Working across Borders: Building Collaborations for Primary Source Instruction

Abstract

Indiana University (IU) Libraries hosts a three-day Primary Source Immersion Program (PSIP) for instructors, to help them integrate primary sources into existing or new courses and foster their students’ information literacy skills in relation to primary sources. PSIP draws on the rich collections of IU Libraries, including University Archives, the Lilly Library for rare books and special collections, and the Herman B Wells Library Map Collections. PSIP began as a collaborative endeavor among instructors, archivists, special collections librarians, teaching librarians and collection managers, and has quickly become a support structure allowing for ongoing collaborations across a large university. This article describes the creation of the Primary Source Immersion Program, including the development of primary source-specific rubrics which were informed by the ACRL Information Literacy Framework and the SAA/RBMS Primary Source Literacy Guidelines. We demonstrate how the pre-PSIP landscape of primary source instruction on campus evolved to be more collaborative after the introduction of PSIP, briefly describe what happens during the three-day workshop, and offer several case studies which highlight resulting semester-long collaborations between instructors and librarians, and provide a rubric developed to assess student learning outcomes. Finally, we discuss future directions for maps/spatial literacy that have grown as a result of PSIP.