Responses to Questions Concerning Research

by Peter J. Wosh, New York University

1. What barriers are there to research in your institution — for you and for students?

Perhaps the best way to address this issue is to sketch an outline of the program generally. Students at New York University combine either an M.A. in history or a Ph.D. in history with a New York State Certificate in Archival Management and Historical Editing. The "certificate," it should be noted, indicates that the program has been registered with, and approved by, the New York State Board of Regents, and is not related to the Society of American Archivists’ individual certification program. For full-time M.A. students, the program generally takes two years to complete. Students are required to select 24 credits in history (including a research seminar) and 20 credits in archival management. The 24 history credits also generally include a series of courses that are relevant to archivists, such as: Introduction to Historical Editing, Oral History, Media and History, and similar offerings. Historical research seminars focus on very general topics that afford maximum flexibility, and some (such as one on "Memory and Identity") examine issues that contain special relevance for prospective archivists. The archival courses include a two-semester, eight-credit introductory overview of the profession, which contains a strong internship component. A series of topical electives structured around more specific archival issues round out the program and include: The Archivist and the Visual Record; Automated Descriptive Techniques; HTML, SGML, and EAD; Preservation Management; Non-Print Resources; Reference and Bibliographic Resources, etc. In addition, several individually directed research courses are arranged with appropriate faculty.

History Ph.D. students may elect either to complete the certificate program, or to use archival management as a minor concentration within their doctoral studies. Obviously, Ph.D. students pursue a much more rigorous research agenda as part of their overall training since an ultimate goal of their program is to produce a publishable dissertation. Along the way, Ph.D. students are assigned to a variety of teaching and research assistantships in the department, two of which are reserved for ongoing historical editing projects: the Papers of Margaret Sanger and the Papers of Jacob Leisler. In addition to the archival course work, Ph.D. students enroll in a series of research seminars, designed primarily to introduce them to theoretical, methodological, and historiographical research issues. This constitutes a fairly standard program for doctoral students.

Instruction in all classes (archival and historical) is based on a seminar-style approach. Classes are intentionally small. The department aims for an incoming class of approximately 25 graduate students per year (including Ph.D. students, general M.A. students, archival management students, and public history students). We accept approximately 6 or 7 students per year in the archives program, and class sizes never exceed 15 individuals. This means, of course, that a considerable amount of mentoring takes place from the point of entry. It also allows an extraordinary amount of interaction between students and faculty, and a very personalized approach to instruction. Further, since students proceed through the program as a cohort, there is considerable opportunity for collaborative projects. Philosophically, the program emphasizes this type of interactive "team approach" to the research process. Too often, Ph.D. research is viewed as an isolated activity, undertaken by a single individual seeking to make her own "unique" contribution to scholarship. In fact, collaborative skills are much more important both within the workplace and society generally. Every effort is made to have students work in groups, develop cooperative projects, and collaborate throughout their graduate school careers.

Faculty are drawn almost exclusively from New York University, with a judicious use of adjuncts. The multidisciplinary nature of the program also contributes to the variety of research techniques and projects that students encounter. As full-time director of the program, a research component is built into my job description, and I am expected to actively engage in research as well as in teaching. Other full-time faculty have similar arrangements. Esther Katz, for example, teaches the historical editing course and also serves as full-time editor for the Papers of Margaret Sanger, an ongoing project that has received substantial NEH, NHPRC, and private funding. The project is involved in producing print, microform, and electronic editions of the Sanger Papers, and students taking this course conduct collaborative research projects that result in "mini-editions." Barbara Abrash, who has taught the "Media and History" course, is an accomplished historical film maker who co-directs NYU’s prestigious Center for Media, Culture and History, and students in her course produce some type of multimedia history project. Rachel Bernstein, an oral historian assigned to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, always structures her class around a collaborative oral history venture. Nancy Cricco, the full-time NYU Archivist, teaches the EAD, SGML, and HTML course. She involves students in considering broad administrative and implementation issues, as well as in the more mechanical process of marking up archival finding aids for placement on the NYU Archives’ web site. In addition, several students have been involved in researching and creating exhibits on the site, including "Around the Square," an examination of Washington Square Park in history and myth, and a photographic essay concerning student protest at New York University in the 1960s. For these type of projects, students engage in historical research and familiarize themselves with digitization issues, technological considerations, and exhibit design problems. So, in general, I think the fact that the program draws on faculty from the history department, the library, and other divisions within NYU serves as an important strength that allows for collaboration and also introduces students to a range of research techniques and opportunities.

One other aspect of the program also enhances research opportunities: location in New York City. An extraordinary array of public, corporate, nonprofit, cultural, and academic archives exist throughout the City, and all sorts of collaborative possibilities attract both students and faculty. A couple of examples may provide some context. In Fall 1997, the Library Director of the College of Insurance approached me about a planned digitization project at that institution. The College, which serves as a major informational resource for the insurance industry, maintains a comprehensive special library that extensively documents the history and practice of insurance. After discussing institutional needs, we framed a project whereby two graduate students in the archives program worked under my supervision to prepare a digitization feasibility study for the College’s Board of Trustees. This two-semester project involved the students in examining the available academic literature, compiling brief case studies of comparable digitization projects elsewhere, examining the College’s holdings in detail, and preparing a cost-benefit analysis. The students gained valuable administrative experience, learned how to apply theory to a real-life situation, and also gained experience in translating research into an administrative document suitable for senior management. They received academic credit for a directed research course, and also created a policy document that served as a blueprint for grant proposals and an ongoing project at the College.

Similarly, St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Episcopal Church approached me during the past year about that congregation’s upcoming 200^th anniversary. Although the Church attracted some of New York’s wealthiest communicants throughout the nineteenth century, its recent history has focused much more on social activism, an innovative poetry and performing arts program, and a very inclusive ministry that welcomes communicants of all ethnic groups, racial backgrounds, and sexual orientations. Again, I structured a research project for a student whereby she worked with the Church’s anniversary committee over the course of two semesters in order to survey the extensive archival holdings, write an administrative consulting report on preserving historical resources, and prepare a series of anniversary exhibits/programs that appropriately celebrated the history of this diverse and interesting neighborhood congregation. Throughout the process, the student necessarily blended archival theory, historical research, and administrative considerations together in a program that helped bring history alive for the congregation. Similar collaborative projects have been undertaken by the Archival Management program over the years with a variety of venerable New York institutions, including St. Vincent’s Medical Center, the American Bible Society, Covenant House, and many others.

My purpose in citing and describing these programs is two-fold. First, archival educators need to take an entrepreneurial approach to their surroundings. The most useful research projects for students are those that result in "real" contributions to some specific problem or program. A broad range of collaborative opportunities exist with a wide range of local institutions and organizations. Too often, archival educators have focused exclusively on introductory arrangement and description projects, and neglected collaborative research endeavors for more advanced graduate students. These possibilities exist and should be explored. Second, there is a need to reach out beyond the immediate institution. Although we have structured other research projects within the NYU milieu, using ongoing programs in the University Archives and the Wagner Labor Archives, it is important to move beyond academia and operate outside our immediate sponsoring institutions in order to provide students with a sense of the diversity and breadth of archival possibilities that exist. It is also important, of course, to tightly control such experiences and to make sure that students are not viewed as clerical unskilled labor by institutional partners that do not share our educational mission. Smaller programs that can exercise close control over internships and research seminars have an advantage here, but these collaborative programs do require lots of work, close on-site coordination between educators and institutional administrators, and careful monitoring of student progress. The effort, however, is worth it and perhaps constitutes the most valuable component of archival training.

One other comment concerning this initial question involves the question of funding, resources, and technology. Virtually all of the graduate funding at NYU goes to Ph.D. matriculants, although some money exists for M.A. students in the archives program. We have worked out a couple of arrangements whereby one student per year receives a two-year fellowship to the program, and is required to work 20 hours per week in the University Archives in exchange for full tuition and an annual stipend. Similarly, NYU recently entered into a cooperative multi-year arrangement with the New-York Historical Society, funded through a Mellon Grant, whereby the Bobst Library will help coordinate a retrospective cataloguing project for the N-YHS’s print and visual resources. Summer fellowships for archives students have been built into that grant, and an additional fellowship (similar to the one described above) has been made available to the program for a student to work part-time on a digitization project at the N-YHS. These kinds of fellowships, that combine tuition remission with on-site work, have proven extraordinarily successful and the students who hold them invariably move on to archival careers. Again, these types of partnerships are important. In terms of technological infrastructure, our program benefits from close relationships with Bobst Library staff, as well as with the Academic Computing Facility at NYU, which has an extensive Humanities Computing Program. Building these links is critical for program success.

2. What is the role of research in a professional program?

As I hopefully have made clear in my response to the first question, I think introducing students to research is critical for the success of any professional program. Research needs to be built into the teaching process, and one of the most important skills that we can communicate to students involves the way in which one structures, executes, and supports a research project. There really is no dichotomy between teaching and research, except for situations where faculty become so involved in large research undertakings that they become inaccessible to students, and in situations where student labor is used primarily to further faculty careers. As long as research is integrated carefully into the learning process, and students are viewed as collaborators rather than a source of "free labor," these dangers should not exist.

Given the variety of uses that researchers make of archival material, prospective archivists require exposure to a broad range of research techniques. Informed appraisal decisions require a sophisticated understanding of use. As we move toward an understanding of archives as "evidence," we need to ask the question: evidence for what? Archivists who lack knowledge of contemporary social science techniques, anthropological approaches, and cultural theory cannot really "make sense" of their holdings and will operate at a distinct disadvantage, both in their dealings with academic researchers and in satisfying their own institutional research needs. Historical training has an important role to play here, because historical methodology borrows freely from a host of theoretical breakthroughs in other disciplines. In my own specialty of American religion, for example, it would be inconceivable to teach a history of religion course without incorporating a lively literature that draws on approaches from material culture, performance studies, cultural anthropology, postmodernism, and feminist theory. An intense engagement with — or at least a working familiarity with — research methods in such fields is most appropriate. And, the best way to understand research is to actually do research.

Is it important to have a doctoral program in the archival and records management areas?

I think that archival management is a very appropriate field of concentration in a range of doctoral fields, such as those in history and information science, and it now serves precisely that purpose in a number of the most extensive graduate programs. One of the strengths of the archives field concerns its inherent multidisciplinarity. The Society of American Archivists’ M.A.S. guidelines implicitly acknowledge this in the wide-ranging discussion of contextual knowledge necessary for archival education programs. The research methods used by archival students and theorists do not seem to me specifically "archival" in any meaningful sense. Rather, archivists borrow established methodological techniques from a broad range of academic disciplines (historical, ethnographic, sociological, social science, information science, etc.), and apply them in order to resolve archival questions.

A doctorate in archives raises intriguing possibilities and deserves further study. Does a substantial body of theoretical literature now exist to support such a program? Although our literature has grown in quantity and sophistication in recent years, do we still focus too much on applied and practical technique? On purely practical grounds, does a need for another Ph.D. degree exist? A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article noted the growing trend within colleges and universities to create highly focused master’s programs that combine academic theory with professional training. The M.A. degree has emerged as a useful entry-level requirement for most archival positions advertised in professional journals, and I wonder whether this master’s model might not work best for archivists. Clearly, there has been some expansion in the archival educator ranks during recent years, thus arguing for the viability of Ph.D. work. Does this truly represent a trend, however, or is it merely an idiosyncratic development? The answer may not become obvious for several more years. At present, virtually all archival educators bring substantial administrative and work experience into the classroom setting. This strikes me as a strength of our professional training, and has helped archival educators overcome the social isolation that often handicap academics’ ability to connect with a broader public. The overwhelming majority of our graduates will continue to pursue employment in non-teaching and non-research positions. They will confront a workplace that is rapidly changing, owing to both technological imperatives and shifting managerial roles. Educators need to immerse themselves in workplace and organizational realities. The most effective type of research involves collaborative endeavors between the academic and public/corporate/nonprofit sectors. In sum, I favor a cautionary approach that recognizes the multidisciplinary character of archival training, remains sensitive to the fact that some of the best archival research occurs in non-academic institutions and responds to business pressures, and does not move too fast in trying to create a pure archive Ph.D. tract when alternative models for archival concentrations within other Ph.D. programs already exist.

Is it desirable for master’s students to be involved in faculty research?

I believe it is highly desirable for master’s students to be involved and engaged in faculty research. Again, one of the weaknesses of the archival profession generally involves the fact that working archivists (even those in academic settings) do not view research as an essential component of their ongoing responsibilities. Workplace pressures sometimes dictate this, but we need to produce working archivists who think carefully and broadly about their profession and their ongoing responsibilities. Research should not be an isolated activity that only archival professors and Ph.D. students are deemed competent to engage in. It should be introduced during the earliest courses in an archival management program. At NYU, for example, the introductory two-semester overview includes a requirement that students prepare a research paper. This forces them to think broadly about some aspect of archival work at a formative stage in their graduate careers, and to begin understanding how other professionals have structured their own research projects. An increased emphasis on this will create a healthier profession in the long run, and will also help to break down the barriers between academic archivists and working archivists. Students need to view their training as an important first-step in professional development, not as a "credential" or "union card" that they need to begin their "real" work.

3. What kind of research methods do you think archives students should be familiar with? As mentioned above, understanding of research techniques is critical for all archivists and needs to be integrated into archival training. The nature of research methods courses will be dictated somewhat by broader institutional imperatives, and the NYU program’s location in a history department means that all students necessarily take a historical research methods course. One important aspect of the students’ graduate training involves their actual use of archives to conduct research projects. This provides students with an important perspective on archives from a consumer’s point of view and sensitizes them much more to strengths and weaknesses in both sources and in the reference process generally. Students should be encouraged to actually use archives, rather than simply conduct studies about archives. This, in my view, helps them to question the nature of information, make links and draw comparisons between different types of informational resources, better evaluate metadata and descriptive techniques, and allow them to view their profession from the other side of the desk.

Research skills are increasingly critical to archivists and records managers in the workplace. The proliferation of data and the exponential increase in available informational resources increasingly means that archivists are called upon not simply to produce data, but to analyze, synthesize, and draw conclusions for senior management as well. Archivists increasingly have become drawn into the world of, for lack of a better term, "knowledge producers." Their job responsibilities have shifted in many organizations from passive curators to active information experts. This calls upon a very different set of skills and a much more sophisticated understanding of the research process, than has formerly been the case, and argues persuasively for the need to incorporate research into the training of all archivists.