Undergraduates in the Archives – Question 3

In one of my undergraduate courses a professor handed out a checklist for good archival research. The last item on the list was simply, “Get lucky.” My most meaningful archival work has indeed come out of the pleasures of spelunking in archives, hoping to come upon a hidden gem. In my junior year of college I studied abroad in Paris, where I took a class on global media structures.

The positive responses I received from publishers reinforced my sense that this project would be viable. In addition to this standard measure of academic success, the project itself was very successful as an intellectual and practical collaboration. The undergraduate collaborators worked vigorously and productively, helping to quickly advance the project. Vodou religion itself is a communal phenomenon.

There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials. In the spring of 2010, the class project was to design a digital exhibit that would bring together Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe photographs from the American Philosophical Society and Ojibwe artifacts from the Penn Museum.

From 50,000 feet up, my greatest success is developing our program of outreach and teaching, and sustaining it over nearly fifteen years. In 1997-98, seven classes visited Special Collections & Archives. Last semester, I taught thirty-one class sessions. The numbers document the faculty’s growing interest in bringing their classes to SC&A and the success of our outreach. The value and enrichment to the curriculum and the students are, of course, harder to quantify.

Oh my, this is a hard one to answer. Without intending to sound unbearably sappy, there are nearly too many moments of success for me to count! My favorite moments are those that come outside the seminar…