Readings: Week 3

I figured I would have a problem finding three articles that truly addressed information literacy or related issues from an archival perspective, because in many experience these are issues that archivists don’t really spend a lot of time talking about.

As it happened, I only actually found one article that explicitly discussed information literacy in the context of archival work, which was rather depressing. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, this article came straight from SI—it was written by Beth Yakel! In “Information Literacy for Primary Sources: Creating a New Paradigm for Archival Researcher Education,” (OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 20.2, 2004, pp. 61-64) she articulates many of the same questions that I have about what information literacy means for archives. As the title indicates, her primary concern is how archival users are educated. Yakel notes that in the shift to an “information literacy” paradigm in the broader library world, archivists’ main response was to focus on teaching how to evaluate and use primary sources. While this is commendable, and important, her broader point is basically that archivists still haven’t really figured out how to do education that focuses on how to actually use archives themselves—how to use the sorts of bibliographic and access tools that archives generally have, and to do it in a way that, in the language of this class, promotes transferability across different tools. In this way, she essentially argues that the shift to “information literacy” in the archival world is pretty incomplete. She particularly notes the ways that archival access systems are significantly different from tools used to access library materials, and that just because someone knows how to navigate library catalogs and databases doesn’t mean they know how to use finding aids and other more complicated tools that archives use.

I realized after reading this article that anything I read about archivists as educators more generally was going to touch on issues of information literacy, even if it didn’t use that terminology. One of the articles Yakel cited seemed useful in this regard. This was “The Archivist as Educator: Integrating Critical Thinking Skills into Historical Research,” by Marcus C. Robyns (The American Archivist 64.2, 2001, pp. 363-384). This article was an overview of research on efforts of archivists to offer education on how to use primary sources, and then offered a case study of doing just that. It seems to have been a pretty influential article and is one of the oldest that tackled this topic. The article did what it promised and did it well, and I was impressed with the degree to which instructional strategies we’re studying in class (the ADDIE model) were actually implemented by the archivists doing the education. Nevertheless, it never moves beyond “how to use primary sources” to “how to use archives,” which seems like the reverse way to go about things.

The final article I found was a qualitative study of archivists and special collections librarians who have been significantly involved in education efforts, analyzing interviews with them to see what could be learned and what areas were ripe for further study in their experiences. After I found the article, I discovered that it too was SI-generated as well, written by an SI-PhD student, Magia G. Krause. This was “’It Makes History Alive for Them’: the Role of Archivists and Special Collections Librarians in Instructing Undergraduates” (The Journal of Academic Librarianship 36.5, pp. 401–411). This article was really illuminating for a variety of reasons in that it shows how far instruction has come in the archival community and how far it has yet to go. A lot of the analysis comes back to the same issues that Beth Yakel discusses, especially when it comes to “navigating” through archival access tools. The archivists interviewed noted that they didn’t really have any formal training in how to do education, but their strategies for teaching and the experience they’d gained seemed to be working quite well. It was heartening to see that there are at least some archivists who are actively engaged in educational roles and take these roles very seriously.

In general, these articles reiterated what I already thought about how information literacy applies to archives, and made me realize several other important points as well. The big takeaways:

1. Archival research is hard! And it’s very different from regular library research, which many more people are used to doing.

2. The potential for educating users/patrons/researchers whatever on how to use archives is huge, and it’s not really being exploited.

3. Teaching people how to use primary sources is important, and good things are happening in that area. But the educational role of archivists should go beyond that.

4. Archivists really need to focus on education more! Librarians have been focusing on education for ages, and it’s about time we in the archival world caught up.