Bringing Undergraduates to Archival Research Through a Digital Lens Grinnell in China: Bringing Undergraduates to Archival Research Through a Digital Lens

Grinnell College Setting Early 1900s/ Missionaries/Teachers Dezhou, Shandong Province, China Innovation Fund process Matthew Johnson, Chinese History seeking an inquiry based research experience for his students Library and Digital Liberal Arts collaborators Archival collections that had not been digitized Digital Grinnell (Islandora) repository collection Grinnell College has a tradition of Social Justice activism. In the late 1800 and early 1900s this took the form of missionary trips to various places including China. Several people with this inclination from Grinnell College ran and taught at a school in Dezhou, China. Grinnell College Archives had received several groups of materials from these people and had processed them as manuscript collections available on-site. Matthew Johnson, a history professor at Grinnell College wanted to provide an opportunity for his students of Chinese history to work with archival materials and learn what was involved in creating a digital collection. Grinnell College has a goal of offering every student an opportunity to do research in their major. Working with colleagues in the libraries and digital scholarship Matt submitted an Innovation Fund proposal that centered on this project and hiring students to analyze and digitize these collections over a two year period. The hope was that this work would provide a real research experience for the students working on it; would leave the archives with a group of materials digitized and available for use; and provide future students with primary source materials that they could use in papers, projects, and exhibitions. The home for this collection will be Digital Grinnell which is an Islandora repository.

Process Innovation Fund proposal and award (Spring 2015) Timeline laid out Students hired/ trained for 2015-2016 Review of project Students hired/ trained for 2016/2017 Digital Grinnell Collection The Innovation Fund was awarded in Spring of 2015 with a July 1 possible start date. Due to academic schedules hiring of students and training started in September of 2015. The first cohort of 6 students took some time to get their feet under them and made some progress by the end of the semester. This project was not our first attempt to collaborate with faculty and students on digitizing archival materials but was the first with a significant budget. Earlier projects had taught us that people don’t understand that databases are only as good as the data that we put in and that creating this data or meta data is best done as an iterative process. We learned a lot about working with people who do not have library backgrounds, and are not users of standard tools. Two of the students went on off-campus programs in the Spring and the others were in their final semester. Professor Johnson went on a parental leave and the project stalled. We reviewed the project at the end of the first year and decided that the students needed to be managed as workers rather than as interested participants. This fall with the return of Professor Johnson to campus the project has revived and progress is being made. There are 5? Students working on the project. I will turn this over to Chris Jones to talk about how working with the students in Archives has gone.

Student training From this...

Student training To this...

Student training To this!

Learnings Fresh eyes can bring new approaches Collaborating across departmental budgets is challenging Quality Control is ongoing Project Management is necessary Funding can drive development Each of us should talk about a positive learning from this process: -Cecilia – learned that it is necessary to talk with people many times to help them understand that they have to create metadata in order to have the ability to search – Having people create their metadata using spreadsheets allows them to go back and make it both consistent and robust. It is all visible at once and people learn as they go along. We still need to revisit it before ingesting -that people believe that Google tools are easier to use than Microsoft products -