VSU History Archives Volunteer Program: Learn History through Hands-on Experience

1. The VSU History Archives Volunteer Program: Another Way to Learn History Another Way to Learn History By Stacey Wright, Dallas Suttles And Deborah Davis VSU Archives

2. The VSU Archives and Special Collections supports the University’s commitment to scholarly and creative work, enhances instructional effectiveness, encourages faculty scholarly pursuits, and supports research in selective areas of institutional strength focused on regional need by collecting, preserving, and providing access to records of enduring historical value documenting the history and development of VSU and the surrounding South Georgia region and in support of VSU curriculum.

3. History and Archives • The Archives is to a Historian like a lab is to a scientist

4. Types of Archives’ Teaching • The Archives Orientation—for those planning Archival Research or wanting to see a particular collection—one-shot, rather like library BI. • The longer term course-integrated instruction. Large research project centered in archives, may include several formal classes and individual meetings. Co-teaching. • The internship or work project that may or may not include research component. Orientation for training. Sole supervisor. • Teach graduate MLIS courses and Independent Studies in Archives.

5. History Class Connection • Dr. Catherine Oglesby, Dr. Melanie Byrd, and Dr. John Dunn of the History Department and Deborah Davis of the VSU Archives have collaborated on archival projects for history classes for the past 9 years. • Movement into the new archives opened up space that made it possible to work with larger introductory classes for the first time—we were looking for a project.

6. The Beginning: A meeting between a history professor who wanted hands-on experience for entry level students and an Archivist with 188 boxes of presidential papers to process…with little help. Archives Apprenticeships for an Entry-Level History Class: A Win-Win Situation

7. History Point of View: Three perspective on why come to Archives: History students need to understand: • Primary sources and secondary sources and what the differences are • What an archives is and how it relates to the study and understanding of history • The work necessary to make primary sources meaningful • How working in an archives is a potential career path for historians

8. Why would a professor want to do this?– Dr. Byrd Already had experience with archives’ “hands-on history.”

9. How does it meet professors’ goals? • Because it gives students a chance to do history instead of just reading about it. • It is a way that students who have trouble with the abstract part of history can still be exposed to historical metholdology, texts and artifacts • It’s a way to get students into the library and to see how vital a library and an archives are to the college experience. • It is a fair and intellectually challenging way for students to truly earn extra credit.

10. Pt 2 • As a professor I want to help students achieve the grade that they feel they can earn. • …..And this is a valid way of doing it. • Opens their minds and makes the past come alive. • Connects them to the heritage of the campus—see school history and culture

11. Pt. 3 • It is a way to get students interacting with other students and library faculty whom they might not ever meet. • Shows them the foundation of research that maybe they can apply to different topics or other classes. Transfer of knowledge. • Archives is competent to assess skill and easy to tell the credit from the spread sheet.

12. Dr. John Dunn’s work from intro to intensive in Archives SACS QEP Project

13. John Dunn • It will help students—Ways of learning • Helps the library • Learning history skills in a different way • If they don’t take tests well—can show what they are doing • 60 hours student took himself from a D to an A and aced the final • History Career focus • Focus on students who have gone on to work in Archives and for careers.

14. Why students think they need to come to Archives • Because our history professors give really hard tests! • And they need extra credit. • Students are relieved that they can “do something” rather than “figure something out” to get part of their grade.

15. Academic Libraries and Volunteers—why haven’t we done this before? Volunteers long used in publiclibrary/historical society areas • Limitations for volunteers in Academic Libraries: • Insurance • Parking • Administration

16. Students as Volunteers • Insurance: covered if a class activity or in library studying. • Parking: already dealt with. • Administrative Support: it’s the educational mission of the unit. • Motivation of the Students: grades primary, doing good secondary. • Education: intimately teaches nature of primary source materials.

17. Special Considerations of This Archives Program • How will they handle the materials? • What can they do with little or no training? • How to supervise without taking time from other patrons/research needs? • Where to house program? • How to make the project useful to us? • How to make sure they learn and it applies to their studies? • How to keep track of their time and effort?

18. The Solution A several-part program to have history students learn about primary sources, learn about VSU, and gain extra credit. We started with the presidential boxes and the old archives room we had just vacated.

19. How to Train: Oh, the Options: • Offered five one and a half hour evening and afternoon orientation sessions in Archives per semester—students volunteered to come. • Had professors announce and trained one-on-one as they came. Cut way down on our numbers. • Classes either came to Archives (perhaps for another one-shot class) or I went to them and did the orientation for every one—Best Solution

20. Where to Work? Depends on the project

22. Resources • Got 3 “trickle down” computers after the “move”’ • Used In-house designed Access databases • Later used home-made mysql databases for more data security.

23. How to Supervise? Student and Student Assistant working on the first volunteer project: processing the papers of Dr. Hugh Bailey.

25. Logistics They would sign in and sign up for either a box, data entry for vital records, or microfilming (most choose a box). They would work on their project over the course of many days. The average to index papers was 10 hours. Student hours and progress were entered weekly in an Excel spread sheet. Students who needed to work outside of daytime hours were accommodated by a student assistant who worked until 7 or 8 pm two nights per week.

26. Student time/info Spreadsheet

27. Results of the early project: 188 boxes of presidential papers have been reboxed, folders replaced, and staples and paperclips removed to enhance preservation.

28. Results: Over 4000 items in our collection detailing what is in those boxes by folder.

29. Results: The Descriptions Every folder is listed

30. The Bailey Project Payoff:

31. Results: Students connected with primary source material Results: Students got the Extra Credit they needed!

32. Assessment: Student Rewards • Grades, future classes • Verbal appreciation • possible jobs • Archives now has a hiring pool of history majors only, with a 3.0 gpa, who have volunteered or taken a class with us.

33. Assessment formats: • Follow up meetings with professor(s). • Written student evaluations. • In-archives meetings to see what we need to do differently. • Sometimes use survey monkey surveys emailed to participants.

34. History/Archives Work Program Evaluation This semester you have been part of a program that uses working in an Archives as an adjunct to your introductory history class. Our goal was to provide you with an introductory understanding of “primary” documents (archival documents) and the work necessary to make such documents available. Your work with the Bailey boxes, the microfilm and vital records databases, or the scrapbooks has been very valuable to the Archives. We think the extra credit has been valuable to you. We also hope that you have gained some understanding of the “nuts and bolts” of history. We hope to continue this program with future classes and would like your feedback about what worked and what did not so that we can make the project work more smoothly and effectively. It was very rewarding working with you. 1. How many hours did you work: (choose the range closest to your final total) 1-5 _____; 6-10______; 11-15; _______; 16-20 _____; 20-25_____; Over 25________ 2. Did you find the extra credit you earned from this project a significant addition to your grade? 3. If you only made 1-3 points, why did you stop there? 4. Did you learn any thing that applied to your history class from the orientations in Archives at the beginning of the semester? 5. What do you think of the facilities for this project found in Old Archives. 6. You may have dealt with Deborah or Leann, archives staff, but generally the student supervisors, Diane, Jennifer, Laura-Lynn, Katrina, or Ryan Powell, supervised the Old Archives workroom. How helpful did you find the supervision on this project? 7. What about the hours available to work on the project. Over the course of the project, we had late hours on Tuesday and Wednesday Hours, and some other nights and a Saturday. Were the hours adequate? Did you know about the extra hours? Did the signs on the Old Archives Door keep you informed? 8. Overall, how well did this project work for you? What did you like about it. Would you come to the Archives in the future to do research or to work as a student assistant? 9. Overall, what did you experience that did not work for you. How should we improve this project to make it more useful to students? More fair? More of a learning experience?

35. History Professor Evaluation The project, along with Ms. Deborah Davis’s presentations of the history of Valdosta State University, provides for the students a look at how micro-history or history at a very local level fits with the larger picture. Ms. Davis surveys the history of VSU through the Progressive Era into the 1980s. They get to hear and see what lifewas like at VSU during the Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement, for instance. By working with and contextualizing archival sources, students come to understand something of both the art and the craft of the historian. Students work in micro-film, in university official’s papers, such as those of the most recently retired Dr. Hugh Bailey, and at cataloging local newspapers from a specified time frame, for example. Although they take on the assignment obviously for extra credit, they discover and appreciate the value of hands-on learning.

36. Archives Evaluation Points • We needed more and better trained student supervisors. • We need to be very specific about when they can and cannot work. • We need rules for cleaning up the space. • Commitment from automation for computer maintenance. • What is best timing for orientations, ending, open hours? • Do we need to change our record keeping system. By student? By project? • We need to make sure it is relevant to their class—older projects. • We need to protect any material given to them.

37. Lessons Learned Over Time: • Planning and More Planning • Handouts, schedules, hiring, training manual • Orientation timing depends on professor and class, not Archives • History is. . . “older than me”—unless it’s really cool. • People can’t come in one week before the program ends and do this…. • Record Keeping is constant.

38. New Projects: New Partners • More Professors involved—separate record keeping—4-5 plus volunteer groups • More levels of students: different complexity of projects • New projects…”older than me” • Appropriateness of projects to student level is key to success

39. The Thirty hour option

40. Valdosta Daily Times Vital Records Index

41. Do the Scholarship needed….and users will come.

42. The bulk of or reference questions come from the Valdosta Daily Times Index and Vital Records Index

44. The Scrap-book Indexing Project

47. Photocopy • scrapbook • Forms for Indexing: a. citation b. people c. subjects d. summary

48. The Database for Scrapbook:

49. Electronic Forms Mimic Paper Forms