We are happy to work with you in developing questions/prompts to encourage students to engage in a close reading and/or examination of an object.  In-class activities and questions can help guide students in their approach to studying select items/objects to extract meaning and context. Curating or co-curating (with you) items that contain high-interest topics or materials that directly relate to your topic will further engage and spark student interest.

A&SC will assist you in creating an assignment or extra-credit that encourages students to refine their concise writing skills, provides opportunity to reflect on an object, offers prospects to research and develop an argument, and share student work.  We developed specifications for writing blogs and are happy to feature student-generated work on various ULS social media outlets.

The University of Pittsburgh Library System’s (ULS) Digital Interactive Wall encourages the enjoyment and study of collections by raising awareness of materials and services in Archives & Special Collections.

Visitors are encouraged to explore extensive content from the archival and specialized collections through galleries, timelines, a book reader and a 3D object explorer. Through an intricate web of hotspots, visitors can follow an infinite variety of paths with stories, fun facts, videos, and music.

With its large scale, up to six users can explore concurrently.

A&SC has 5 digital microscopes available for class use.  Digital microscopes magnify significant physical features in an object that may shed light on its’ creation or use.  The microscopes amplify fine details encouraging students to identify and study the materiality of paper, ink, and printing methods.

Students may wish to transcribe existing oral histories. The assigment could include transcribing all or part of an oral history with a follow up exercise such as creating an exhibit, blog post, presentation, or poster project that relates the interview to content being covered in the course subject.

As we transcribe audiovisual content, it is important to keep in mind that both the recording and the resulting transcript are equally valuable. The goal of the transcript is to enhance the audiovisual recording, and not to supplant it. When transcriptions are created, we need to make efforts to record what is being said accurately. Our goal is to produce the best possible representation of what we hear. This means we capture what the speaker says the way it is said and resist the urge to edit the transcript if, for instance, what is said is grammatically incorrect. The transcript may have a note stating just this, 

The following is a verbatim transcript of what was spoken in the recording. Our best efforts have been made to capture and represent the interview in its entirety, though there is the possibility of error.

A&SC has guidelines in place to help create transcripts according to current best practices. 

The body of a  transcript may look something like this:

Carolyn S. Schumacher [Schumacher]:This is March 4th, 1988. Carolyn Sutton interviewed by Carolyn Schumacher.

[Pause]

Schumacher: Well let’s start talking about your early education, where you lived and where you went to school, and your family, and how many children were you know--

Carolyn Sutton [Sutton]: Yeah, uh huh. Well, I grew up in Sewickley and I went to Sewickley Academy and that's clear through tenth grade, which is when it stopped. And it was the rather odd little community school, in a way. Why, when it stopped at tenth grade, the,  I would say 95 percent of the student body went away to boarding schools. And I did that for two years, and--a--and that was just the time--oh you want to know family too--mother and father and I had two sisters, 8 and 10 years older than I was; that was the size of the family. And we had always lived in the--we’re all from western Pennsylvania, both sides of the family. In fact, if you want a little aside issue, my mother’s mother had 84 first cousins in the area [laughs]. [Schumacher: That’s still a lot of people.] 64 of them were one--from our father’s family, but anyway, that’s not part of this. Uh, let’s see, what do you want to know? 

We offer opportunities for students to curate exhibits drawn from the A&SC collections in our virtual and physical gallery spaces as part of a course requirement or internship.  Student curators work closely with A&SC staff to determine a theme or approach to the exhibit, perform independent research, select objects from A&SC collections, write interpretive text, plan the installation, and may offer public gallery talks.  These exhibits may be designed in conjunction with curricula and may vary in size and scope.  A&SC staff are available to help develop or focus your ideas to build a virtual exhibit on the Digital Interactive Wall or other online platform, as well as the physical museum exhibitions in the gallery.