Faculty, Archivists, and Librarians Focus Group by Ashley Todd-Diaz

2025-04-05 16:52:32 UTC

Currently we offer opportunities for classes to visit the archives and sometimes we go to visit the class so they don't have to come find our space.

In a past position I created an Open Access Resource (OER) activity and I'd like my current archive to be able to offer those as well eventually. And/or offer resources/support for students or faculty who want to use our resources to create OERs

2025-04-05 16:59:40 UTC

Yes, I facilitate student engagement at my institution. I often host class visits to Archives & Special Collections, promote our open research hours, and make myself available during the open hours times times. I identify collections to be digitized and placed in our IR. I also work with individual students and student organizations to facilitate donations which are within our collection development policy. Often I use these engagements to inform the individuals or orgs about their rights as donors.

2025-04-05 17:00:55 UTC

This is the text of my Archives project I did for several semesters with my GEO 300 (Research Methods) class, if anybody is interested in doing something similar.

2025-04-05 17:24:52 UTC

How does your institution or department measure outreach success?

This is an area that needs attention and improvement. I can't say that we have developed effective measurements for determining success or failure. It feels like a lot of measurement comes from vibes.

2025-04-05 17:34:37 UTC

One add on regarding students and social media outreach - at a past institution I managed the social media for the library for a time and I wanted students to become more engaged, but concerns came up over security and quality control. As staff, we did want to be sure to have some standards, but we also wanted to avoid people posting at the same time, etc. So I found challenges regarding: multiple people using one social media account, sharing log in information and concerns over security or losing access, and scheduling posts. I think social media is a great way to get outreach to work and students do engage with it. But balancing some of those challenges can be difficult. Luckily at my current institution we have a person dedicated to be the social media manager so I am hopeful we could engage student workers interested in participating and contributing

2025-04-05 17:49:52 UTC

Here's a PDF of the assignment language I've used for a larger class, where the archive set aside a handful of antique maps of Michigan and my students went on their own time to look at the maps and address various critical prompts.

2025-04-05 17:53:35 UTC

Describe a time when you had a gratifying, collaborative interaction with a student (or group of students). What do you think made the interaction so positive?

I did not work with this group of students but my colleagues worked on a semester long project building an exhibit with curatorial studies students from a large queer archive we have. They created a zine/catalog of the exhibit and had a well-attended opening including press coverage. The students were supported and were allowed to make the decisions about mounting the exhibit. It was wonderful.

rcelestestu — 2025-04-05 18:00:48 UTC

Challenges we face in outreach?

Partnerships in programming with libraries, departmental faculty, and university marketing. We constantly hear about events that would be relevant to our materials that are occurring on campus that we weren't invited to participate in or even attend. It's hard to be everywhere at once, and we do our best with colleague to colleague outreach, but it can be really disappointing.

2025-04-05 18:21:35 UTC

Describe a time when you had an ungratifying interaction with a student (or group of students). What do you think made the interaction fail?

My answer to this involves constraints with space and time. Our research room also functions as a classroom during class visits. Often, our research room is not large enough to host a class of more than 12 at one time, and so we often split the classes up. In a 50-minute class students may have 10-15 minutes to interact with objects designed for interaction. Abrupt ends to interactions, especially when students are demonstrating active and positive experiences, lead me to feel a mix of success and failure for the interaction.