Papers Panel 9. Teaching/Learning

Abstract

“Career Development for New Professionals: Fellowships and Internships as Alternative Sites of Education”: Educational tracks for special collections librarians and archivists tend to separate the library and archives disciplines and encourage students to choose one or the other. This division stands in stark contrast to the realities of the workplace: information professionals working in special collections often must be proficient in practices from both archives and librarianship. Internships and early career professional opportunities, then, provide a real world counter to the library/archives educational divide. In her talk, Alison Clemens will discuss the utility and scope of current academic library archives fellowship programs and her tenure at the University of Houston, specifically, where she operated within a special collections departmental context to work with traditional historical materials, as well as multi-format records pertaining to the history of Houston hip hop. Alison will also discuss her experiences interning and working in an academic library, an archives, and a library and museum.; “Teach with us: managing the demand for classes through collaboration, transparency, and technology”: Engaging students with primary source materials in special collections is a function central to our missions, so it should be with excitement that we greet the rise of faculty interest in teaching with us. However, with more than 200 classes per year and promises of growth, Houghton Library staff began to wonder: can there be too much of a good thing? With the help of an Arcadia Foundation Library Innovation grant we designed and produced a Class Request Tool (CRT) to streamline, consolidate, and automate administration of special collections teaching. We propose to share our experiences of building the CRT, the impact it has (and promises to have) on our seminar program, as well as our commitment to making it freely available to the special collections community.; “Students as Producers: Connecting Strategic Archives Projects with Student Needs”: Students are frequently looking for challenging projects that will improve their job skills and add to their resumes. Library administration often has more ideas for improving access to resources than can be accomplished with limited manpower. Last year, Vanderbilt’s libraries looked closely at workflows for strategic projects to determine if there was a means for using student assistants to accomplish some of those goals. A trial run in spring 2012, hiring a senior to work with mentors to build an interactive exhibition of photographs documenting Appalachian strip mining communities, proved so successful that the program was expanded in 2013 with new students working on one or two semester finite, strategic projects within the libraries. This paper will look at the six projects completed in the first full year of Library Dean’s Fellows that run the gambit of strategic projects typically left on the “wish list.”