LIS 2222 ARCHIVAL APPRAISAL, DESCRIPTION, AND ACCESS

This course is organized in three parts and will provide students with an introduction to the critical archival responsibilities of archival appraisal, description, and access. In the first section of the course, we will engage with archival appraisal. The archivist's process in determining continuing value affects all other archival functions and impacts individual, organizational, and societal memory. Because of its significance for both archival work and society, appraisal has been the function most debated and subjected to experiments with new methodologies and theoretical models. This course will survey these models and, through an experiential project, delve deeply into one model in particular: documentation strategy. 1 Representing archival materials and providing access to them are core functions of the archival profession. Archivists do this with access systems that incorporate descriptive standards, data structures, controlled vocabularies, and increasingly, digital tools. The ways in which archives are described and represented influence the ways that users, such as historians, lawyers, and policymakers access, engage with, and understand the historical record. In the second section of this course, students will engage with archival descriptive standard and archival management systems, as well as debates and theories in the representation of information. Finally, we'll consider strategies for raising the level of access for an archival collection, paying particular attention to the creation of digital exhibits.

Academic Career: Graduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: Grad LG/SNC Basis
Course Requirements: PREQ: LIS 2220
Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3

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