IRSC and the Digital Archive: Digitizing Local History
IRSC and the Digital Archive: Digitizing Local History
Mia Tignor
Indian River State College
Project Background
In 2017, Indian River State College librarians identified local archival collections to add to the College’s burgeoning institutional repository and digital archive as part of a grant application for the NHPRC. The research revealed that the Treasure Coast has a robust community of historical societies, and that IRSC’s own archive contained a wealth of historically relevant materials that were rarely accessed. However, since most of these historical organizations are run by volunteers, many lacked the time necessary to digitize their collections and make them accessible for researchers. In addition, the lack of a designated archivist at the College limited the amount of time the Library could spend digitizing.
Across campus, history faculty were exploring different service learning projects that would engage students in the process of ‘creating history’ and help students more fully understand the research process and reached out to the librarians to collaborate. As a result, Emerging Technologies Librarian Mia Tignor and Dr. Michelle Carrigan created IRSC and the Digital Archive: Digitizing Local History, a service learning project for students in American history courses in which students digitize materials and create corresponding descriptions that highlight their local and national historical significance. IRSC and the Digital Archive provides students with practical experience in the digital humanities and provides a valuable public service to the community, as it makes these archival sources accessible to the local population and to researchers. Moreover, the project also answers the American Historical Association’s call to demonstrate the relevance of the skills developed in history courses, as it helps students improve their understanding of where information comes from, how information is organized, and how to place primary sources in historical context.
Program Overview
After a successful pilot in Fall 2017, students in Dr. Carrigan's 2018 Spring and Fall AMH2020 classes (2 honors, 1 regular) partnered with Indian River Historical Society's Hallstrom House to digitize Hallstrom archival records and issues of IRSC’s own Pioneer Press, the student newspaper published in the 1960s and 70s. The project was spread over 8 class periods in four different categories: a critical cataloging presentation, selection and digitization days, a research day, and description days.
Class Sessions
Critical Cataloging Presentation
An important aspect of the IRSC and the Digital Archive project is helping students understand the importance of ethical description and archiving practices. Emerging Technologies Librarian Mia Tignor visits each class at the beginning of the semester to introduce the project and to engage students in a discussion of how librarians and archivists facilitate access to materials through the assignment of subject headings and descriptions. The presentation identifies two of ACRL’s six Frames for Information literacy (Authority Is Constructed and Contextual and Information Creation as a Process) and highlights the fact that archivists (and students) must be mindful of their own ideologies as they seek to facilitate access to materials, and that understanding the information creation process will contextualize their understanding of different types of sources.
Selection
Students select the items that they will digitize over the course of the semester. Students working with the Hallstrom House materials travel to the house and meet with volunteers to select historically relevant materials for digitization. Students working with the Pioneer Press newspapers select items that show local perspectives on national news, such as this interview with students about their opinions on the military draft system during the Vietnam
Digitization and Description
After students have selected their items, they can move into the digitization and description process. Mia Tignor provides a brief overview of best practices for archiving and instructs students on using the final submission form for their descriptions. She also holds an instructional session to show students how to find relevant and credible secondary sources that they can use to assist them in the creation of their summaries and descriptions. Students then take turns scanning items and creating metadata. All items are reviewed by faculty before their submission and ingestion into the digital archive.
Adaptability
The Digital Archive makes use of college and statewide resources and has no budget and is scalable for any budget and need. All Florida Colleges have access to a free Islandora site and unlimited storage digital storage space. Students scanned materials during class using a flatbed scanner previously purchased by the library (and that cost less than $150), a laptop, and the library computer labs. Faculty can reach out to smaller historic organizations in their area to create a similar project or make use of any archives available at the institution.
Accountability
IRSC and the Digital Archive is assessed through several different measures. First, students are required to submit a reflection paper as the final component of the project. They reflect on the digitization process and are also asked to share any ways in which the program could be enhanced in future classes. Student feedback from Spring 2018 indicated that they enjoyed digitization process, and that the project provided opportunities for student participation and engagement:
I absolutely loved this course. As someone who has never been very interested in history, this course completely changed my mind and has even made me consider minoring in history. The discussions in class were very engaging and deep, opening my eyes and challenging me to think outside of the box. Digitizing archives was such an amazing experience, and I enjoyed working with my classmates on this project (Student response, 2018).
In Fall 2018, the project was rolled out to a larger class. Although student comments were comparative to previous semesters, course comments did mention that having a single scanner for a class of 24 created a backlog as some students had to wait several weeks to digitize their selected sources. In response to this feedback, faculty are exploring grant opportunities to purchase additional digitization materials. Student success rates are also compared to classes without the service learning project, and faculty found that students had a higher rate of completion and on average earned higher course grades than previous sections.