This article is more than 5 years old.

This fall, I had the pleasure of teaching LIB100 with Audra Eagle Yun, our Project Archivist. Audra and I met several times over the past summer to discuss our course and how we’d approach it. One of Audra’s ideas was to use primary source material from Special Collections. Great idea, I thought-but how would we do this? We couldn’t exactly turn students loose in the closed stacks!

Together, we decided to take a hybrid approach. We picked selected materials from the closed stacks and let students use these materials in the Special Collections Reading Room. The Dolmen Press was the targeted collection. Audra and I spent time selecting correspondence files from 5 Dolmen artists and the books and printing blocks that we had from each artist. The artists were: Tate Adams, Elizabeth Rivers, Juanita Casey, Michael Biggs and Louis Le Brocquy.

Over the course of the semester, the groups were able to spend time researching the materials we provided them and conducting further research on their own using the ZSR resources we learned about in class. Each group used the research they compiled and the primary resource materials to produce an exhibit. On the final class day, each group gave a short presentation about their exhibit. These five exhibits are now in the cases in 401.

This was a unique way to present and teach LIB100, and one that I think Audra and I both believe was useful and enjoyable for the class. We were also able to immerse ourselves in a great collection uniquely owned by ZSR- The Dolmen Press Collection.