Firsthand Learning in the Archives

During the summer and fall semesters of 2025, the Department of Special Collections, Archives and Preservation welcomed more than 20 graduate and undergraduate classes in 10 different academic programs across the University at Albany to the Special Collections Reading Room and Preservation Lab. The department’s instruction efforts are led by Research Services Archivist Melissa McMullen. Students joined Ms. McMullen, her library colleagues, and their professors for primary source instruction sessions, guided collective research experiences, and hands-on workshops.

Some recent highlights with undergraduate courses included students from an advanced English writing workshop visiting the Preservation Lab to create their own poetry chapbooks and a History/Judaic Studies class engaging in a hands-on, material analysis of early modern Jewish books using 18th and 19th century Hebrew, Latin, and Yiddish volumes from our Kosover Collection. Earlier in the fall semester, more than 100 students from the Introduction to the Criminal Justice Process course reviewed correspondence between incarcerated individuals in New York State and the Albany-based Center for Law and Justice whose records our department holds. And it’s never too early for students to begin to learn about primary sources or the University! One First Year Experience course visited the department in September to learn about the history of the University through photographs and take a tour.

Graduate students regularly seek opportunities to work directly with original materials as part of their primary source research. Two separate classes – one from Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies and one from Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies – explored the topics of feminism and ecofeminism in our Latin American and Caribbean Handmade Book Collection. In October, our department also hosted first semester graduate students in the Information Science program who learned more about possible careers in archives, especially digital archives, and records management. In September, Jennifer Kabat, author of Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods, spoke to a Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop about her experience conducting research in the department. The class then reviewed portions of the manuscript collections held here that informed Ms. Kabat’s new book.

Several community groups also recently visited the department. This included the University’s Spanish Immersion Summer Camp, where a group of teenaged campers read and completed an assignment with our Latin American and Caribbean Handmade Book Collection, and the Albany-based Underground Railroad Education Center Summer High School Program. This second cohort completed local history research using a variety of archival and manuscript collections in order to conduct oral histories with Albany Civil Rights leaders from the 1960s and 1970s. For Writing Center Connection Day in November, sponsored by the University’s Writing Center, our department welcomed instructors from high schools in New York’s Capital District who work with students on college assignment preparedness. This group reviewed the records of the English Department and the Writers Institute.