Effective Archival Instruction When Embeddedness Won’t Work

Over the past few years the standard “one shot” archives instruction session has been overshadowed in archival literature by a focus on the importance of embedded archivists, as well as emphasis on multiple guided instruction sessions for classes. These innovative techniques offer many advantages but this paper argues that the “one shot” model still holds relevance, especially for small institutions with limited staff sizes. Work on such sessions over the course of a decade have resulted in changes made to this model at the University of Mississippi, and this article discusses these changes and offers both lessons learned and examines benefits of the “one shot” approach