Archives and Special Collections Research Services

We are available to help you design engaging and meaningful classroom activities and assignments that make use of digitized and born-digital collections in order to meet a wide variety of learning goals. Please contact Deborah Richards to discuss the details of your class visit.

In addition to traditional research projects, Archives and Special Collections can support a wide variety of public engagement projects including curating a digital exhibit, creating a blog or website, transcribing and annotating historical documents, and more. We are committed to creating student learning experiences that are equitable and accessible.

Grounded in the learning goals of the Mount Holyoke College curriculum and informed by primary source literacy guidelines, the education program of Archives and Special Collections emphasizes active learning for archival literacy, information literacy, and visual literacy.

There are myriad ways to integrate special collections materials into a classroom experience, whether transcribing nineteenth century correspondence to use as mapping data, exploring scrapbooks for examples of photography and ephemera, actively listening to LGBTQ alums’ oral histories, or investigating the dissemination of a work of literature through the ages: we are excited to collaborate to support the intersection of distinctive materials and intentional pedagogy.

We work with faculty across all disciplines to meet a wide variety of learning goals and support teaching with our unique materials. Our emphasis on active learning places the student at the center of our instruction design, providing the opportunity to engage in hands-on learning to build transferable skills that directly promote students’ academic growth and development.

Some of our offerings include:

Understanding Digital Collections, Images, and Facsimiles in Context
Introduce your students to Archives and Special Collections and primary source research online. Use digital collections and surrogates to help students understand the context of a digital source, engage with data, and make connections between digital materials and course themes.

• Incorporate a classroom activity, such as Exploring ASC’s Digital Collections or Defining Digital Images.
• Read about Teaching with Digital Primary Sources: Literacies, Finding and Evaluating, Citing, Ethics, and Existing Models and Digital Facsimiles.
• Think about the questions to consider when engaging with a digital collection and building bridges to critical reading in a digital context.

Primary Source Literacy, Document Analysis, and Transcription
Use primary source sets for students to interpret and engage in document analysis, build narrative between sources, and contribute to scholarly communications through transcription, annotation, and other activities.

• Explore examples of primary source lesson plans at TeachArchives.org.
• Consider the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy.
• Engage with available crowdsourced transcription projects, including: Zooniverse People-Powered Research Projects, Smithsonian Digital Volunteers, LOC’s By the People Project, UIowa’s DIY History or contact Head of Archives and Special Collections Leslie Fields for options from Mount Holyoke’s collections—and don’t forget these useful tips for reading old handwriting.

Teach Archives.org
Based on an award-winning project at Brooklyn Historical Society, Teach Archives shares articles and sample lesson plans for effectively integrating active learning and primary source material into your curriculum.

Kelli Hansen’s "Collaborating with Your Special Collections Librarian" on the Pedagogy & American Literary Studies blog (October 10, 2016). Tips and examples of assignments for incorporating library collections into courses and best practices for collaborating with librarians.

Tala Khanmalek’s "Teaching Students How to Use Archival Sources" on Ideas on Fire blog (February 19, 2019).
Reasons why teaching with archival sources is beneficial to students across the disciplines and interdisciplines as well as some pedagogical tips on how to do it well.