Archives, Documents, and Hidden History: A Course to Teach Undergraduates the Thrill of Historical Discovery Real and Virtual

TREASURES AWAIT students and researchers on the shelves of libraries and archives across the country, but unfortunately they often remain unknown to the "modem" researcher who limits his/her research to using the Internet. The process of physically going to the library stacks and browsing the shelves in a subject area is on the decline and more and more students expect that all their research can be done on-line at home. These missed sources of valuable information are called "hidden collections," and include materials that have not yet been entered into on-line catalogs or listed in on-line archival finding aids. They can include primary sources and they can be any format from microform and videos to print or graphic materials. "They represent millions of items and collections -untapped knowledge resources that are inaccessible to scholars. In this age of access and increasingly digital access, these collections are becoming increasingly hidden since the chance of someone coming across them physically in the stacks is diminishing."1 My library class was recently offered an example of what browsing the stacks can reveal when Barbara Chernow, who was working as an Associate Editor for the Hamilton Papers, set out to track down all the possible information related to Alexander Hamilton found what she was looking for The History Teacher Volume 40 Number 4 August 2007 c Society for History Education