Collections Activity

Description: Brainstorm the resource needs of particular courses, content areas, and/or grade levels. Consider areas where current resources are limited, multiple perspectives are not presented, topics that are particularly strong at the Library and topics where primary sources would add value to student investigations. Create a general list of priorities for searching. Types of search goals are presented to participants such as locating unique items to inspire student inquiry, creating a collection of items to consider a theme such as change over time, or organizing collections of collections to challenge students to create multiple connections among primary source items. Participants work in pairs to search through a limited number of collections to find primary source items related to an identified topic that meet a particular search goal. Participants regroup into new pairs and share their knowledge of at least five collections, found items of interest, and search goals. The activity ends with a Galley Walk where participants display one primary source that they would use in their work setting on their computer. All participants walk around the room to view the displayed primary source items and may ask other participants to show them the collection and their search method.

Facilitator will:

  1. Divide participants into groups by grade level or subject taught.
  2. Ask participants to brainstorm subjects and curricular topics where additional resources are needed. Post these ideas on chart paper. Use these lists as guides when searching American Memory so that every participant can search for both themselves and the other participants.
  3. Divide participants into partners from different schools.
  4. Give each pair a list and description of about 10 collections. Use lists of collections divided into elementary and secondary.
  5. Ask participants to look at the list of collections and read the descriptions.
  6. Choose at least 5 collections that may have materials relevant to your school setting. Think about requests from teachers at different grade levels, areas where the students have trouble understanding the curriculum, and areas that currently lack resources. Are there projects that certain grades/classes do every year that might need additional resources?
  7. Offer to assist as participants explore the identified collections. Encourage participants to take time to learn about the collection, read the collection connection or the special presentation/feature if there is one. Search for useful items using synonyms for key words. Try the “Browse this Collection by” to locate items. Use the table to record your results.
  8. Join participants with a new partner, not from their school. Show the new partners collections and items of interest and describe what grade level might find this resource useful and why. Participants may want to take notes on a listing of all of the American Memory Collections in Alphabetical order.
  9. Join partners from schools back together. Share the items found and heard about that might be useful in the school setting. Brainstorm possible uses of these items/collections with students.

Ask all participants to display the most interesting item found. Place a post-it-note on the computer monitor with a two sentence or less description of how this item might be used with students.  All participants walk around in an organized way to view each of the interesting items.