design process for Emporia State's virtual reality experience for the May Massee Collection, along with challenges faced and outcomes of the project.

In academic libraries, information literacy traditionally focuses on instruction sessions and classes, activities in library learning spaces, and interactions with librarians. Often overlo...

Archivists have grappled with the processing and management challenges of congressional collections, but have spent less time exploring the use of these collections or their utility for research outside traditional topics and disciplines. This case study examines how two department projects produced new insights into congressional collections at an institution examining the importance of its political materials within its collection development policy. A survey of Native American collection materials led to a new understanding of the vast scholarly potential of congressional collections. Likewise, a general assessment of special collections revealed the popularity of congressional collections and the nature of their users. The article recommends using data-informed analysis and a better understanding of American political life for the future development and promotion of congressional collections within and outside the library.

Producing exhibits is an important form of scholarly and creative activity for academic librarians, archivists, and curators. While other forms of scholarship such as publishing a book or a peer-reviewed journal article are unquestionably accepted, exhibits are typically viewed as less intellectually rigorous. Through a literature review and a review of appointment, promotion, and tenure policies of selected Association of Research Libraries institutions with faculty status, this study seeks to uphold the creation of exhibits as a critical scholarly endeavor in the academic library and to provide guidance in evaluating exhibits as scholarship for library faculty, especially those working in archives and special collections. An overview of strategies for documentation and evaluation of exhibits as noteworthy scholarly communication is included. The recommendations provided can also assist nonacademic library and archival institutions to create high-quality exhibits of enduring value. Exhibits, digital humanities projects, and other forms of scholarship and creativity should be considered for promotion and tenure if presented in a compelling way to review communities.

Specialized primary source holdings, not only manuscripts and books but also audio and moving images, are difficult to discover, often requiring users to navigate multiple search tools. These discovery challenges arguably lead to underutilization of specialized primary source holdings in the higher education curriculum. Faculty often include collections in their syllabi only if they have a direct relationship with an archivist or know of specific relevant collections. Similarly, archivists have the most success matching collections to courses when they have built individual relationships with professors, becoming familiar with course content. Particularly at a time when academic libraries are under increasing pressure to link their holdings to student outcomes, a new discovery paradigm to augment personal relationships is needed. This article suggests a conceptual model that would provide a mix of traditional methods and new data mining tools to increase access points to curricular content. The a...

Sam Houston State University's Special Collections (SHSU) needed a way to expose finding aids to more users. Using social media to promote online awareness, while simultaneously improving search engine result rankings for the finding aids, seemed like a potential solution to this problem. With this goal in mind, SHSU researchers selected ten social media sites to test the assumption that posting information about finding aids to social media would be an effective marketing strategy. Following three months of posting information about finding aids while tracking user traffic to finding aids from social media sites, the research findings indicate that a combination of certain social media sites, in this case WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter, provides a better marketing strategy for getting the word out about archival collections. Additionally, the researchers confirm that posting to social media improves search engine result rankings for the finding aids. Overall, the SHSU researchers' results conc...

In 2005, with limited time, personnel, and financial resources, the staff of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries embarked on a planning project. Departmental staff identified key issues, conducted research on approaches to archival planning, and developed a process that required minimal time and money. A four-member task force assumed major responsibility, while a larger advisory committee reviewed and provided input to the plan. The task force adopted a mission statement for the archives and then tackled the tougher issues. The process educated staff and provided a plan for addressing sixteen key initiatives.

STEM undergraduates are an underserved population in archival outreach and instruction. This case study, conducted at New York University's Polytechnic School of Engineering using the Poly Archives and Special Collections at Bern Dibner Library, aims to demonstrate the benefits of integrating archival research into the under-graduate STEM curriculum. Archivist and faculty collaboration during a semester-long course not only resulted in student gains in archival intelligence, but also allowed students to practice critical thinking, reasoning about uncertainty, and working collaboratively in teams, all competencies recognized as integral to engineering design and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's guidelines for developing engineers for the twenty-first century.

Louisville, Kentucky, has a rich musical heritage, including an underground scene that influenced the sound of not only punk, indie, and hardcore, but also of popular music regionally, nationally, and internationally. In 2013, faced with the loss of several members of this scene over the course of twelve months, archivists in the University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections launched a project to document this important slice of Louisville's musical culture. The Louisville Underground Music Archive (LUMA) project successfully applies documentation strategy, paired with a strong community engagement component, to address the gap in the historical record related to this culture.

This case study documents how "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) was used to process a large twentieth-century manuscript collection at Humboldt State University Library Special Collections. HSU is a small, publicly funded repository quite different from those previously discussed in the MPLP literature. In contrast to many published examples of MPLP in practice, MPLP was not used at HSU to address an overwhelming backlog through widespread minimal processing or by adopting a baseline processing metric. Instead, MPLP served more broadly as a framework for deciding how to allocate available resources to best fulfill the repository's mission and benefit the end users of the collections. This case study supports a nuanced understanding of MPLP as a decision-making framework (not a set of processing techniques) and the potential value of MPLP to a wide range of archival scenarios.

The following case study examines three years' worth of data gathered by East Carolina University's Special Collections Division. The analysis focuses on the number of Unique Page Views (UPVs) reported by Google Analytics. A straightforward method to analyze this data is proposed, which ranks the frequency of UPVs received per year for each collection-level web page. The results indicate that the overall distribution of UPVs is heavily skewed toward the top 20%—or, top quintile—of online finding aids, which account for over 70% of the views. The term mass representation is introduced to refer to the disproportionate amount of visibility attained by the top quintile.

The increasing emphasis on attracting new users and the development of new technologies has created both opportunities and pressures for outreach within special collections. This study describes the results of a spring 2012 survey of social media outreach by repositories in the United States and Canada. The survey sought a broad understanding of social media adoption, management, content, and audiences, and looks at how effectively special collections use blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to connect with users. Survey findings indicate that social media use varies widely by platform and institution type, that a large majority of respondents believe that social media is an effective tool for outreach, and that self-reported numerical data cautiously supports that perception of success.

Collecting political papers related to women requires archivists to adopt a broader perspective than does collecting political papers in general. Special Collections at the University of Maryland, College Park, has collected the papers of women state legislators and other political materials related to women and women's issues for almost forty years and serves as one institutional example of documenting women in politics, more specifically women state legislators. This article identifies the unique challenges related to collecting the papers of women state legislators and provides general recommendations for developing basic collecting and selection criteria that incorporate critical thinking about women in elected office. A brief discussion about research use of the papers of women state legislators follows to illustrate how researchers utilize or neglect these collections for various reasons. Finally, this article demonstrates that even though women appear to be entering the political mainstream, archiv...

The impact of the Internet on archival repositories has been nothing short of revolutionary. Many repositories mount finding aids, online exhibitions, digital collections, and outreach initiatives on the Web. This study contends that we have much to learn about how well these new Web-based archival products meet the needs of users with disabilities. A literature review provides the background for the discussion, and a mixed-method study quantitatively and qualitatively examines the accessibility of a number of repository websites. The study first employed automated accessibility checkers to provide an overview of site accessibility, then used in-depth and hands-on content analysis of these sites for more detailed analysis. The author demonstrates that gauging website accessibility requires more than software-generated compliance reports. Evaluating website accessibility necessitates the same commitment to context, nuance, and user needs as does archivists' professional imperative to establish and maintain...

In the months leading up to the 2008 presidential election, a collection of organizational records held by the Special Collections Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago became a politically charged source of public scrutiny, and the department's role in providing access to the collection became one of the top library stories of the year. This case study relates how the department implemented new collections management policies and procedures and developed an attuned sensitivity to balancing donor obligations with researcher needs in the wake of a public relations crisis.

The twenty-first century provides new challenges and opportunities for professionals working in archives and special collections. One of the most exciting advances of the last decade has been the development of archival content management (ACM) systems that enable archivists to effectively manage information about their collections. Unfortunately, these systems have the unintended consequence of perpetuating the problem of backlogs by augmenting archivists' current fixation on processing as the solution. This article examines how business process management (BPM) can be used to better understand the archival business process and highlights the importance of taking a holistic approach to solving problems such as the backlog. It also looks at how concepts from BPM have the potential to improve ACM systems-particularly through the integration of workflow management.

On 26 September 2008, the University of Mississippi hosted the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. This case study describes the wide variety of programming and resources developed by the Archives and Special Collections to coincide with this historic occasion. It identifies objectives, outlines assessment, and discusses lessons learned that have implications for any large-scale programming efforts.

This article describes the planning, funding, methodology, and impact of a comprehensive survey of the physical condition and preservation needs of manuscript collections in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) unit of the Washington State University Libraries. MASC librarians and management determined that these collections, as well as MASC's historical photograph collections, should be systematically surveyed and assessed, so that a prioritized preservation treatment plan could be developed. MASC librarians designed and executed two separate surveys, one for photograph collections and one for manuscripts. The manuscript portion of the survey project, which supported the development of a comprehensive preservation treatment plan for processed manuscript collections, is the subject of this article.

In today's high-tech information environment, archivists and special collections librarians can use technology to enable the informational contents of rare and unique materials to transcend their physical boundaries. To explore this possibility, a team in the William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama sought to create access via the Internet to a small set of the Hoole Library's materials relevant to the famous Confederate raider, the CSS Alabama. The creation of the CSS Alabama Digital Collection served as a learning experience for the staff in the digital imaging of a wide variety of special collections materials and resulted in an electronic learning resource for students of all ages. To date, the website has logged over three thousand hits and has evoked highly positive responses from users, proving that the World Wide Web is an effective access medium for special collections materials.

This article reports and interprets data collected from a 1995 survey of special collections repositories at Association of Research Libraries institutions. It covers part one of the survey—current practices in preservation management. One hundred thirteen institutions represented by 170 archives/manuscripts repositories were asked to participate, of which 143 institutions, or 84.1%, did so. This is the second largest sample of archives' preservation activities ever gathered in the United States. The goals of the study were, first, to create a base of data on the development of archival preservation programs in research institutions and interpret that data and, second, to understand the extent to which the archives and library preservation departments interact in their common mission to ensure the availability of research materials to present and future generations. The study is unique in its investigation of the interrelationships between the archival repository's and the library's operational functions. This article recognizes that there is potential for a certain amount of preservation program development and integration between libraries and archives.

This case study applies the principles of General Diplomatics and the analysis of Special Diplomatics to modern documents at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Special Collections and University Archives and the University of Massachusetts Archives. The information obtained from the application of diplomatics was then compared to information gleaned from administrative sources, such as procedural manuals, to determine if diplomatics revealed sufficient new information about the files to justify such a detailed analysis of records. This case study revealed that the use of Special Diplomatics is not justified, but that the principles of General Diplomatics could be very useful to the modern archivist.

In 1995 the Yale University Library agreed to serve as an "early implementer" site for the FindAid DTD, now EAD. Three Yale manuscript repositories—the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Collections in the Divinity School Library, and the Manuscripts and Archives Department of Sterling Memorial Library, agreed to participate in this test phase by creating an integrated database of SGML-encoded finding aids, accessible via the World Wide Web. This case study describes the basic configuration of the Yale finding aid site, reviews the project's history and accomplishments since its inception in 1995, discusses the methods employed by the participating units to mark up legacy files and to integrate EAD into their routines for creating new finding aids, and suggests issues to be considered by others contemplating an SGML/EAD encoding project of their own.

Impressed by the potential EAD offers for intellectual access to manuscript collections via publication of their finding aids on the World Wide Web, the University of Vermont Libraries supported Special Collections in accumulating the tools and knowledge needed to convert printed inventories to Web-publishable documents. Staffed by one faculty member and two undergraduate students, all on a part-time basis, and with support from the library's systems staff, the EAD Project published its first inventory in March 1997. The project raised many questions, such as what constitutes accurate and appropriate use of EAD markup, what are the differences between publishing on paper and publishing the same information electronically, how to handle vocabulary control, and what is the most appropriate technology for electronic access to a variety of finding aid formats.

This essay reviews the experiences of Duke University's Special Collections Library in building major collections of advertising agency and trade organization archives. Duke has acquired extensive records of several still-existing agencies and organizations and has agreed contractually to service the collections for the records creators' business needs as well as to make large parts of the collections available for academic and general users. The author describes the agreements made with donors, the experiences of an out-of-house repository trying to build the collections, the management of a fee-based information service for business users, and outreach to the scholarly community. The efforts at Duke have been extremely successful, but not without pitfalls and opportunities to "learn the hard way".

This article addresses the many challenges the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), the nation's oldest scientific laboratory, faces in maintaining its records. One of the most serious problems is the number of archival repositories which collect LBL records. The author discusses what the implications are for LBL and the archival profession in having institutional records alienated, and what safeguards are in place to protect the identification and integrity of federal records, but how those safeguards fall short of the objective in actual practice. Lastly, this article discusses one possible model for LBL to work with other archival repositories, as they build special collections which include federal records of post-World War II science.

The Speeches series of the Senator Strom Thurmond Collection contains over 100 cubic feet of material spanning more than 50 years of public service. Because of the need for improved access, the Special Collections Unit and the Cataloging Unit of the Clemson University Libraries initiated the Thurmond Speeches Indexing Project, using the AMC MARC format to index the series. In this article, the authors describe the planning and implementation of the project and discuss some of the lessons learned, as well as future developments that might occur in the index.

Clemson University celebrated its centennial in 1988-89, an event that served as the catalyst for transforming the university's archives. The author discusses how the Special Collections department capitalized on centennial-related reference requests, publications and oral history projects, exhibits, and time capsule activities to reach new audiences and win support for program expansion. Important elements in the successful strengthening of this program were the support of key university administrators, start-up funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the identification of viable, high-visibility projects for its various constituencies.

Form, genre, and physical characteristics are basic elements in the description of archival material. Either alone or in combination with such other information as name of originating agency, subject, place, and date, they are a powerful retrieval tool that is only beginning to be exploited. The authors summarize the value of access by type of material, describe the vocabulary lists currently in use by archivists and other special collections communities, and outline benefits of distinguishing subject headings from form headings. They focus on catalog entries in systems using the USMARC bibliographic format, with special attention to retrieval issues in catalogs shared by archival, rare book, and visual material collections. Their conclusion calls for increased use of form headings and more cooperation to ensure effective access.

Special Collections and Archives at George Mason University (GMU) is one of many American archives responsible for a large collection of photographic negatives facing deterioration. At particular risk recently at GMU's Fenwick Library was the Library of Congress Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Collection. What follows is a discussion of GMU's experience in preserving the extensive volume of negatives in this collection and contracting with a firm that operates a LogEtronic camera, a photo-reduction mechanism capable of producing microfilm directly from photographic negatives. The Library of Congress FTP Collection has been on permanent loan from the Library of Congress (LC) since 1974. The Federal Theatre Project, one of the four Works Progress Administration (WPA) emergency relief programs during the Great Depression, provided work for unemployed theatre people. The collection consists mainly of the records of 3,129 theatrical productions and includes playscripts, set and costume designs, photographs, posters, production bulletins, playbills, research material, technical drawings, music, and some administrative material. The photographs represent a visual record of the casts, sets, costumes, personnel, and theaters of the FTP productions. The 9,000 negatives, predominantly on safety film and ranging in size from four by five inches to five by seven inches, with a handful of 35mm, were deteriorating alarmingly as they reached their fiftieth year in 1985. Neither GMU's library nor LC could undertake financially the task of duplicating the materials. Further, LC, as a federal agency, could not seek grant money from another federal agency such as the National Endowment for the Humanities or the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), seemingly the most promising sources for assistance. Therefore, GMU's Special Collections and Archives, with the support of LC, began the search for grant funding for a microfilm project. During a telephone inquiry to NHPRC, a grants analyst suggested that the microfilming be accomplished using a LogEtronic camera. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was already experiencing success in the use of a LogEtronic camera that conformed to its preservation standards. The camera, operational there since about 1978, was used for various purposes: to duplicate photographs that would be prohibitively expensive to reproduce through traditional means, to provide copies for researchers in order to avoid excessive handling of originals, to salvage images in deteriorating negatives, and to copy parts of large aerial imagery. Next, a representative from a company in nearby Maryland made a site visit, with examples of deteriorating negatives (before) and microfiche copies (after), demonstrating visually what the LogEtronic camera was capable of doing—not only copying the negative, but indeed enhancing it in the duplicate microfiche. It was especially evident that the image of even the deteriorated negatives could be enhanced and preserved by this method. Unfortunately, during the time it took to write the grant proposal the company went out of business. We were told about another company, then called Eikon Radiographics, now

Suggested strategies for archival outreach usually focus on promoting research use of the collections archivists maintain. Recent discussions on enhancing the profession's image among the public, however, also have concluded that archivists can and should encourage an appreciation of the curatorial methods they employ. Ironically, although archivists work hardest at marketing collections, it may be archival methods, particularly preservation skills, that most intrigue the general public. People who are wholly unfamiliar with the significance, usefulness, or even the meaning of archives often are extremely interested in learning how to manage and care for their own records. For instance, how many archivists, after trying to explain what they do for a living, have been greeted with the reply, "I have these old photographs in my atticwhat should I do with them?" The archivist's ability to satisfy such interests offers the opportunity to cultivate closer ties between the archival community and the rest of society. Archivists can exercise this type of outreach in a number of ways. Some of the more common include lectures or workshops on basic conservation practices, consultation services about establishing archives, and assistance in producing historical displays for various types of community institutions or groups. Another approach has been implemented recently at the University of Toledo with promising results. The university offers a public, noncredit minicourse on the recognition, appreciation, and basic care of historical records commonly found in the home. The course is sponsored by the university's Division of Continuing Education and is directed toward individuals seeking advice on how to properly maintain their own documents and memorabilia. Entitled "Historical Family Records: How to Recognize and Preserve," the class is taught by an archivist and carries a $35.00 standard continuing education fee (anyone over 60 years of age may enroll free). Meetings take place in the special collections and archives department of the university library, and classes are limited in size to twelve students. The