'Find Ten Primary Sources by Tuesday': Tips for Teaching Students to Use Digital Archives
By Molly Strothmann, Social and Behavioral Sciences Reference Librarian, University of Oklahoma Libraries
Many of the topics librarians address in teaching
digital archives of historical documents are common to bibliographic
instruction of all electronic resources: explain the content and scope,
demonstrate searching and show how to print and save searches. Digital
archives, however, are sufficiently different from other search tools
because their instruction requires a more specialized approach. Several
suggestions for effectively teaching such primary source archives follow.
First, explain to your users how using a digital archive
will benefit them. While it's easy to spend the limited bibliographic
instruction time available on the what and how of
the resource—content and searching techniques—it's essential
to not neglect the all-important why.
What benefit does a primary source archive offer that
a database of journal articles does not? This is a vital information
literacy question, and your answer will depend, of course, on the expertise
of the users you are teaching. Although historians with extensive experience
using primary texts will find the value obvious, it's unlikely that
all beginning undergraduates will share that understanding.
Why should students burden themselves with original
historical documents—arcane and abstruse as they often are—when
they have textbooks available to summarize and interpret the same information?
Why would any professor demand such a thing? Teaching digital archives
affords you an important opportunity to explore these questions with
students. By encouraging an understanding of the value of primary sources—including
the potential for original discoveries in unabridged historical documents—users
often explore digital archives with a new pleasure in making the required
deductions and inferences on their own.
Next, explain the content of the archive—its
scope, dates of coverage, document types, etc.—as well as its
limitations. If an archive's content, for instance, is focused primarily
on a particular geographic region, make that clear to your users. Depending
on your students' information literacy, it may be helpful to outline
the differences between a historical archive and other electronic databases.
The reasons for this are twofold: first, it reinforces the distinctions
between available resources (primary versus secondary, journal articles
versus numerous document types), and, second, it allows you to explain
how the content will influence searching strategies.
Demonstrating a variety of searches will generally
be the core component of your instruction, during which you can further
clarify how searching digital archives differs from searching other
resources users already know. In addition to the ubiquitous keyword
searching, digital archives usually allow a number of other searching
and browsing techniques. Explain why those other options are helpful;
unlike keyword searching, the benefits of the more sophisticated options
are generally not obvious to students.
For example, if the archive allows one to browse by
genre, explain not only what the available document types actually mean,
but also why your students might want them. Beginning students might
know they're interested in religious documents, but do they know the
difference between Psalters and catechisms, or why they would want to
view either? They might understand the use of newspaper articles in
research but still need guidance on what they might learn from a classified
ad or a menu. Likewise, why would they want to differentiate among sources
according to any of the other characteristics provided? As you demonstrate
how to browse by date or place of publication, your students might need
you to elucidate what they can learn by limiting their searches to a
specific time or location.
Try to tailor the level of detail to the needs of
the audience. One always hesitates to inundate users with too many technicalities,
and the teaching of digital archives should be no exception. Your users
probably won't be terribly interested in details of the digitization
process or the OCR quality—except, of course, as it affects their
ability to search. They do need to know if they are likely to encounter
any discrepancies: will a keyword, full-text search for “Massachusetts”
produce documents from the Commonwealth of "Mafsachustts"?
If not, how should they search instead to be certain they are not excluding
relevant items?
Your answer will vary depending on the audience. Sometimes
demonstrating advanced search techniques like wildcards will be well
received. For novice searchers, showing browse techniques or explaining
citation text searching might be enough. For all users, though, do take
the time to explain procedural details—nearly everyone will want
to know how to print, zoom, save searches and email persistent links.
Finally, encourage your students to explore and experiment.
Digital archives are marvelous tools for creative discovery and engagement
with historical texts. By teaching your students to use them and urging
them to make some discoveries of their own, you give them a means to
enrich their understanding of history. Their insights may amaze them.
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