Teaching with Special Collections and Archives

Special Collections and Archives (go/special) offers hands-on, immersive learning with primary sources, the raw materials of artistic, religious, social, scientific, and political history. Working with primary sources encourages students to wrestle with contradictions, compare multiple sources and different points of view, and confront the complexity of the recent and distant past. Our staff can support single visits or continued engagement: a one-time class session; several visits for in-depth investigations; or longer-term research projects, websites, or exhibitions where students work independently over the length of the semester. We can also help students navigate our online collections of over 14,000 photographs, handwritten documents, maps, sound and film recordings, and more more.

Links

• Special Collections & Archives
• Middlebury Special Collections Online Archive
• Why Use Primary Sources? From the Library of Congress
• Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy, published by the American Colleges and Research Libraries section of the American Library Association

Contact info

Rebekah Irwin, Director and Curator

Special Collections Staff Listing