Chair/Lead: Jillian Sparks

Members: Kristell Benson

The Problem

Students are often not aware of the resources available in Special Collections and the Archives that represent their own lived experiences.

Goals

Special Collections and Archives instruction and outreach aims to provide an inclusive environment for engaging with a variety of primary source materials in our collections and to encourage audiences to interrogate silences, gaps, contradictions, and evidence of power relationships in individual sources and among groups of sources. We strive to present diverse materials to students that are relevant to their course topics with the goal of not only sharing a range of historical perspectives, but also providing an opportunity for students to see their own experiences represented in the collections.

Actions Taken

1. Introduce more disciplines to our activist art collections
2. Incorporate the Bodman-Lang East Asia collection into Eurocentric topics, i.e. the narrative on the invention of printing
3. Provide space for students to discuss what voices are missing in the collections
4. Engage in conversations about access, processing, and collection policies in archives and special collections
5. Participate in professional learning opportunities to expand inclusive instruction and outreach with primary sources methodologies

Accomplishments so Far

1. We have worked with WRIT 110 classes for three years; classes with a majority of BIPOC and economically diverse students.  Student projects have included history harvests that have inspired our collection work, social justice issues using local context and sources, to using protest art from special Collections. 2. We work to engage students in learning about the work of librarians and archivists, discussing the inherent power archives and libraries hold in curating and describing their collections.  We discuss the issue of racist language that can be preserved in a controlled vocabulary and how to work with communities to describe materials that are later donated to an institution.
3. We educate students on the true origins of printing in China and to include examples of Western and Eastern manuscripts and codices when discussing book history. These resources are publicly available in Panopto and will be included on relevant special collections LibGuides.
4. Our exhibit program focuses on highlighting topics that align with current events and provide multiple perspectives. Our exhibit on Immigration tied together our activist art prints, historic immigration documents from NAHA, and current immigration materials from Government Documents. Our new gallery wall on level two provides an opportunity to showcase more from our activist art collections, including a current exhibit on women activists and the environment and criminal justice reform.