INLS 754

Community Outreach, Access & Public Service

I taught this class in the first full semester after the pandemic shut down the university to in-person classes. In the Fall 2020 semester, I was initially slated to teach two seminar classes: INLS 754 and INLS 768 (? Community Archiving?). But because we had a faculty member trapped in Copenhagen and unable to teach, I agreed to teach two sections of INLS 520 (consolidated into one section), INLS 697, and made INLS 754 a dual class, consolidating the two original seminar classes into one. Students who wanted to take the community archiving class registered for an independent study, but met at the time that this class was scheduled. I did this because I knew that there were a number of students who were graduating in Fall 2020 and really wanted the community archiving class.

My vision of this course was originally that, as a class, we would develop a community archive around a Twitter “archive” of police brutality developed by Greg Doucette, but the students were hesitant to immerse themselves in that material for the entire semester. So, we went through a process to discover what the SILS community archive would be. The students taking the community archiving section would use the design thinking process to develop technical infrastructure, collection development, metadata, privacy, or community guideline policies. Students taking the community outreach section would choose a context (higher-ed / K-12 / museums) and use the design thinking process to develop collection development (that is, how to get the community to donate materials), educational and community outreach activities for the community archive.

The archive we built focused on the SILS community’s creative output during the pandemic. SILS has a lot of creative people, and during the lockdown (going on 6 months at the beginning of the semester), many of the people in our community made lots of things, ranging from prints and drawings, to embroidery and knitting, to music and theater productions. This was to be a collection of those things.

My position on seminar classes is that students take these classes because the topic is important to them; and because it’s important, they have opinions and needs in terms of what they want to read, and what they want to accomplish. With that in mind, for readings I created two Zotero collections: one on community archives and another on archival outreach (I can share, but need a Zotero username because files are linked), and told students to find one article to read per week, or a community outreach / archive site to review, and write a brief summary on our class blog which we would then discuss. Classes consisted of discussion of readings and collections, and group work to develop the policies and outreach activities.

I tried to give students in this class an experience of developing policies, guidelines, and outreach activities in a real-world situation. The original idea was to build a community archive that could be used by the SILS community in perpetuity. However, students developed community and privacy policies that would have been difficult to implement and impossible to administer, so the site could never go live. Students were not open to any constructive criticism of these policies. I felt like I couldn’t realistically implement their policies and couldn’t write my own and still call it a community archive. So, the project died when the class ended. It was a disappointing end to an anxiety-filled semester.

Syllabi