Archiving Exercise

Purpose  Doing this activity will give you practice at thinking through strategies for archiving and retrieving reports and data after you have conducted research.

Scenario

The Professional Writing program at Purdue has just been given a room (12x16x8) to create a library. The director of the program wants to put all of the texts and documents that pertain to the program into this one place. Because of the excellent reputation of Purdue University's Professional Writing program, the director wants to use this library as a place that PW scholars/students can visit to learn about the history of building and designing such a program. He has asked students in the English 203 class to develop a strategy for archiving the various materials for this purpose.

The Material

From the original technical writing classes (1918-1949) currently stored in boxes over in Civil Engineering...

  • Program Description
  • Program Budgets
  • Grant proposals
  • Textbooks
  • Syllabi
  • CVs for part-time faculty
  • Manuals for using typewriters

From English Department's Professional Writing (1981-present)...

  • Program Description
  • Program Budgets
  • Grant proposals
  • Proposal for new courses
  • Textbooks
  • Various Professional Writing journals
  • Some Composition books
  • Syllabi
  • Paper copies of assignments for students (after 1997 all of these can be fond on the web; some of these are no longer available because instructors have moved on and taken down their material; all current syllabi are available)
  • Some samples of student writing that instructors have collected
  • CVs for part-time faculty
  • Application from TAs
  • Manuals for using various computer technologies (this ranges from Apple IIe to recent Dells, from dot-matrix printer to HP Color Laser Printers, from Word Perfect to Macromedia MX programs)
  • Electronic records from listserv conversation about developing and implementing hybrid distance education classes; in affect between 1999-2001.

Preliminary Work

In your principles group, address the following prompts. Record your answers as legible notes (you will be submitting these)...

  • What are the rhetorical parameters of the this project?
    • What is the purpose of doing this archiving?
    • Who will be the audience of this material?
    • What ethos do you think the Professional Writing program should project?
    • How will your decisions affect this ethos?

Look through the Cox and Samuels article, as a group determine...

  • What principles should archivers consider when doing their work? In other words, what suggestions do the writers make that you can put into practice?

After you all list the recommended principles of archiving, apply these principles to the scenario.

Writing Assignment

Collaboratively write a memo to the Director of Professional Writing (i.e., Dr. David Blakesley) in which you make recommend an informed strategy to the program about how it should set up this new space. This memo should be about 500 words.

You want to be quite specific in the suggestions that you make to Dr. Blakesley. You are not telling him how to do the archivial research himself, but what specifically he should do with all the material in the room.

So some of the things that you will want to suggest will include...

  • what should be kept?
  • how will you store thespecific types of materials?
  • how will you sort different types of material?

This is not an exhaustive list; you are encourage to think beyond these questions.

Logistics

At the end of class, print 6 copies of your memo and submit it with your notes.