Educational Programs: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections

Educational Programs: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections explores how archivists and special collections librarians in organizations of different sizes and types have approached the challenges in creating effective educational programs to prepare the next generation of researchers and advocates for archives.

The case studies featured are:

1. Tablet and Codex, Side by Side: Pairing Rare Books and E-Books in the Special Collections Classroom
2. Fells, Fans and Fame: Acquiring a Collection of Personal Papers with the Goal of Engaging Primary School Children
3. Student Curators in the Archives: Class-Curated Exhibits in Academic Special Collections
4. A Win for All: Cultural Organizations Working With Colleges of Education
5. The Archive as Theory and Reality: Engaging with Students in Cultural and Critical Studies
6. Make Way for Learning: Using Literary Papers to Engage Elementary School Students
7. Archivists Teaching Teachers: The Archives Education Institute and K-12 Outreach
8. Animating Archives: Embedding Archival Materials (and Archivists) into Digital History Projects
9. “A Certain Kind of Seduction”: Integrating Archival Research into a First-Year Writing Curriculum
10. Not Just for Students: An Archives Workshop for Faculty
11. Web Archiving as Gateway: Teaching K-12 Students about Archival Concepts
12. Evocative Objects: Inspiring Art Students with Archives
13. Documenting and Sharing Instruction Practices: The story of TeachArchives.org

These case studies show a range of audiences and strategies, but all were selected because they demonstrate ideas that could be transferred into many other settings. They can serve as models, sources of inspiration, or starting points for new discussions. This volume will be useful to those working in archives and special collections as well as other cultural heritage organizations, and provides ideas ranging from those that require long-term planning and coordination to ones that could be more quickly implemented. The chapters also provide students and educators in archives, library, and public history graduate programs a resource for understanding the varieties of issues related to creating and implementing educational programs and how they can be addressed.

Kate Theimer is the author of the popular blog ArchivesNext and a frequent writer, speaker and commentator on issues related to the future of archives. She is the editor of the Rowman & Littlefield series, Innovative Practices for Archives & Special Collections, in which volumes on management, description, outreach, and reference and access were published in 2014. She is also the author of Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections and the editor of A Different Kind of Web: New Connections between Archives and Our Users, as well having contributed chapters to Many Happy Returns: Advocacy for Archives and Archivists, The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping, and the Encyclopedia of Archival Science. She has published articles in the American Archivist and the Journal of Digital Humanities.

Kate served on the Council of the Society of American Archivists from 2010 to 2013. Before starting her career as an independent writer and editor, she worked in the policy division of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. She holds an MSI with a specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan and an MA in art history from the University of Maryland.