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Dr. Erin Wahl, Fall 2025
Course Description
Course Description
This course acts as an introduction to the principles and practice of collecting, servicing, and arranging archival holdings. Instruction includes appraisal, acquisition, arrangement and description, preservation, and administration of institutional archives (ALA 2B, ALA 4F, PLG 1.1, PLG 1.2, SLO 2). Attention to issues of preservation, intellectual property, and service in both physical and digital environments. This course is an introduction to the historical and evolving theoretical foundations, professional institutions, key practices/terms/concepts, and contemporary issues of the archival and manuscripts professions.
Featured goals in this course include gain understanding of why societies, cultures, organizations, and individuals create and keep records and archives (ALA 1F, SLO 6), gain sufficient familiarity with the concepts, functions, processes, and underlying ideas of scheduling, inventory, appraisal, accessioning, preservation, arrangement, description, reference, and outreach in traditional and digital archival and manuscript environments (ALA 1A, ALA 5C, PLG 3.1, PLG 4.1, SLO 1), understanding sensitivity to legal, policy, cultural, and ethical issues surrounding archives and records administration (ALA 1G), and lastly, developing the knowledge to be able to identify and demonstrate real-life examples of ways in which records and archival programs serve as instruments of bureaucracy, transparency, accountability, political ideologies, cultural heritage, memory-keeping, identity construction, human rights and social justice, community and individual memory and empowerment, and scholarship (PLG 4.2).
Analysis
Analysis
The final project in this course was a learning experience that challenged my writing and collaboration skills and pushed me deeper into the world of scholarly communication, thus strengthening my abilities. In developing a group literature review, I felt successful in understanding and interpreting the different formatting rules for different peer-reviewed journals (ALA 7D). While I certainly wouldn’t call this collaboration a failure by any means, it certainly showed me where my weaknesses are in group writing and allowed me to work on collaborative topic deliberation, outlining, delegating, and most importantly, group time management. The result of this experience was a thematic literature review on our topic, audio preservation (PLG 1.1), that successfully incorporated sources (ALA 7A, PLG 4.1), themes, analysis, and synthesis from all participating group members (SLO 3, SLO 5).
Reflection
Reflection
While I have many experiences writing papers for class, I had never written one that mirrored a legitimate peer-reviewed journal literature review before. This was a big challenge as it was a group paper, something else I had never done before, and my collaboration and communication skills were certainly put to the test (ALA 1J, ALA 7A, SLO 3, PLG 1). While I had started out with some mistakes and errors in my communications, by the end of this project I had discovered I was more confident in scholarly collaboration with my peers and demonstrating leadership. I had also learned a lot about different archival journals and the process of getting published. In conjunction with the professor, my group mates and I have decided to pursue further revision to submit our literature review for publication (ALA 7D). This was not an outcome I had anticipated, but it greatly increased my confidence and is pushing me to further pursue scholarly writing. Not only did my communication skills develop, my archival-specific communication skills were strengthened.
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