Reimagining Primary Sources North America: Literacy, learning and leadership
In a time of AI and misinformation, it’s vital to equip tomorrow’s leaders with critical thinking skills that help them evaluate and respond to the world around them. Investing in a humanities education and, in particular, the interrogative skills nurtured through primary source literacy, provides students and researchers with strong foundations to become informed, insightful, and empathetic future leaders.
AM’s first virtual primary sources symposium, Reimagining Primary Sources: Literacy, learning and leadership, hears from researchers, faculty and librarians who have placed primary sources at the heart of education.
From research and teaching case studies to integrating resources into library discovery systems, and the overall value of investing in primary sources, institutions and research communities are leveraging primary sources to help tomorrow’s leaders respond to a constantly changing world.
Agenda (timings in EDT):
10am
Welcome | Felix Barnes, Senior Knowledge and Engagement Manager, AM
10.10am
Introduction | Martha Fogg, Managing Director, AM
10.25am
Keynote: On the value of primary sources in the current age | Thomas Teper, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services and Associate Dean of Libraries, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
10.55am
Break
11.05am
Navigating the primary sources wilderness: Practical instruction strategies with digital and analog collections | Deborah Hollis, Professor, Special Collections Librarian, Collection and Archival Strategy Team, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries
11.30am
Tracing scents: Exploring sensory histories through deep engagement with primary sources | Lewis Goode, former student at the University of Bristol
Primary sources and the individual, classroom, and community | Foster Duckworth, current student at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte
12.05pm
Break
12.15pm
Empowering libraries to lead accessible text data mining using AM metadata | Joshua Been, Director of Data and Digital Scholarship, Baylor University Libraries
12.35pm
Thinking with the Mass Observation Archive | Jennifer Purcell, Director and Professor of History, St Michael's College, Vermont
12.55pm
Closing remarks | Felix Barnes, Senior Knowledge and Engagement Manager, AM
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Speaking at AM's Reimagining Primary Sources symposium, Lewis Goode, University of Bristol graduate, and Foster Duckworth, University of North Carolina, Charlotte graduate, share perspectives on the skills developed through digital primary source research and their application beyond undergraduate study.
Hear from Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film at the British Film Institute, alongside AM’s Alice Hone and Joe Young‑Perez, as they explore how audiovisual primary sources support critical thinking and enable interdisciplinary research.