Service

Teach with Special Collections

Discover, engage, and collaborate with special collections to help students use primary sources and understand material culture.

Our librarians and archivists are ready to help you incorporate special collections into your classes. Tell us about your class or group and how special collections can help support it, and we will reach out to discuss your request and work out details. 

Request a Class

Discover, Engage, Collaborate

Through active learning with our staff and primary source materials, students grow as researchers. Working with our our interdisciplinary experts, students and faculty can develop new projects and assignments.

To foster discovery for your students, we will work with you to:

  • Suggest objects to support learning objectives
  • Offer guides to collections and to navigating search and discovery
  • Keep materials on hold in our reading rooms for students' sustained engagement

To develop students’ analytical skills and engage their imaginations, we can:

  • Design engaging activities to develop students’ analytical skills with material culture
  • Lead interactive sessions with materials from a single library or multiple libraries
  • Help you create assignments or projects using our collections

To assist students as they develop projects, we're ready to:  

  • Mentor students in methods of material culture and digital scholarship
  • Maintain office hours and individual consultations
3 students flip through various rare books as part of a class at Houghton Library
Students work with special collection materials at Houghton Library as part of a class on the Declaration of Independence.