Model Archives: Pedagogy’s Role in Creating Diverse, Multidisciplinary Archival Users

The need for greater levels of access (to primary sources and for users) has become a mantra for archival organizations since the digitization boom of the mid-to late 2000s.¹ The “greater access” movement’s democratic underpinnings have served as the motivation for innovations in descriptive and organizational practices, for reforming privacy and copyright restrictions,and— most often— forlarge-scale digitization projects.² Of course, the push for access is hardly a new phenomenon; important efforts date back at least to the 1930s.³ What is new about contemporary paradigms of archival access, however, is their explicit attention to the value of diversity in archival users and uses. This is increasingly also found in both organizational guidelines for archives and scholarship about archives. For example, in his essay “Points of Origin: Discovering Ourselves through Access,” Rick Prelinger describes a “good” archive as one that “seeks out new users and new user communities.”⁴ Likewise, Kate Theimer’s book Reference and Access: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections calls “expanding our audiences . . . [one of] the defining characteristics of the archival profession in the early twenty-first century.”⁵

To bring more diverse categories of users into archives, the limits of current paradigms of archival access must be addressed. Recent digitization efforts have exposed otherwise hidden collections to millions of additional potential users. Overhauling descriptive and arrangement practices, digital metadata, out-reach programs, and physical and online accessibility for differently abled people have allowed users to discover archival materials, realize their value, and facilitate their use. However, pedagogy has almost entirely been overlooked as a crucial factor for access, one that can support many (if not all) of the goals related to access. Indeed, this essay argues that greater digital or physical access to archival materials is inconsequential without training in how to navigate and find archives (even online archives) and education in how to use them.

In scholarly literature, the fostering of diverse and expanded audiences is often seen as an inevitable by-product of greater access, usually achieved through ubiquitous online description and large-scale digitization.⁶ The operative assumption is that as more material becomes digitally available, new or nontraditional but nevertheless “interested”—the word used most often—communities and individuals will inevitably gravitate to archival collections. The all-too-common usage of “interested people” as the amorphous target of diversification efforts implies that an archivist’s role is not to generate interest or claim a collection’s relevance to the work of nontraditional users, as their interest already exists without further intervention. It also assumes that a key limitation on new usage is the restriction of physical or digital access to materials. Certainly facilitating digital access has generated millions of additional users and uses and new desire for access. However, these uses are generally measurable statistically only as undifferentiated downloads. Thus we cannot really determine whether digitization has produced significant numbers of new users or uses or whether existing users have simply made significantly greater use of these materials for existing purposes. The assumption that digitization necessarily yields diversity is misguided because it suggests that diversity is only found outside the geographical confines of the archives and/or with users unable to find the archive digitally. It also suggests that diversity depends on digitizing additional types of material in the hope that it will attract user groups who have thus far been uninterested. Paying attention largely to these factors ignores other groups of people who could potentially discover archival materials but cannot use them because the people lack the foundational and operational knowledge needed to do so.

For this reason, discussions of access must be closely intertwined with discussions of actual, measurable, and impactful use, especially when discussing the diversity of archival users. Archival collections might be openly accessible, but the real measure of diversity will be the people and projects by whom, and for which, they are used. Measuring an archival institution’s or individual collection’s use across disciplines, I would argue, is an especially apt method to determine the institutional value of media studies–related collections...