Name/Title
Students Collaborate to CollectDescription
Illinois College
Jacksonville, IL
When Illinois College (IC) in Jacksonville, Illinois shifted to remote learning in mid-March 2020, the Khalaf Al Habtoor Archives, as part of IC’s museum, archives, and special collections, implemented Archive Your Story. The student-led initiative is designed to document the campus community’s COVID-19 experience by collecting handmade, born digital, and oral history records. With its oral history component, the initiative invites community members to share their story in their own voice through short, guided audio and/or audio-visual conversations. In spring and summer, undergraduates enrolled in IC’s paid student work program attended remote training sessions, meetings, and conducted and transcribed oral histories. Students continue to serve as project leaders and stakeholders during the 2020-21 academic year.
Student leadership on IC’s Archive Your Story initiative builds upon previous student-led projects with IC collections, but it marks the first time that the museum, archives, and special collections have engaged and employed undergraduate students for 100% remote work and research. The process provided a framework for future remote work, internships, and overall engagement. One immediate impact of the initiative is it allowed our project team to remain meaningfully connected to one another as we collaborated to collect through video meetings and training sessions. Additionally, organizational policies and procedures developed and refined as a result of Archive Your Story have created guidelines and a practical template for other collections-based future initiatives. For example, in Fall 2020, the museum, archives, and special collections collaborated with IC students enrolled in RE214 Healing & Healthcare to conduct a remote project documenting COVID-19 campus health and safety modifications.
As Illinois College navigates the 2020-2021 academic year, the museum, archives, and special collections remain poised to support both onsite and virtual student engagement and learning with historic collections, combining traditional hands-on experiences with deliberate digital engagement. IC's Archive Your Story initiative creatively utilizes limited resources to implement sustainable methods of serving campus community stakeholders. The evolving initiative also allows our team to continue to pilot new institutional and student-centered approaches to digitally collecting, preserving, and sharing history.
