I'm finding that our discussion in class last week triggered a lot of the same thoughts I had after doing the readings the first two weeks, considering issues of information literacy and the difficulty in teaching well. On that front I don't have a lot more to say.
However, I did think a lot about how all this relates to my areas of interest and my work as (hopefully) a future archivist, which is somewhat of a different focus from most of the rest of the class. The archives field has always learned a lot from and had a lot to learn from librarianship, and this area is certainly no exception.
One thing that struck me in our discussion was that archivists don't often think of themselves as educators, and they rarely think of education as an important part of their work. At the same time, we often bemoan lack of public knowledge of or interest in archives. Perhaps the first has something to do with the second? There is clearly a lot of education that archivists could be doing, especially in areas related to how to use and evaluate primary sources (our niche within the world of information literacy, I'd think) and simply when trying to get people to use our resources! It's especially worth noting that most archives are situated within larger institutions that do have a significant focus on instruction, such as academic (and sometimes even public) libraries and museums. But archivists rarely play an educational role, which is surely to the detriment of their institutions and their patrons. There's a lot of work to be done here, and there probably should be more discussion in the archival community about the roles we could play as educators.
As we talked about screencasts, I thought specifically about the ways they would or wouldn't be useful educational tools for archivists specifically. One thing about archives is that most archives have far fewer online resources available than libraries-- the majority of their collections still have to be accessed "on-site." But usually most archives have pretty useful on-line tools for finding out about their collections-- what they are, what's in them, what's useful for different areas of research, etc. Often, though, these tools are pretty complicated; most repositories don't have a single online "place" that tells you everything about their collections. Some things may be in a library catalog, but many may not be. Some collections may have complete and beautiful finding aids online, some may just have briefer listings. These different tools may exist in several different parts of a website, especially if the archive is connected to a larger institution like an academic library. And there are always going to be some things that don't have any online representation, that actually requiring sending an email to an archivist to find out about. The best method of looking for archival content will probably depend on your topic and your end goal. None of this even gets into how to look for and use archival content that has been digitized and is actually available online, which can also be difficult. Some institutions have a lot more content online than their users even realize, because it's not easy to find!
In short, using archives is complicated business, much more complicated than using most libraries. But it's a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to online tools. It's hard to tell, though, if people actually know how to use these tools very well. I would imagine that a lot of the time they don't. I kept pondering whether screencasts might be part of the solution to this problem. I'm still not sure. You could definitely do a screencast that explains the best ways to navigate through a database of finding aids, for example, or how to use the library's catalog to specifically look for archival collections. You could do a screencast that shows how to navigate your institution's portal for access to digitized materials. But getting your users (libraries talk about patrons, archives often say "researchers" instead, so I'm splitting the difference and going with "users" here) to actually utilize these tools seems even harder than it is for libraries. This is all complicated a lot by the types of users that archives have, and the preconceptions about those types of users (PhD-level researchers, undergraduates using the archives just because they have to for a class, genealogists) and what those capabilities are or aren't. I realize these are problems for libraries too, but my perception is that in general libraries have been much better at being open and accommodating to new user bases over time, and archives have struggled with this a lot.
So I don't have any clear answers, but a lot of thoughts (most of which I still can't get into clear enough form to articulate well here) about how archivists can come to play more of an educational role, and in this instance how screencasts could maybe be part of that.
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