“The Links in the Chain”: Connecting Undergraduates with Primary Source Materials at the University of California

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University of California “The Links in the Chain”: Connecting Undergraduates with Primary Source Materials at the University of California Sherri Berger, Ellen Meltzer, and Lynn Jones “Monday through Friday I set out on a solo expedition to Westwood in search of any information that might be pertinent to my topic […] I wanted to immerse myself [in] as much primary information as possible so that I could reconstruct what happened, like a real historian […] I could not help but get a rush from feeling like some investigator out of a Bond movie.” 1 Dedicated reference librarians working in partnership with faculty A library-sponsored annual prize for under- graduate research Drive for online access Undergraduate students increasingly demand online access to library materials, and UC meets this need for special collections with the Online Archive of California (OAC). 2 Managed by the California Digi- tal Library since 1998, the OAC website aggregates collection guides and digital objects from more than 150 libraries, archives, and museums at all ten UC campuses and throughout the state, thereby provid- ing integrated access to collections dispersed among many institutions. 3 Institutional commitment at the system-wide level has enabled the OAC to evolve to meet the needs of researchers at all levels, including undergraduates. As of June 2010, it contains over 28,000 collection guides (EAD finding aids contrib- uted by institutions and MARC21 records extracted from UC’s system-wide catalog) and 210,000 digital objects (contributed images and texts). Additionally, the OAC’s companion interface, Calisphere, is a useful tool for undergraduates—es- pecially those who are interested in digital repro- ductions rather than physical records. 4 Launched in 2006, Calisphere is a simpler “face” of the OAC that excludes the finding aids and presents many of the objects (images and texts) in topical and chronological groupings with short contextual es- These are the reflections of a freshman at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley who spent her spring break absorbed in documents and case files at the UCLA Library Special Collections. Not only was her research experience—her first with primary source materials—obviously personally rewarding, but it also earned her an honorable mention from UC Berkeley’s Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. How did this student learn to “do history” so well and so early in her career? How do we inspire undergraduate students to use archives and special collections, and how do we support them in doing so? At the University of California (UC), we see sev- eral “links in the chain” that contribute to student engagement. This chapter focuses specifically on campus initiatives at UC Berkeley and system-wide projects at the University of California–California Digital Library (CDL) to illuminate a continuum of activities, namely: • Online access to finding aids and digitized special collections materials • A supportive undergraduate curriculum

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