In the fall of 2019, the Brown University Library conducted interviews with fourteen instructors in the humanities and social sciences to gain insight into how the Library can better support their use of primary sources in undergraduate education. The selected instructors represent twelve departments and centers on campus (some have dual or triple appointments), with eight professors, two associate professors, one assistant professor, one lecturer, and two postdoctoral fellows.
The interviews and subsequent analysis examine how faculty learned to teach with primary sources, how they integrate the use of primary sources into their courses, if or how they collaborate with library staff, how they identify and locate primary sources, and how they help their students find materials.
Takeaways include (Read the full report):
The Four Takeaways
Primary sources help faculty model practices in their fields and illustrate complex events, ideas, and histories to support student learning.
For instructors in many different disciplines, incorporating primary sources into class activities and assignments is a key element of intellectual engagement, and connects to other exercises essential to course goals. Faculty look for ways to design courses for more effective critical thinking and active learning through hands-on experiences in libraries or in digital environments.
Recommendation for the Library: Formalize the instruction program for teaching with special collections at Brown to include training opportunities for Library staff, faculty, and graduate students, and more coordinated outreach between the Library and other campus centers such as the Sheridan Center.
Review, analyze, and correct exclusionary practices reflected in Library collections.
The way that libraries and archives have collected, cataloged, digitized, and prioritized collections incorporates historical inequities in other areas of academia, history, and our broader culture. Part of the process of decolonizing our collections involves exploring materials in Brown’s repositories, which contain more than just the perspectives of a dominant group, to help instructors and students identify materials that include unmediated or marginalized voices.
Recommendation from the Library: Achieving change requires intentional realignment with campus courses and initiatives that address diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as partnering with faculty to provide new perspectives in instruction to promote active learning with primary sources, adopting non-discriminatory cataloging terms, and being purposeful about what we digitize and make accessible in Open Access.
Collaboration between faculty and librarians provides opportunities for stronger engagement with primary sources in teaching and learning.
Many instructors have not been offered formal training in primary source pedagogy, and feel at sea in navigating complex and emerging library schema to identify primary sources. It is not always clear how faculty can navigate collections or take advantage of library expertise. There is a clear role for librarians working with classes to help bridge existing gaps.
Recommendation from the Library: Create a central online hub to connect instructors with primary source teaching resources that can be used to incorporate class requests, library contacts, and resources for online and physical collections, as well as to create opportunities for instructors to share with and learn from peers. Collaborations between faculty and library staff can mitigate these issues, leading to more productive discovery and more successful, goal-oriented, course design.
Library catalogs, websites, and physical spaces can be confusing or intimidating.
Faculty and students encounter obstacles when attempting to find primary sources through library catalogs and databases, and many perceive special collections libraries to be unwelcoming spaces. Such barriers create confusion and uncertainty for faculty and students attempting to identify and access primary source material. Faculty struggle to teach their students how to search for materials, because they themselves have trouble using library systems to find them.
Recommendation from the Library: The tools and procedures used to access Library collections and services must become more user-friendly for learners and researchers at all levels. The Library needs to respond to calls from the community to modernize library procedures, spaces and terminology to create a more inclusive atmosphere.