Hot Brainstem

I was thinking of using this for high school students, but this exercise would also work well for undergrads.  Two main goals and two smaller goals:

1. Construct a narrative history of some person, event, topic, etc. using primary and secondary sources.
2. Explore what it means to have a written history of something — what are the biases that go into creating a history.
3. (Exposure to working with primary source materials.)
4. (General archives outreach and instruction.)

In the first part of the exercise, you use a secondary source’s source material to explore how the author(s) constructed a history:

1. Find a book that has includes tons of citations, many of which are from a single repository (see example below).
2. Identify an interesting 1-2 page passage from the book and retrieve all of the primary and secondary sources that the author used to build that history.
3. Students read the passage first, then they work together to identify where the author found all the information by going through the body of records, books, and other materials you’ve pulled.  You could create a worksheet to guide the students through identifying each cited concept or quote.
4. Discuss what the students found and where they found it.  Also talk about what else was in the source material that the author chose to not include — what do these extra details add to the story?
5. Optional: It would be nice to also pull a couple documents that extend the story beyond the written passage.  The book should be helpful in identifying such material.  You can discuss what these other materials add to the story.

The second part of the exercise has students building histories from from scratch.

1. Using a different passage in the book, again pull all the cited source material.
2. Without showing the students the passage, have them use the materials to build a 1-3 paragraph history of the topic you’ve laid out for them.  This might be more effective if students are broken into manageable-sized groups.
3. At the end, have the groups present their histories.  Optional: Create a more complete history using all groups’ histories.
4. Give the students the author’s passage and discuss the differences.  Use this as a jumping off point to discuss things like:
   • What details had more focus in the book than in the students work?
   • How does background and point of view affect one’s understanding?
   • How can one person’s understanding of history differ from another person’s and why?
   • Who determine’s what is history? How do different types of biases play a role?
   • Are primary sources reliable and how do they related to secondary sources?
   • What if sources disagree with each other?
   • Is history the truth?

Comments:

• This exercise would also work online or as a packet of reproduced materials, which would also allow for cross-repository source material.  I think it would it have more impact and get students more engaged if they were dealing with the original documents in-house, but that means the expense of a field trip.
• This would be a good National History Day small-group exercise.
• When writing the grant proposal to support such a program, don’t forget to use phrases such as “introduce historiographical methods” and “interrogate sources.”
• Transcriptions of tricky handwritten documents would help.
• An example of a book that has includes tons of citations from a single repository is A New and Untried Course, Steven Peitzman’s book about the history of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (1850-1998) which draws heavily from the collections at the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives.

This falls into “positive it’s been done before category” — I assume a number of teachers are using this approach.  So, as usual, I’d love to hear about any archivists, educators, whoever who have been doing this sort of thing at a repository or has struck up standing teacher-school-repository partnerships.

Today I received an email reference request and over the course of 20 minutes, located four helpful resources (2 printed, 2 microfilm) in the Archives and Library. I took snapshots with my iPhone, emailed the photos to myself, then composed a reply describing the content of the photos and forwarded everything to the researcher.

The image to the right is all the detail I’m looking to provide at this early stage of the researcher/resource conversation.

Beware, this is one of those revelations that is completely obvious once it has happened: Being able to email myself photos from speeds up reference and makes me more likely to send along more resources that I identify.

Ideally, I would be able to register that a digital surrogate exists for some library/archives resource, but that is exactly what tends to slow me down in the first place. It is the extreme quick and dirty approach that makes the whole process work. Doing “proper imaging” of resources bogs me down. The slowdown caused by the initial setup of the scanner or photo staging area lends itself to waiting until a threshold has been reached — say, once I have 20 things to scan (across different researchers), I will set aside time for a scanning session.

The thing that drove me to escape this session-based imaging and changed my mental approach was researchers themselves. At least a 70% of our in-house researchers simply take reference snapshots of materials rather than making photocopies or requesting scans. I decided that if it was OK for them, it was OK for me to give to them. That is when I started taking quickie snapshots of everything with my point-and-shoot digital camera.  But the transferring of photos to the computer also tended to cause a slowdown for me: the former scanning session slowdown morphed into an image transfer session slowdown — a smaller bottle-neck than before, but still a bottle-neck.

My new camera-phone approach has become:

1. Find a resource
2. Take snapshots with my phone (including any photos need for citation info)
3. Email photos to my work email address (low-res is usually fine)
4. Tweak file names to make sources clear
5. Email snapshots to researcher

This approach has not only saved me hours of time but also improves the response time and thoroughness of reference requests.

While I do have an iPhone, this would certainly be true of any camera/phone that would allow for emailing or wireless image transfer.  I’m interested in hearing what quick and dirty approaches others use.

[Add-on, March 29, 2010:] Just got this forwarded to me — “Capture and Release: Digital Cameras in the Reading Room” by Lisa Miller, Steven K. Galbraith, and the RLG Partnership Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-05.pdf

John Armstrong, master of all trades and my pal, designed this collapsible custom book cradle for use with a large set of over 200 oversize volumes. The challenge was:

1. None of our current book cradles were large enough.
2. The content of this set of volumes (Philadelphia Maritime Exchange Records) is such that researchers use 2 to 4 volumes simultaneously.
3. The book cradles should be stored with the volumes, on already-cramped shelves.

John will be tweaking the design and making a total of four cradles, which I like to call the Franklin Street PortaCradle — named after John’s burgeoning tote bag business, Franklin Street (via Etsy).

I need to post photos of the tote John made me which is waxed cotton, blue, and awesome.

(video via Flickr; or video via YouTube if you prefer)

Update: John made four more PortaCradles on July 31.  We ended up using three of them the very next week for a researcher.  Check below for an action shot.

[View with PicLens]