Digging Through the Archives

 

One of my favorite projects, and certainly the most challenging project, I undertook was creating a MEMS research guide. After visiting UMBC’s Special Collections archive in the library, Dr. Johnson and I discovered that there were hundreds of medieval and early modern books available for student research. After discussing the best way to advertise the collection, we decided that a research guide – or “brochure” that sorts the available books by date, subject, and location – could be useful for students. However, as the Special Collections is a closed collection, where a call number and title are required for access, creating a list of books for the research guide proved increasingly difficult. While the library luckily has an online database that lists the books in the collection, there were over three hundred MEMS-approved books to sort through (many of which were not in English) – and I quickly realized this would be more difficult than initially anticipated.

The ultimate goal of the project was to help students, who may have been unfamiliar with an archive or in a time crunch, find primary sources for their research without having to comb through the online database. Yet, with the extensive collection UMBC has to offer, finding a way to organize the research guide became a challenge. The first step was to make a list of all the books available, then I sorted them according to academic subject and publication date. Although my initial plan was to create a single-page handout (in brochure format) for every MEMS book in the collection, once I compiled the list, I realized there was no way to fit everything without the guide being over five pages long. Eventually, after several days trying to redesign and reorganize my initial draft, I found that creating several different brochures, organized by subject matter, would be the only way to fit in all the information on a single handout. Although the project took much longer than expected, it was surprisingly rewarding! By the end of the semester, I not only used the brochure for my own research project, but we were also able to send it out to other students to help with their research as well.