This has been a really interesting and useful thread, both to confirm that what we're doing here with under- and post-grad students is broadly the same as other archives, and to get new ideas.

As with Helen, Teresa and a few others, we work mainly with students whose tutors already have an awareness of archive material and its use in research. Recently, though, we've developed a introduction to archives for students at MMU's School of Art, particularly the history of fashion and design students. This came about through contact with the Industry Curator here who looks after our textile collections. This has been more challenging for us, because we can't just point the students to the catalogue and expect them to rummage to find something that will spark their creativity - we've had to work more closely with the tutors to develop something specific and relevant. The tutors weren't as clued up on archives as some of the more 'traditional' academic course tutors. In a way this was better, because the tutors didn't presume their knowledge of archives was complete, and they were as engaged as the students as we took them through what we have in our collections and how they might use them. I think this had a positive effect on the students, seeing their tutors engaged in a learning process!

Aside from that, our standard approach has been delivered in two ways. Manchester University used to run introductory sessions for post-grad students where archivists from around Manchester went to a day of seminars and gave talks on their archives. Ours was called "Everything you wanted to know about archives in 3 easy steps" and the run through was:
1. Archives – What are they, where do they come from and why keep them?
2. How to make archives work for you – how to use them, what’s in them, and how do you make sense of their contents?
3. Hidden Gems – how do you find out what’s out there and how do you get your hands on them?
I then spoke about MOSI's collections, what subject areas we cover, and how the students might think laterally about their relevance to their studies.

Now we tend to work with groups of students on specific under- and post-grad courses and have them come to us so that we can bring items out from the strongroom for them to get hands on with. This approach has been more successful in getting return visits and having students make use of our collections.

We have a crib sheet that the students can take away with them, that covers the points in the original "Everything you wanted to know" presentation and provides a list of online catalogues and portals for them to start searching for archive material. We also stress that we're here to help them, that no question is too stupid, and we'd rather they came to us for advice and help than view archives as too challenging.

I'm going to take some notes from the discussion so far and make some adjustments to our approach, so that we're including more about what we do as archivists and explaining more about what archives are.

Jan Hicks
Senior Archivist
MOSI

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