1. Connecting
K-12 Students & Teachers
with
Online Archival Material
Matt Herbison
herbison@gmail.com
twitter: @herbison
Legacy Center, Archives & Special Collections
Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia
SAA 2012 San Diego
Session 208
2012 Aug 09
See slides at bit.ly/ARCHK12

2. Exploring history through primary sources
Students say...
...which means
I felt like a detective!
...I was thinking critically about documents.
The old photo was more real!
...I have a sense of authenticity & original-ness.
I got angry!
...I was personally engaged and excited.

3. Students need this
...and Teachers too
Doing History.
More than Historical Thinking...
Critical Thinking!
Teachers benefit by combining their expertise with our
expertise.
There's a new emphasis on the use of primary documents in
the teaching of K-12 history.
(Common Core School Standards - CoreStandards.org)
(See NARA talk at SAA Session 402)

4. We can learn from museums
Museum educators connect their objects with
K-12 audiences all the time.
We should be doing this too.
Interpretation…in a museum sense.

5. What we're doing at the
Drexel University Med School Archives
How do we connect with K-12 online?
Planning grant and new implementation grant
from the Heritage Philadelphia Program
Program of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage,
supporting public history practice in the
Philadelphia region.
Worked with groups of students and teachers
to get their input through in-class story-testing
sessions, surveys, and focus groups.

6. Where we're starting from
Custom-grown digital collections system
(from IMLS grant 7+ years ago)
It works well for our typical researchers
But our metadata, interface, and features
fail for K-16 users
(and other novice users)

7. Wait.
You are in 9th grade.
Who are Eliza & Matilda?

9. Archives' online collections are too
hard for teachers & students to use.
We can do much better in making our
digital collections:
Accessible
Useful
Engaging
…essential for K-12 users

10. Online - Students & Teachers Want
• CONTEXT - Why should I care about this?
• Video & Audio
• Transcripts, even for scanned typescripts –
need to be easy to read and copy
• Easy to grab & use images from website
• Good balance of images and text
("good" might mean 2-10 images for 1 text)
• Teachers tear apart lesson plans for their
context and primary sources. Should we make
things more a la carte?

11. Digital History Toolkit
Where we’re heading – based on our findings
Interpretive layer on top of revamped digital
collections database
>>>Driven by Story-based pages
Improved item-level pages

16. Digital History Toolkit
Interpretive layer on top of revamped digital
collections database
• Improved item-level pages
o Context to answer "Why does this matter?"
o Easy to grab and use images and text
• Story-based pages
o Gather, connect, and contextualize several items
that support the story
o Place in time and geographically
o Prompts to help explore documents and connections
• Later phases of development will add more
options for guided discovery

17. You should do this. You can do this.
No matter where you work.
All it takes to start:
• a good story with several supporting documents
• the historical context
• a connection with a teacher

18. So you're interested in the K-12 audience...
Reference Access Outreach (RAO) Section meeting
at 3:30pm today in Sapphire 400
...the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) discussion group
Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) Symposium:
Engaging Students & Teachers: Integrating Primary
Sources in K-16 Curricula (archivists & teachers mingling!)
October 18-20 in Cincinnati, OH
MidwestArchives.org
Also Session 402 at 10:00am tomorrow in Sapphire AB
will touch on some of these topics, including field experience
for pre-service Social Studies teachers in archival institutions

19. Connecting
K-12 Students & Teachers
with
Online Archival Material
Matt Herbison
herbison@gmail.com
twitter: @herbison
See slides at bit.ly/ARCHK12
Special bonus slides…

20. Come for the content
Stay for the process
Are the students learning content, process, research skills? Is
it an intro to your repository?
(See BHS talk at SAA Session 402)
All counts towards critical thinking.
Starting points:
Not: Is there bias? More: What is the bias?
Easy starting point: WDYK? WDYWYK?
(What do you know? What do you wish you knew?)
Structured document analysis approaches are an easy place for
you to dive in.

21. Systematic approaches for
analyzing primary sources
• Library of Congress - Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool
• National Archives - Document Analysis Worksheets
• SCIM-C Historical Inquiry strategy (a favorite; too thorough!)
• Stripling Model of Inquiry
• UC-Irvine History Project - The “6 C’s”
• Primary vs Secondary sources at Princeton, handy dandy
examples
• Peter Pappas’ Teaching With Documents website
• Nikki Lamberty at Carleton College
• John I. Brooks at Fayetteville State University
• Brooklyn Connections @ BPL - Independent Research Project
Packet (another favorite starting point, worksheet based)
• many more