Access to the Archive: Making MDAH’s Digital Collections Accessible for the Classroom
The Mississippi Department of Archive and History’s mission is to preserve Mississippi’s rich and diverse history and share it with the public. One of the many ways we do this is through engaging with students across the state and nation. A great resource in this regard is our extensive digital archive collections which cover a multitude of topics that can fit most social studies classrooms. This includes the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission collection, the 1927 Flood photograph collection, and a number of Freedom Summer related collections, among others.
Al Wheat is the Director of Education for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Prior to joining MDAH, Al was a classroom teacher in Mississippi public schools for seven years. Al received his Bachelor's in History Education from the University of Southern Mississippi and his Master's in History from Jackson State University.
The issue we have always faced is that many of these digital collections are quite voluminous. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission collection, for example, has over 133,000 pages of documents and nearly 1,000 pictures. While having that large of a collection is invaluable, especially for researchers and those interested in the content, it can also be a hindrance, particularly for classroom educators. We all know teachers are overworked and underpaid with constantly increasing and evolving expectations, giving them less and less time to do their own research. As a former teacher myself, I can promise that opening and seeing a collection of incredible documents and images is enticing, but seeing that many would be overwhelming. The search functions are great and help make it less daunting, but for a teacher with limited time, it still may be too much.
To combat this, the education staff developed Learning Lagniappes, which are activities that show students (and educators) how to navigate the digital archives to find images related to the subject at hand along with questions that explore the context and history that relate to the images. These are excellent tools for older learners and teach historical content while also cultivating research skills to help demystify using an online archive.
For some, however, this can still be a daunting task. Not all students can navigate the archives while still understanding the content. Some learners are too young to effectively use the lagniappes to their fullest potential. The lagniappes also lend themselves more naturally to documents, like the multitude of letters, official documents, and more that we have in our digital archives. They are not the most efficient at featuring images in a way that is both educational but also attractive and attention getting.
In 2021, The University of Southern Mississippi’s Digital Humanities staff reached out to see if we would like to partner on a project that would help us create materials that would fit our missions and serve the public. What we eventually came up with were stand-alone sites that would feature contextual essays from experts in the subject area, a selection of images from our digital archives, and lesson plans developed by educators or our education team.
The project turned into what we now call Digital Snapshots: a website that contains a “snapshot” of a given digital collection with the aforementioned essay and lesson plans. The sites have evolved some since they were first created and are now more user friendly and can help students and educators explore historic images and content easily and effectively. The partnership has allowed us to modernize how we’re working with classrooms by meeting educators’ needs while being more modern in how we deliver content. In tandem with our Learning Lagniappes, we can feature document- and image-based activities for classrooms that can help them navigate our digital archives or experience subsets of our archives for an easy introduction. With this partnership, we hope to continue to have a positive impact on classrooms throughout Mississippi and the nation.
