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

Participating Institutions

Events > Partnerships Workshop

PARTNERSHIPS WITH CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL SOCIETIES, MUSEUMS AND ARCHIVES

The Teagle Special Collections Project / Workshop Three

Peabody Museum, Yale University
June 16, 2006

Utilizing Connecticut Special Collections in Historical Societies and Museums
The Repository Perspective

Llyn Kaimowitz

During the past few weeks, I’ve been watching something extraordinary on my computer monitor. Through the HawkCam at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I’ve been able to spy on the growth of two baby red tailed hawks, in a nest on a building window ledge, from adorable tiny fuzzy balls to full-grown soaring hunters. I watched as the parents first nurtured the little ones, bringing tasty mice and staying with the babies throughout the day and night. Later, as the babies neared maturity, however, the parents withheld food and their presence in the nest, keeping watch from nearby trees, waiting for the babies to become hungry enough to take their first awkward glides off the building ledge as fledglings. Now the babies fly easily around the campus, learning to hunt for themselves.

This is a good metaphor for what we’re here to discuss today, pushing college students out of the campus nest so that they can forage for information on their own. In their high school and perhaps the early college semesters, students stay in their comfort zone of the school library with a diet of secondary source material where a scholar has located the primary source information, digested it, and given the reader a conclusion. The wise college, however, makes sure that at a certain point it boots the student out of the nest and into the real world – other community institutions and their primary sources – so that the student can learn to digest for himself or herself. It’s this fledgling process that we are discussing here today.

For my task of speaking about the role of repositories in helping students to leave their own campus behind to do original research on their own, I looked back to my own experience as a history major. As an undergrad, I tackled the history of a portion of the town in which I grew up, an area that had been first a Native American site, then an early Northwest Territory village with a truly fascinating but forgotten Mormon church past. To conduct my research, I had to go to the county courthouse in another city, locate the County Clerk’s early maps room, and find out the map reproduction options. Later, I had to learn about the Mormon church archives in Utah and arrange for reproductions of old journal entries to be sent to me. I also needed to screw up my courage and call a writer at the newspaper to quiz him about his knowledge of local history. This wasn’t just a history paper, it was boot camp for adulthood.

I realized that the importance and utility of this type of research is demonstrated through my actions last year. In West Hartford, the town council had approved construction of a major retail shopping area in the town center. A vote for approval of re-zoning and transfer of town properties to the developer was held, later followed by a referendum instituted by residents unhappy with the plan’s provisions. Though we were plied weekly with multiple publicity mailings from all the various interested parties, these mailings rarely had much content and certainly didn’t contain the full story. Needing more data, I knew where to find the original set of documents relating to the town’s agreements, I read them all, and I drew my own conclusions about the feasibility of the planning, enabling me to be an informed voter. Few other people I talked to knew how to access the information or had the courage to wade through the records, but then, none of these people have admitted to having any serious research training in college of the type we’re discussing today. I’m firmly convinced that sending students out to alien territory to gather data and digest it is extremely important for creating full-fledged critical and questioning citizens of the future. Whether your school has abundant documentary resources of its own or not, getting the kids off campus is the kindest thing you can do for them.

So, the assigned topic for this joint session with Dr. Walsh was framed as “creating partnerships or relationships that libraries and colleges or universities can build with local organizations such as historical societies to enrich teaching and learning and access to special resources that the campus doesn’t have.” In looking at this topic, I have drawn from both my own experiences as a history major and my experience of nearly thirty years of working with and advising various historical societies, libraries, government document repositories, corporate archives, and museums. In putting together these thoughts and suggestions, keep in mind that I’m only starting the discussion here. This isn’t exhaustive, and surely you will have additional ideas that need to be discussed. This is the jump off point, and I look to you to keep the ideas rolling during the discussion period that follows.

One approach to the topic is the faculty perspective, to look at how students are prepared by professors to go out into the community to conduct research. Dr. Andrew Walsh gave us an interesting look at how he manages this process, and Trinity College has a strong program for supporting this type of education. It’s clearly an individualized approach, working one-on-one with students, addressing their specific concerns as they arise.

Another approach is to look from the point of view of repositories and to ask ourselves what we need professors and students to know in order to make research more profitable, what we can do ourselves to inform students in advance.

When I reflect on my student research days, I recall many anxieties. One, for example, was the stress of trying to find a research topic that interested me, met the course requirements, was the right size project, and wasn’t written about many times already. Another anxiety when using a repository in a strange city was finding its location, finding affordable parking, and not making a fool of myself while asking for documents. The cost of reproductions turned out to be a real concern, too. Gosh – twenty-five cents a page for photocopying, one dollar a page for oversize maps, and fifteen to twenty five dollars for a copy of a photograph! Who did these curators and public clerks think I was?

I find that many of the same anxieties today continue to beset students who stray off their campus. Unfortunately, there is no one fountain of information for students that will serve as a panic-calming resource. Here, however, is my list of things that I, as a representative of a repository of historical materials, would like the professor and student to know about the research process.

Let’s start with Internet research, the easiest way for a student to leave behind familiar campus resources and venture out into the world. My first observation about students is that not all of them know as much about Internet research as the news media would lead one to believe. I’ve spent a lot of time in the classroom recently myself as a student engaged in research at both the undergrad and graduate levels. At one school, I found that, for many students, Internet skills extended little further than how to find the infamous Paris Hilton video on-line, download new cell phone ring tones, or maybe, just maybe, access the URL for Wikipedia. When glitches occurred in accessing URLs given out by the professor, many students lacked the skills to find those pages in other ways or to move onto other pages at the site. Professors should make sure that students have taken courses on campus in basic web research techniques.

When students use the Internet to begin their hunt for a research topic, professors might wish to steer them immediately towards certain sites. One useful site is Connecticut History On-Line, a collaborative project of the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at UConn, Mystic Seaport, and the New Haven Colony Historical Society. It’s a rich database of historical materials and can be an excellent starting point for generating a research topic.

Another wonderful resource on-line is the database of repositories of primary sources, created by the University of Idaho Special Collections and Archives. It contains 49 listings for repositories in Connecticut, linking directly to each organization’s own special collections webpage.

Yet, even these resources fail to direct researchers to the majority of repositories in Connecticut. Students need additional resources for locating potential research materials. The phonebook comes up short; the SBC yellow pages for Hartford lists only 7 organizations under “Historical Organizations and Places.” It lists 63 places under “Museums,” but many of these are children’s museums or other sites not suited to research, and, of course, none of these listings have helpful descriptions.

Students, then, need to be resourceful and call upon people who might have a wide knowledge of the state’s repositories. For example, Mark Jones, State Archivist at the Connecticut State Archives, is one excellent starting point for knowledge about the state’s local historical society collections. Eunice DiBella, the State’s Public Records Administrator, is a good choice for advice on research in state or local government records. And don’t overlook less orthodox sources of information. For example, the Connecticut AAA book lists dozens of historical organizations by location, describes the historical range of the organization, the hours of access, directions for travel, and gives a phone number. Students can easily call and inquire about any library holdings they might have. What’s not to like!

When students have generated a possible topic and a repository to visit, the next thing that we want them to know is that, before students come for their first visit, they ought to coordinate it with the curator in advance. Many repositories are small and have only one staff member who may need to close up for lunch or leave on time at the end of the day. Repositories may close sometimes for special circumstances. Small repositories or government offices can’t be open during the same liberal schedule of hours that students would find back at their campus library. Key people who know a collection best may take time off or sick leave. Anticipation of potential schedule hold-ups is important. When students don’t check these things out in advance and then find themselves up a creek, they occasionally get testy. So professors should encourage students to begin their research at an outside repository with a phone call. During this call, curators can tell new patrons how much time to allow for “housekeeping” duties such as the interview, reading the security regulations, getting a user card, or whatever.

It’s smart for repositories to communicate expectations for researchers up front, before researchers arrive. Of course, most repositories are friendly and ready to help, but sometimes security or conservation measures can seem daunting or frustrating to students. I’ve heard verbal altercations started by students who were upset that they couldn’t have their notebook at the worktable, and I’ve seen students surreptitiously get out pens when the curator wasn’t looking. Professors could help by acquainting students with the reasons for security and conservation measures in advance. In addition, repositories might consider including a page on their website that clearly lists their rules and expectations for visiting researchers, as well as lists of research collections, even if you can provide only a brief description of each.

Repository curators would also like students to be clear on the parameters of their research project at the beginning of research and be able to tell the repository curator the details. Students need to understand the importance of the reference interview that a curator conducts with any new researcher and cooperate fully. I have sometimes seen interviews where students are secretive or badly prepared to answer basic questions.

Using original documents takes time and patience. Repositories would like professors to make sure that students understand that they should start their research early in the semester. Too often students become frantic toward the end of the semester and must take research short cuts, preventing themselves from experiencing as rewarding a research project as they could have. They also may not fully realize how time consuming it can be to work with primary sources, where there are no organized chapters or conclusions, and where time is needed to digest data and make connections. Often students don’t have all of the background knowledge they need to put their research in context, and they must spend considerable research time working with traditional secondary library materials while trying to understand their primary sources. Professors should suggest to all students that they seek out courses from campus reference librarians on library research skills in order to speed up their overall research.

The charges for duplication of research materials can still be a problem for students. They should understand in advance that there will be charges for copying – if the materials are capable of being copied, that is. Of course, students can avoid excessive charges simply by allowing enough time to work with the collection on-site and to take notes, rather than copying everything to take back to the campus, another reason to stress the early start of research.

Finally, in considering the partnership of repositories and professors, I think that many curators would like to remind professors that they can make curators their teaching partners. Though the backgrounds of curators vary widely, depending on the type of repository and its funding, most curators have in-depth knowledge of their collections’ subjects that can greatly enable and enrich a student’s work. They also have specialized research aids and reference works, and the familiarity with these resources to use them effectively. Professors can communicate a respect for curatorial knowledge to their students and encourage students to use curators as another knowledge resource.

So, Andrew Walsh presented the faculty point of view regarding the partnership between the academic world and repositories outside of one’s own campus. I’ve suggested some ideas for locating repositories and attempted to represent the repository’s viewpoint on the partnership. How, though, can we get a more active interaction between the two, especially when people have so little time or money to enact new ventures?

One possibility is to make use of Yale’s Teagle project website to post information. We could begin by compiling a list of the various problems that might impede a student’s quest for off-campus research opportunities. This could then be transformed into a template for each repository to use in describing access to its materials. The completed descriptions could be posted on the Teagle website as a sort of research Rolodex.

These descriptive pages could suggest that researchers call in advance, and it could set out specific time parameters for research, such as “researchers must arrive at least one hour before closing time.” Repository descriptions could give an advance indication of what practices to expect. Curators could prepare one-line descriptions of their collections for inclusion on the description template. A schedule of reproduction charges could be included, as well.

Unfortunately, however, publicizing the site and keeping it in the professorial mind is easier discussed than done. To see real increases in usage by students, repositories may want to create mailing lists of faculty in local schools and send them a newsletter at the beginning of each semester that highlights their research holdings. Perhaps repositories can form regional collaborative groups to do this, sharing the work and the costs. These notices should also be sent to reference librarians and special collections curators at those local campuses. Website URLs, details on hours, security and conservation information, and other useful information can be shared easily this way.

Those are my suggestions for building the academic and repository partnership. Now let us take some time to discuss yours.