This morning I went to a great session that included three case studies related to outreach methods. The first, “Master Teachers Seminar at Society of the Cincinnati” was given by Rachel Jirka. She explained that the program began in 2011 and developed into a week long seminar held at the Society. The first program had 7 teachers who participated in workshops to help them develop lesson plans that incorporated primary sources held at the Society into their classroom instruction. The staff at the Society held show and tell sessions to highlight relevant materials, and made themselves available to the teachers for reference assistance in the afternoons.
Rachel believes this program was successful and they’ll be doing it again this summer with 14 teachers. They’ll be putting the teachers into small groups and assigning a librarian to work with each group to facilitate the research process. The staff will also lead a library orientation session to familiarize teachers with handling rare materials, finding and analyzing primary sources in the collection. The program is funded through Society membership dues.
Next was Ken Jaehnig from the Hagley Museum in Delaware. Ken discussed his outreach efforts to promote the Z. Taylor Vinson collection. The collection isn’t processed or available to the public yet, but through a CLIR grant, the museum developed an outreach program to share the collection. The most interesting method they used-to me- was notion of holding information days at the museum, where they invited the public to come to an information booth and hear from archivists about the collection and learn what materials comprise the collection. Of course through that method they could only reach a certain segment of the population that could travel to the physical site.
The last presenters were Sierra Green and Alexis Smith from the Senator John Heinz Historical Center. Sierra described her efforts to enhance the MARC records of hundreds of oral histories that document the local Italian American immigration experience. They then pursued a grant to create a website to share these resources with the world. The site also included related photographs and other documents from the collection. They chose to use omeka.net and created an online exhibit in 2012. They also incorporated lesson plans for the K-12 community. Their site received press attention and demonstrates the increasingly flexibility that an online platform like omeka can offer an institution looking to leverage their unique resources and present them to new audiences.
One of my big take aways from this session was the absence of a cohesive assessment program for outreach methods. It’s all too tempting for all of us (and I’m a perpetrator of this as well) to launch a project and then leave it without a formal assessment to determine its success. When asked about an assessment method, Rachel reflected that we must first define what success looks like for our particular efforts. I agree, and believe we must then create a way to measure that success and impact whether quantitatively or qualitatively.
I watched the recent ARL webinar about assessing digital collections and our current models seem to be to be unsustainable. We must be able to articulate and demonstrate to our key stakeholders the value of these outreach efforts. Hard data is the easiest way to convey the value.
If anyone has documentation for their assessment programs, I would love to hear about it!