RIC Sleuths Unravel Mysterious Objects in Archives, Then Share Findings in Podcast
Each year Associate Professor and Reference Librarian Amy Barlow teaches a First Year Seminar course titled “Raid the Collections.”
First she selects five fascinating objects from Adams Library Special Collections. Then she asks her students to research the stories behind them. This fall, they explored:
1) The leaves of a 16th-century book of woodcut prints
2) A guidebook to gay Boston, circa 1980s
3) The 19th-century marriage license of Ada and Franklin Edmonds
4) A paper folding book
5) A watercolor painting of Caroline DiOrio, circa 1940
Her 22 students – all freshmen – broke up into five groups, with each group using what Barlow calls the “objects-based approach” in researching their object.
Barlow explains that in traditional research, you start with a topic and try to find evidence to back it up. With the objects-based approach, most often used by museum educators, you start with the object.
“You don’t know anything about the object, you don’t really have a research question nor a line of inquiry,” she says. “You examine the object, you begin to pose questions about it and then you try to learn what you can about it based on that initial, tactile examination.”
For example, with the paper folding book, there was no information on file about it. No one knows how it got into Special Collections, what purpose it served or where and when it was produced. Barlow’s students worked on solving these questions.
The object-based approach helps students develop their critical thinking skills, their creativity and their ability to work collaboratively.
“They’re doing real research, they’re communicating their findings in a format that is interesting and they’re learning skills that they can take into other courses,” says Barlow.
For the final project, each group was required to create an episode for a podcast based on their research. They could either 1) talk about their research process, 2) talk about one piece of the puzzle that fell into place for them or 3) present a historical narrative about their object.
“The important thing is that they present their research in a way that is interesting to a podcast audience,” Barlow says. “Thanks to the support from Assistant Professor Veronica Denison, these podcasts will become a permanent part of Adams Library’s Special Collections for preservation and online access.”
Listen to the “Raid the Collections” podcast on RIC Digital Collections, Acast, and Spotify. Each episode is five minutes or less in length.
“I enjoyed the research process,” notes Barlow’s student Trevor Salmans, “I also enjoyed audio editing as I’m interested in that sort of thing for my personal projects. I’d like to bring the research and editing techniques I learned into future projects.”
Student Gleny Vargas says, “What I liked was the hands-on learning – being able to see and touch what I was going to research. I liked understanding the history behind my artifact and other cool unexpected facts. We had a good group, and we were able to work together. I worked on the podcast script and had to decide what information was relevant for others to know and what info wasn’t. I loved recording the podcast.”
Student Ibrahim Sinyan adds, “Trying to research an artifact with virtually no written information or background on it was hard, but we did it!”
Amy Barlow is a 2022 Scholar of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship, a past Rhode Island Council for the Humanities grant recipient and a past American Library Association Emerging Leader. She is the author of numerous articles, including a recent piece about pairing texts and podcasts in the classroom, published in “College and Research Library News.” She enjoys teaching students how to approach their research with equal parts creativity, discipline and resourcefulness.