Instruction Consultation for Archives Visits: Why No One Talks About It, and Why They Should

Abstract

Instruction consultation, the process of negotiating a lesson plan with an instructor, plays an important part in the success or failure of a class visit to an archives or special collections library. However, the subject is rarely discussed in the scholarship. This lack of scholarly conversation mirrors and perhaps indicates the dearth of substantive dialogue many archives educators have with instructors during this process. Merely assenting to requests without engaging the instructor to confirm or clarify them can lead to a misunderstanding of the instructor's (and thus the students') needs. This article posits four challenges to productive communication and collaboration with instructors: the recent shift in archives education to active learning; the difficulty expert researchers have understanding the needs of novices; the complex nature of research requests, as exemplified by the reference transaction; and the uneasy relationship between librarians/archivists and teaching faculty. It examines relevant existing scholarship, arguing that a better understanding of these factors helps archives educators think more critically about their practice and formulate strategies for communicating more fruitfully. It also offers points of future research.