Archives and Public History Digital

Curriculum

This page lists the courses currently offered by the Archives and Public History program in the recommended curricular sequence. See also the list of outside courses that might be of interest to Archives and Public History program, or see more information about the program requirements. Note that there is a new curriculum under consideration that may go into effect in Fall 2010.

If you have taken one of the courses below, please consider adding an evaluation of it in the comments on the course’s page.

Semester 1

• Introduction to Archives

  Description

  Introduction to the theory and practice of managing public, private, and institutional archives in the United States. Includes a historical overview of recordkeeping and archives, introduction to bibliographic resources, appraisal, arrangement and description, reference, collection strategies, and the development of the USMARC AMC format.

• Introduction to Public History

  Description

  This course reviews the history, theories, and methodologies of public history from its 19th-century origins through the present.

• Creating Digital History

  Description

  Historians who work with the public, as archivists and public historians do, have a particular need to be comfortable with digital tools and aware of digital issues. This course gives students a basic grounding in the technological skills needed to conduct online historical research and to present the results of historical research online. It also introduces students to issues in digital history such as copyright and intellectual property, how the Web changes the relationship between historians and audiences, and the problems and opportunities of information abundance. Students will research a historical topic of their own devising, producing both an annotated bibliography and an online archive and exhibit.

Semester 1 or 3

• Introduction to Preservation and Reformatting

  Description

  Overview of principles and practices of archives preservation. Examines the physical composition of archival materials in all formats, causal agents that contribute to archival deterioration, the application of appropriate preservation and conservation methods, and various reformatting and rehousing techniques, including digitization. Explores the ways in which archivists select material for preservation, perform condition surveys, develop environmental controls, and formulate disaster planning and recovery programs. Use and access considerations are addressed, as are thetechnical aspects and limitations of various preservation options.

• Historical Editing Seminar
  

  Description

  This seminar in historical editing is designed to introduce students to the theories, practices and problems in editing, digitizing, and publishing historical documents. Students will apply lessons from readings in the development of an edited collection drawn from the Margaret Sanger papers. Students will be organized into groups and create mini-digital editions of a selection of Sanger papers, complete with all prefatory material, transcriptions, annotation, key word list/index/ search methods and other non-textual elements.

• The Historian and the Visual Record

  Description

  This course is designed to familiarize students with recent scholarship addressing visual sources, with increasingly prevalent digital collections of visual materials, and with the variety of visual records found in archival and museum collections. The structure of the course will follow a chronology of American history from the colonial period to the 20th century. Students will build visual literacy and gain an understanding of various visual media, including paintings, prints, daguerreotypes, photographs, and advertisements, in order to explore how visual sources enrich historical scholarship. We will address archival techniques for cataloguing and preserving visual records. Throughout this course, students will evaluate how visual sources alter and augment historical interpretation of the American past.

Semester 1, 2, or 3

• Readings in Archives and Public History (independent study)

  Description

  Directed individual or small-group readings concerning a selected topic involving public history or archival theory and practice, developed in conjunction with the course instructor.

• Research in Archives and Public History (independent study)

  Description

  Directed individual or small-group readings, research, and writing concerning a selected topic involving public history or archival theory and practice, developed in conjunction with the course instructor.

• Topics in Archives and Public History

  Description

  In-depth reading, discussion, exercises, and assignments on one important aspect of archives or public history. Examples include the historian and the visual record, material culture, history and public policy, oral history, historical documentaries, archival systems, archiving and preserving digital media, archiving and preserving photographic collections, and archives in the age of Web 2.0.

Semester 2

• Approaches to Public History

  Description

  A reading-intensive review of some of the major methods in public history: teaching and learning, oral history, public policy history, and film and media (historical documentaries). Students also gain hands-on experience with such activities as creating lesson plans and conducting oral history interviews.

• Internship Seminar

  Description

  Students enrolled in this course complete a 120-hour practicum at a selected archival repository or public history site.

• History in the New Media

  Description

  This course will introduce the ideas, techniques and complexities of creating digital history texts and web sites. It will introduce standards and best practices for digitization and explain the basic steps to designing and implementing digital projects in an archives or public history setting. The focus of the course is not on technical work, but on the intellectual work of designing digital projects.

• Institutional Archives

  Description

  Traces the rise of modern bureaucratic organizations—businesses, governments, and nonprofits—and their relationship to the documentary record. Examines the history of recordkeeping; the records and information needs of businesses, nonprofits, and governments; records management theory and practice; and the challenges posed by electronic records.

Semester 3

• Advanced Archival Description

  Description

  This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of advanced archival descriptive techniques. Focuses on the development and use of bibliographic standards to create and exchange data concerning historical records. Particular emphases include the MARC AMC format; introduction to such Web-compatible technologies as Standard Generalized Markup Language and Extensible Markup Language; the history, development, and future of Encoded Archival Description; and the administrative and technical considerations involved in digital reformatting.

• Research Seminar (capstone)

  Description

  Students enrolled in this course will either a) write an article-length essay ready to be submitted to a journal, b) build an online archive and/or exhibit, c) prepare a significant print or online edition of historical documents, or d) finish another substantial original project to be published in print, published online, or otherwise made publicly available. Students work independently but meet periodically in a group to share their progress.