Developing a Primary Source Lab Series: A Collaboration Between Special Collections and Subject Collections Librarians

In 2014 librarians at the Claremont Colleges Library piloted a 2-part workshop series that gave graduate students the opportunity to closely read a primary source as artifact, explore related digital primary sources, identify interesting research questions, and find secondary scholarship that spoke to those questions. This Primary Source Workshop series was developed collaboratively by special collections librarians, subject liaison librarians, and graduate faculty. The series has since been adapted for a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes. As a sequence, the workshops emphasize the continuity from paper sources to digital sources and the interrelationships of primary and secondary sources in the scholarly conversation. This chapter, in the book Collaborating for Impact: Special Collections and Liaison Librarian Partnerships (American Library Association, 2016), traces the development of the workshop series and the holistic view the workshops present of the process of research, while emphasizing the collaboration between special collections librarians and subject liaison libraria