Findings
About the Study | Participants & Methodology | Documents & Bibliography | Findings
The diagram below summarizes the range of activities relevant to scholarly engagement that the team has observed at the participating institutions so far. During the first year, the team found it useful to distinguish between engagement with scholarly experts already embedded within the archive, who are well grounded in collections-based work, from engagement with outside users whose primary employment is outside the library or archive. Not surprisingly, processing staff tended to be more comfortable with the internal mode of engagement than with interactions with outsiders. However, there was widespread consensus that both types of engagement are important.
It was also useful to break down engagement activities according to a theoretical timetable that the team called the "project lifecycle." Typically, most staff members viewed the "outreach" stage, occurring after processing is complete, as the most opportune time to invest in interactions with scholarly experts, and they tended to structure these interactions more formally, in newsletter articles, conference presentations, symposia, or reference and instruction. However, the team observed engagement activities at all stages of the lifecycle among the sample set of projects, suggesting that a more holistic perspective on engagement with users, incorporated into projects from their very beginnings, is possible, at least in theory. Limiting factors to engagement were primarily related to institutional context (e.g. geographic location, ties to academic institutions, whether the primary user base was local or distant), the cataloging method to be employed (e.g. "more product, less process," etc.), or the nature of the collections (e.g. whether they were closely related to a given subject, or whether handling them required special skills in conservation and preservation). The processing stage seemed to be particularly rich period for informal engagement, both "internal" and "external." The involvement of graduate and undergraduate students in processing was a significant factor in promoting such interactions.
Staff reported a strong desire to improve engagement practices, notably in tracking project outcomes and user needs assessment.
This diagram shows the whole range of activities observed, and should be viewed as a theoretical framework which staff can use to identify opportunities for engagement they have not yet explored. It must be emphasized that no single institution from the study demonstrated engagement initiatives at every project stage.
