Archival Intelligence and User Education

In the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of The American Archivist, Elizabeth Yakel and Deborah A. Torres published an article, “AI: Archival Intelligence and User Expertise,” that reported on the results of a research study to determine the characteristics of an expert user of archives. A specific model emerged from this study that defined three distinct forms of knowledge that were required by users to demonstrate effective use of primary sources in their research: domain or subject knowledge, artifactual literacy, and archival intelligence. It was the concept of “archival intelligence” where the authors directed their attention. “Archival intelligence,” they asserted, “is a researcher’s knowledge of archival principles, practices, and institutions, such as the reasons underlying archival rules and procedures, how to develop search strategies to explore research questions, and an understanding of the relationship between primary sources and their surrogates.” In this influential article, Yakel and Torres called upon archivists to rethink their approach to user education, move away from the typical archival orientation sessions that many of us conduct in our repositories, and to develop “a broader and deeper curriculum.”1 The development of such an expanded curriculum is the topic of our first article in this issue of the Journal of Archival Organization. In “Teaching Undergraduates to Think Archivally,” Cory L. Nimer and J. Gordon Daines III present a detailed case study of their efforts to provide students at Brigham Young University with a “stronger foundation in primary source analysis.” Recognizing the limitations inherent in the traditional class-based instruction or orientation sessions conducted regularly as part of their outreach program in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, the authors sought to improve their instructional program by developing a credit-bearing undergraduate course that would focus on two of the three forms of knowledge proposed by Yakel and Torres in 2003: archival intelligence and artifactual literacy. Offered in the BYU Honors Program in the winter of 2010 and again in a revised form in the winter semester of 2011, “Archives and Archival Research” attempted to address the call for archivists to “more fully envision archival user education to include all aspects of archival intelligence,” and to respond to Yakel and Torres’ argument that “for researchers to become expert users of archives and manuscript collections, basic conceptual knowledge and the development of a general framework of archival management, representation and descriptive practices, and search query formulation are necessary.”2