IS2 Archives Assignment: An Overview

1. IS2 Archives Assignment: An Overview Jenny Swadosh New School Archives and Special Collections

2. What does “archives” mean? • What words or phrases come to mind when you hear/read this word? • Don’t worry about being correct or incorrect. • How is this word used in The Hair with the Amber Eyes?

3. What does “archives” mean? • What are some examples of archives? • Some examples • government archives (federal, state, local) • museum archives (the Met, MoMA, Museum of Natural History) • historical societies (N-Y Historical, Brooklyn Historical) • universities and colleges • corporate archives (Conde Nast, YSL) • community-based archives (Interference Archives, Ballroom Archive and Oral History Project) • libraries (NYPL, BPL, QPL, all have archival collections)

4. What does “archives” mean? • Have you ever visited an archives (in person or virtually)? • If so, share your experiences.

5. What is a “primary source?” • Make a list of examples from readings, previous assignments, or “real life” experiences. • How are these different from secondary sources? • Ask class to think about research context. Can some examples in the list be both primary and secondary sources? • Discuss Edmund de Waal’s experience using primary sources.

6. What is a “primary source?” • Relate this question to students’ lives and work. • What kinds of records do they create, collect, and share as students, as designers and artists, as citizens? • What are they evidence of? What do they “tell us” about you? What do they not tell us?

7. How do researchers find archival sources? • Some archival collections can be found in Bobcat, WorldCat, and ArchiveGrid • You can guess where a collection might be based on subject matter, biographical information, etc. • You can ask a librarian or an archivist for help • You can use citations, acknowledgments, endnotes/footnotes, etc. from secondary sources

8. Example of citation use • Ask students to examine a page(s) from a secondary source that show examples of primary source research. • Ask students to identify primary and secondary sources • Ask students to reflect on what these citations imply

9. Primary Source Exercise • Students try out archival research using hand-out • Hand-out should be adapted by instructors • Can be divided into groups of 4, or conduct exercise as a class • If dividing into groups, assign groups by format (photographs, textual records, posters, newspaper clippings)

10. The Hand-Out • Should be freely adapted by all faculty • Practice in taking notes, distilling discussion

11. Discussion: CONTENT • Ask students to describe -- not show -- what they looked at. This is an opportunity to demonstrate how words can help further develop research. • How would you better describe your primary sources, or differently?

12. Discussion: CONTEXT • Ask students for their thoughts on context • How do the individual items relate to each other? • How do they relate to what was happening at Parsons, in New York City, in the world? • If students are unsure about context, ask them to devise a strategy for finding out. Where would they look first? Second?

13. Discussion: SIGNIFICANCE • This section is the synthesis between the content and the context. • After discussing content and context, what do we still not know? • What steps – hypothetical or real – could we take to find possible answers? • What do we already know that helps us to make sense of these primary sources?

14. Discussion: SIGNIFICANCE • Think about the citations we looked at earlier. What would your citations look like? • What sources would you use? • Where else might related primary sources be? (think back to list of types of archives)