Engaging Undergraduates in Primary Source Research

Lijuan Xu has been immersed in information literacy-related work since 1998. Her three-year stint as a user education librarian at SUNY Albany and fifteen-year tenure as the associate director of research and instruction at Lafayette College have helped her garner rich information literacy experiences. In addition to partnering with individual faculty members to build information literacy into their courses, Lijuan has collaborated with the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CITLS) and the College Writing Program (CWP) to organize lunchtime events such as the faculty information literacy presentation and the “What’s Your Favorite Writing Assignment” panel. Through the grant-funded HathiTrust-based “Digging Deeper Reaching Further” initiative, she has taught text mining workshops at different institutions, including Harvard and Columbia. At Lafayette, she has teamed up with faculty members to explore the application of computational tools such as Voyant in primary source-based teaching.

• PrefaceAcknowledgements1: Teaching Power and Storytelling Through Zines Regina M. Duthely and Katherine L. Curtis2: Using First-Person Accounts to Bring Colonialism Home Paul C. Campbell, Jennifer Fredette, and Miriam Intrator3: Imagining the Sonic Past: Using Primary Sources to Understand Music Making in the Early Modern Period Abigail Flanigan,?Bonnie Gordon, and Stephanie Gunst4: Creating Lesson Plans on Local History Dunstan McNutt, Carolyn Runyon, and Susan Eckelmann Berghel5: Developing an Open Primary Source Reader on Gender and Sexuality Mir Yarfitz, Kyle Denlinger, Kathy Shields, and Megan Mulder6: The City as a Learning Lab: Using Historical Maps and Walking Seminars to Anchor Place-Based Research Anne E. Leonard and Jason A. Montgomery7: Mapping Tombstone Iconography as Data Carrie Schwier, Theresa Quill, and Jon Kay8: Materiality, Research, and Digital Interpretation: Annotating Daily Life in Medieval and Early Modern China Maglen Epstein, Sara Lynnore, Stephanie Montgomery, and Jillian Sparks9: Tracing Environmental Legislative History in the United States Ana Ramirez Luhrs and Andrea Armstrong10: Contextualizing Scientific Primary Research for Different Audiences Kristin Klucevsek and Melody Diehl Detar11: Epilogue; Lijuan XuAbout the EditorAbout the Contributors

Balancing attention to theoretical frameworks, creative pedagogy, and practical approaches to assessment of student learning, Xu and her authors demonstrate how primary sources from the documentary to the digital can enhance and extend innovation in undergraduate education in areas such as critical thinking, digital scholarship, makerspaces, and more.