University of Chicago’s Mapping the Stacks project to survey, identify, and process African American collections, lending their subject expertise to under- described collections. Sarah Shreeves described how students participating in the Ethnography of the University project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) seed future study by depositing their output into the institutional repository. These projects show the added value of engaging students with special collections in a curricular context and illustrated Waters’ observation that bringing users efficiently into processing streams requires solid infrastructure and scholar-friendly data-entry tools. Summarizing various speakers’ reflections on use, Alice Prochaska noted that special collections are not distinctive just because they are unique but also because of what their stewards do with them to promote use. Placing students and scholars at the center of the value proposition brings strategically built collections into alignment with the academic mission. Effective assessment methodologies can then drive advocacy and ensure allocation of resources in the broader university environment. Special Collections Are Central to the Academic Enterprise Throughout the forum, this call to align special collections with the core mission and activities of the research enterprise provided a revised perspective for addressing the challenges of engaging scholars and advocating for resources. Several speakers explored aligning special collections with the teaching and learning mission of research institutions. Beginning with the first panel, Steve Nichols acknowledged that traditionally special collections have been viewed as “eccentric” and marginal to undergraduate education, but suggested that they should instead be seen as intimately aligned with the teaching, learning, and research directive of research universities. This exposure must be more than show and tell and integrated into “the fabric of the curriculum,” as Barbara Rockenbach noted. The Boyer Commission report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education,3 was referenced by both Rockenbach and Shreeves, who argued that RLI 267 12 Moving Special Collections Forward in an Age of Discovery: Themes from the ARL-CNI Forum ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC Listen to Jacqueline Goldsby on the value of a collective model of humanist inquiry that breaks down silos and enriches our understanding of mid-20th-century African American literary and cultural studies. [ 4 min.] http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/rli-267- goldsby.mp3 Photo: David Christopher
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