Digital technology has fundamentally altered the archival, public history and editing landscapes. New media have, in many ways, promoted a convergence of these various fields. Archivists, public historians and historical editors all face increasing demands to make analog resources available online, to manage and preserve born-digital materials and to incorporate social networking technologies into their products.
Professionals within these fields also necessarily need to integrate new media and advanced technology into their daily work. Archivists, editors and public historians increasingly find themselves educating students and researchers remotely through their web sites, as well as helping to develop online curricular materials for use in secondary school and undergraduate classrooms. Each profession has struggled—too often independently and in isolation—with the need to provide better metadata and explanatory materials so that their users can access and understand digital collections.
All three professions are confronting the challenges of mastering new media, working collaboratively and effectively with information technology staff without allowing such services to drive their programs, and ensuring the long-term preservation of born-digital materials.1
1 A growing body of archival literature, evident in such traditional professional journals as The American Archivist and Archivaria, as well in such newer e-publications as D-LIB, Wired, and First Monday, addresses these issues and concerns. The recent book by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
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Preparing students for careers in archives, public history and historical editing has also become far more challenging. For generations, archivists learned to process and describe collections, public historians to create museum exhibits and film documentaries, historical editors to transcribe, annotate and publish primary source materials in print format. The products created by these scholars and professionals were aimed at a small and well-defined audience—the researchers consulting an archival collection, visiting a museum or scouring a print edition of documents. But as archives, museums and editing projects venture onto the World Wide Web, the tools of their trade are becoming more diverse, more challenging, and rapidly changing. Their audiences, previously a relatively known quantity, have expanded to the billions around the globe who have internet access. Preparing students to participate and thrive in a technologically complex and competitive world, as their products vie for attention alongside with those of enthusiastic, but untrained, amateurs has become a major challenge for educators as more and more cultural heritage and memory institutions seek to make their analog material available online.
Professional associations, grant agencies and employers recognize the need for greater emphasis on digital skills in professional education. The Society of American Archivists has, since 2002, required that “Digital Records and Access Systems” be a core contextual element of archival training, specifically noting that archival educators need to “include information on the development of new media formats and document genres, and changing information technologies for the creation, maintenance, and use of records and papers.”2 A 2007 survey of history-based archival education programs, however, found that most failed to adjust to these changing professional expectations.3 In public history education, programs lag behind their information science colleagues when it comes to integrating digital technology with scholarship. A few exceptions, notably George Mason
Press, 2006), is addressed specifically to historians and offers an excellent overview of the salient issues. See also: Kate Theimer, Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2010).
2 “Guidelines for a Graduate Program in Archival Studies,” Society of American Archivists (approved January 2002 and revised in 2005 and 2011), http://www.archivists.
org/prof-education/ed_guidelines.asp.
3 Joseph M. Turrini, “The Historical Profession and Archival Education,” AHA Perspectives 45, no. 5 (2007): 47–49.
3. Teaching Digital Skills in an Archives and Public History Curriculum 81 University and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, prove that it is possible to integrate new media, history, and technology, but the difference between these two leading edge programs and the typical history department is stark.
Recent curricular surveys of the public history field contain virtually no discussion of technology or digital issues, despite the fact that such studies also document the fact that employers expect program graduates to possess precisely the blend of technological, collaborative, and administrative skills that immersion in digital history might provide.4
But students need more than a basic grounding in digital tools. They must still master their core professional skill sets: historiographical content, museological approaches and information theory. They also require practical immersion in such tasks as processing archival collections, curating museum exhibitions, and transcribing and annotating historical documents. They further need to engage with historical research and master some content area. In most graduate programs, this must be accomplished within the temporal constraints of a two-year masters program. If programs fail to provide real-world job skills, graduates will continue to face gloomy employment prospects.
As educators need to carefully balance theoretical, practical and digital skills in their programs, program managers struggle with complex issues in trying to redesign curricula and keep programs current: Which skills do students really need? Should mastering a minimum set of digital skills constitute a graduation requirement? Should programs incorporate specific software programs and tools into their curriculum or should they focus primarily on underlying concepts? Should purely technical skills, such as learning HTML or programming be incorporated into history degrees? This chapter details the New York University archives and public history program’s experiences in reconfiguring a long-standing program and integrating digital skills throughout its curriculum.
4 For example, see Philip M. Katz, Retrieving the Master’s Degree from the Dustbin of History (report to the Members of the American Historical Association, 2005); Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Characteristics of Public History Programs, Fall 2005” (report by the Curriculum Committee and Training Committee of the National Council on Public, 2006); and, Marla Miller, “Playing to Strength: Teaching Public History at the Turn of the 21st-Century,” American Studies International 42 (2004): 174–212.
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