Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University, a private university, founded in 1831, has an enrollment of around 2,700 students, mainly undergraduates. The University has a mission in which outreach to the local community is an important element.

The TEAGLE Interview

The interview for the TEAGLE project took place on January 30, 2006. The following library staff and faculty participated in the interview:

1. Suzy Taraba, Head, Special Collections and Archives and University Archivist
2. Valerie Gillispie, Assistant University Archivist
3. Tricia Hill, Professor of American Studies and History
4. Indira Karamcheti, Associate Professor of English and American Studies
5. Ron Schatz, Professor of History

Available local special collections

Wesleyan University holds several special collections around the following topics:

• History of the book
• Middletown and local history resources
• History of the university (archives)
• Collection of Legal Change
• World Music Archives
• Wesleyan Cinema Archives
• Davidson Art Center
• Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies

Some of these are part of the library; some are managed separately, like the Cinema Archives and the Davison Art Center. The latter offers an extensive educational program and support tools for teachers (see http://www.wesleyan.edu/dac/coll/prints.html ). This interview focuses on the collections that are under the library's care.

The Library's Special Collections & Archives holdings, in addition to printed books and periodicals, include pamphlet collections, early newspapers, broadsides, photographs, prints, maps, artifacts, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera of all kinds. The library holdings in this category number about 20,000. While some have been purchased with funds provided for specific purposes, most have come as gifts or bequests from alumni and friends of the University over the past 160 years.

At the Olin Library, the Davison Rare Book Room holds part of the special collection, and serves as one of the reading rooms.

The use of the Special Collections and Archives

Suzy Taraba, Head of Special Collections and Archives at Wesleyan, is happy with the level of use that faculty make of the materials. Around 50 faculty (out of 350, many of whom are not teaching social sciences or humanities) send their classes in on a regular basis for demonstrations and use of primary sources. When she arrived at Wesleyan University, she started encouraging the use of special collections by studying the curriculum catalog and sending letters to faculty members, inviting them to make specific uses of Wesleyan's special collections in the courses they would be teaching in the coming semester. This marketing was successful and over time, became obsolete (except for new faculty members of course).

The ambition for the future is to make the same happen for the University's archives. Although the archives serve many purposes besides a role in undergraduate learning, it is believed there are opportunities in this area.

The collections are open to students of other schools, and to the general public. Special Collections receives several classes each year. Some challenges with opening up such collections to wider use include the issue of use versus preservation, scheduling of the use of rare book rooms, and staffing. The philosophy of the library is based on the idea that a balance has to be found between preserving the materials and having them available for users.

Library staff and faculty would advise students on the use of other, locally available special collections, like those of historical societies, or Yale University.

Selected examples of using primary sources in undergraduate teaching

Faculty would bring in seminar sized groups (up to 20 students) into the Davison Room, where relevant materials would be displayed. Students might do the "mystery book" exercise, in which they would answer from specific questions about a book or object to more general ones, showing them how they can learn to evaluate an item. The questions would touch upon the content and physical appearance of the item. An example of a class for which the exercise was used, is a seminar, taught by Tricia Hill on 19th century utopian communities.

In the course English201, taught by Indira Karamcheti, students are shown a wide range of materials from different time periods and starting from early book production. Goal is for students to learn about how books are produced, what kinds of books are preserved, etc., whereby the historic content of the documents is placed within a specific time and place in history. The same approach might be found in courses on the development of Higher Education and the History of New England.

In the 'Othello assignment', students use editions of the work to research text changes over time. For these classes, some of the items are restored to be able to withstand intensive handling by students.

In some cases, students return after these sessions to use special collections for their honors thesis, or they would work on assignments using primary materials, like digitized renaissance maps. This digitization was done in order to increase the accessibility of the maps, in close collaboration between Indira Karamcheti and Special Collections & Archives.

Ron…. His students use the archives at Wesleyan for his course on the history of Middletown and Wesleyan University.

The added value of using primary materials in teaching

The attending faculty are of the opinion that nothing compares to conducting research with original items, preferably the originals: students are able to act like historians, they might be touched by the 'presence' of a historical person in manuscripts, learn about class structure and society in a particular point in time, and learn about books as objects of practical value. Research, conducted by using secondary studies will let students use other authorities on a subject, but denies them the thrill of becoming an authority themselves, of constructing an original argument. Ron…. emphasizes in his classes the use that other people in the future might make of the work of the students and teaches the students the importance of this 'groundwork'.

Assessment of student learning

Assessment of student learning is mostly anecdotal. As measure of success are mentioned the number of students that return to the library to use special collections, or the level of use of the collections by faculty.

How can a project like the Teagle Project help?

The attending faculty agree that the most useful aspect of a project such as the Teagle Project would be to provide better insight in what collections are available outside the university, and possibly further the accessibility of those. All agree that cataloging of materials is the number one need when talking about using special collections in teaching.

Contacts

Olin Memorial Library, 252 Church Street, Middletown CT 06459-0108

Suzy Taraba, Head of Special Collections and University Archivist
(860/685-3375,
staraba@wesleyan.edu