" To enhance undergraduate learning in the liberal arts by promoting use of library special collections"

Participating Institutions

Teagle Project

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This project began with the hypothesis that academic institutions and their libraries are ready to make significant progress in bringing special collections into the classroom - or in taking students to special collections. That is to say, we believed that introducing undergraduate students to special collections in a structured learning environment could enhance educational outcomes in numerous ways.

We formed a coalition of nine Connecticut institutions and set out to explore interaction among those institutions and engagement with special collections housed not only in those institutions but in other cultural establishments in the state. The coalition included a range of public and private institutions, from community colleges to internationally renowned universities. We paid particular attention to non-print media, including oral history and visual media.

Our work proceeded by developing some specific resources of information and expertise for participants to use; by designing and conducting daylong workshops on topics where participants agreed that opportunity was real but impeded by the lack of information; by a series of site visits designed to measure progress and opportunities at participating institutions; and by designing and implementing assessment techniques, both to measure the outcome of this project and also to assist teachers and institutions who would follow in this direction when they come to review the outcomes of special collections-based learning.

We concluded that there are significant opportunities more or less ready to hand in Connecticut and, by extension, in other comparable regions, on which faculty in institutions of many kinds can draw. Students can gain experience in handling and studying materials, in forming and pursuing research questions based on those materials, and in understanding the importance of the material artifacts of information for the creation and preservation of valuable knowledge. The learning environment in which students encounter these materials, moreover, strongly reinforces valuable forms of active, research-based learning. We explored as well the constraints under which these opportunities are encountered, including, not surprisingly, multiple forms of support - not all of them by any means notably expensive, but all of them real in terms of both dollars and time - that faculty and librarians need in order to be actively engaged in the practices we have studied. In short, in order for special collections to become a meaningful part of the classroom experience, incentives (in the form of release time, librarian and other support, training, academic reward, and so on) need to be created, most often at institutions which have no way to provide these.

The report ends with suggestions of ways in which this project itself could be carried forward, particularly for making its possibilities and conclusions more widely known.

9-26-06