Collecting Student Records

Aside from processing the Ruth C. Engs papers for my internship, I will also be spending a significant amount of time working on a project to collect the records of IU student groups.  The student records project is a collaboration between the IU Archives and the IU Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists that gives SLIS students the opportunity to get first-hand experience in seeking out records, participating in records appraisal, and processing collections.  Since I am also the Outreach Chair for the IU SAA chapter, the archives has asked me to spend some of my time at my internship organizing this project as well, and this has been especially helpful and convenient, considering that the project is a collaboration between the student chapter and the IU Archives.

Yesterday, we held our first general meeting for the project.  Students who expressed interest in participation met with me, Amy Jankowski (our student chapter president), Dina, and Phil Bantin, the head archivist at IU.  Dina spoke to all of us about some of our general objectives and more specifically about what types of records we are most interested in collecting.  Then, we established that our first goals would be to revise our form letter used for contacting student group representatives and to identify a list of student groups that we would like to contact first.  Focusing on smaller groups of organizations at one time makes the project more manageable.  We also got a chance to brainstorm and discuss a variety of organizations we would be interested in approaching.  We have an enthusiastic group of students interested in working on the project and it promises to be a successful year of student record collecting!

I will also be creating a video that will be used to help students understand and become familiar with the concept of an archives and to persuade members of student organizations to consider donating their records.  After discussing the video at the meeting yesterday, we have established that the video should be relatively short (3-5 minutes), show students the repository itself, show students interesting records of student organizations and student life from the past, and explain to viewers the value of student records in general.  If any archives friends or general readers have any further ideas or suggestions about any aspect of the video project, feel free to comment on this post.  It would be great to have feedback and ideas from others!