Lesson Plan: Intro to Special Collections

This week, I had the immense pleasure of leading a group of undergraduate students in an hour long instruction session on working with Special Collections material. The class itself was focused on reproductive justice and Black womanhood in the Americas and our session would be entirely virtual. This meant that everything we looked at had to be already digitized or easily scanned, presenting a bit of a challenge in terms of both achieving learning goals and instruction design.

Speaking of learning goals, this session was all about demystifying Special Collections by offering a basic introduction to discovery systems and collection content; opening the door to the kind of experiences one can expect both visiting a Special Collections Library and working with Special Collections material; probing at the ethics of Special Collections work; and (always) primary source literary and critical thinking skills using primary sources (these are all, tbh, the learning goals for my sessions 90% of the time)

Using Zoom breakout rooms and Google folders, we had a good discussion and achieved the above.

---

Instruction Outline

Introduce self, department, Special Collections (15 minutes) 

1. how will you find SC material (SC infrastructure) and what will you find (SC content)

   1. What is “Special Collections”?

      1. What kind of objects do you find in Special Collections

      2. How do you find them? 

         1. Library Catalog

         2. Finding Aid

         3. ArchiveGrid

         4. WorldCat

         5. California Digital Library

         6. South Asian American Digital Archive

         7. Plateau Peoples' Web Portal

         8. Hathi Trust

   2. Touch on silences, biases with archives

      1. Content warning 

1. Students are broken into breakout rooms, each get link to an open Google folder with an object in it (no other context)

2. Students complete first set of questions (10 minutes) 

   • What is this? 

     • How do you know?

   • Who was this document created by? 

     • How do you know? 

   • Who was this document created for? 

     • How do you know? 

   • When is this document from? 

     • How do you know? 

   • Why does this document exist? 

3. Everyone gets second set of questions and link to the catalog entry (10 minutes) 

   • What questions does this document answer?

   • What questions do you have about this document? Or what do you wish you knew about it? 

   • What next steps would you take to answer those questions? 

   • What surprised you about this document?

   • Do you trust this document? 

   • Do you think this document is important? Valuable? Significant? And to whom?

4. Students present on their objects to the group (15 minutes) 

5. Questions and / or browse time (5 minutes - end) 

   1. What was here today and what wasn’t

---

Object list: 

State of Ohio Court Documents Regarding an Abortion Trial of Ann Porter, 1829 September (C0140, Box 36) 

The tryall of witch-craft, with the true discouerie thereof (Win 78)

Tennessee Circuit Court (Giles County) Documents Related to a Dispute over the Sale of Nancy, Enslaved Woman, 1854 (Box 49) 

Utah woman suffrage song book (M1664.W8 U8) 

---

Accompanying powerpoint!