Projects / Papers

Communities of all kinds create records, but not all communities have traditionally been represented in institutional archives, nor included in the process of establishing and maintaining archival collections that document their experiences. This course draws from archival scholarship and recent case studies to introduce students to a range of models, including grassroots community archives, community-created archives that have been acquired by formal archival institutions, and partnerships between communities and archivists. Throughout the semester, this course engages with a range of topics relevant to community archives, including participatory and post-custodial archives, outreach and advocacy, grant writing and fundraising, and community-based, collaborative research methods.

Student teams focus on inquiry, through experiential learning, by identifying the information needs of the knowledge organization with which the team has been matched. Students are immersed in observing organizational behavior, collaborating in teams, and practicing soft skills necessary for communication and presentation. Team members gather information about the mission and culture of the organization by observing and listening to understand the context of the needs and challenges of the organization.

This course is organized in three parts and provides students with an introduction to the critical archival responsibilities of archival appraisal, description, and access. In the first section of the course, the course engage with archival appraisal. The archivist's process in determining continuing value affects all other archival functions and impacts individual, organizational, and societal memory. In the second section of this course, students engage with archival descriptive standard and archival management systems, as well as debates and theories in the representation of information. Finally, this course consider strategies for raising the level of access for an archival collection, paying particular attention to the creation of digital exhibits.

Introduction to the concepts and technologies around data, code, metadata, and databases. Basic data types and file formats, code to manipulate data, the generation of metadata about data, and modeling databases to persistently store and structure data.