Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Spanning Boundaries To Identify Archival Literacy Competencies, Sharon A. Weiner, Sammie L. Morris, Lawrence J. Mykytiuk

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

This paper is a report of a collaborative research project that identified the competencies undergraduate history majors should have related to finding and using archival materials. The boundary-spanning collaboration involved archivists, librarians, and history faculty.

Historians have long relied upon archives as essential source material, and recent studies confirmed the continued significance of archives to research in this field. However, there is no detailed listing of the archival research competencies that college history students should attain. Without a clearly defined list upon which history faculty, archivists, and library liaisons to history departments agree, teaching about archives research is difficult and …