PhD Candidate Vincent Longo published an article entitled “Model Archives: Pedagogy’s Role in Creating Diverse, Multidisciplinary Archival Users” in the latest issue of The Moving Image (19.1), as part of a special issue on archives and pedagogy.
The essay challenges the wide-spread assumption that the digitization of archival materials fosters diverse and expanded audiences and users, arguing instead that efforts for greater access can be inconsequential without equal effort to discover and educate new users in navigating, searching, and using the materials. The essay then presents programs designed to teach primary source research to K-12 students as an apt model for how archives and universities can educate and facilitate access to their own materials to a variety of audiences. The essay ends by explaining how the author and his collaborators mobilize these pedagogical approaches in several digital archive projects using material from the Orson Welles Collections at the University of Michigan Special Collection Research Center.
