Hi all,
Wow! This has turned into something very substantial, and that maybe indicates how important the topic is, and that it is a topic where sharing ideas is really useful.
For my own part, i'm going to create some pages reflecting a good deal of the great advice that has been given. It was going to be one fairly brief page, but now its becoming a really long FAQ! I think that this might be the best option - to put it in the form of questions that students might ask. I'll also add a list of resources for the various books, blogs and tutorials people have referred to.
I think that our focus, on the Archives Hub, will continue to be around discovery, but if I can provide an FAQ answering questions such as the difference between primary and secondary sources and questions around trust, interpretation, size of archive collections, etc. it might be quite useful at least as a starting point. But I want to point off to all the resources that are already out there rather than duplicate effort.
I'll share it when I've knocked it into decent shape - there's lots of information to think about integrating into it!
cheers,
Jane
On 6 Feb 2013, at 15:18, Alison Harvey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello Jane,
>
> Brunel blogged on this a couple of days ago, and it looks like there might be more to come: http://brunelspecialcollections.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/teaching-from-the-archives-the-magical-and-meaningful/
>
> I liked the idea of asking students to imagine that the content of their inbox would be all future researchers would know about them, and how misleading this would be - that not everything had been kept, and a lot of what had been kept was misleading, inaccurate or unimportant. I can see that analogy coming in handy in several contexts!
>
> Thanks for starting this thread; I'm finding the responses very useful.
>
> Alison Harvey
> Asst. Archivist
>
> Special Collections and Archives (SCOLAR)
> Arts and Social Studies Library
> Cardiff University
> P. O. Box 430
> Cardiff
> CF24 0DE
>
> Tel: 029 208 74911
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Web: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/scolar
> Blog: http://scolarcardiff.wordpress.com
>
>
>
>
> From: Jane Stevenson <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask],
> Date: 06/02/2013 10:09
> Subject: MA Students using archives for the first time: where to begin!
> Sent by: "Archivists, conservators and records managers." <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
>
> Hi all (me again!),
>
> I gave a short talk to MA students yesterday about strategies for searching for archives. I talked about what archives are, tips for using archives, visiting reading rooms, using the various aggregators, etc etc.
>
> However, in the hands-on what struck me is that they were asking me what to actually do with the archives. That is, how do they use them in their research. They seemed a bit overwhelmed with these huge descriptions they were finding and didn't know how to start thinking about ways to bring the archives into their dissertations.
>
> I wondered if anyone knows of any advice out there that I can either point students to, or maybe utilities in order to create a few pages on the Hub about 'first steps in using archives for your dissertation'.
>
> There are some great educational resources on TNA's Education pages, but they are more focussed on exercises using archives, and present exercises that are already worked out, they are not so much aimed at students at an MA level and how they work with the kinds of evidence that archives provide (although I might have missed something here - please let me know).
>
> cheers,
> Jane.
>
>
>
> Jane Stevenson
> The Archives Hub
> Mimas, The University of Manchester
> Devonshire House, Oxford Road
> Manchester M13 9QH
>
> email:[log in to unmask]
> tel: 0161 275 6055
> website: archiveshub.ac.uk
> blog: archiveshub.ac.uk/blog
> twitter: twitter.com/archiveshub
>
> Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask]
>
> For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at
> https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra
>
> Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask]
> For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra
>
Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask]
For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra
|