Archiving

Archives can be developed for any number of uses. Instructors might want to build archives of student papers to serve as models for other students, for example. Students might want to build archives of projects they have completed in school and elsewhere. This tutorial guides you through the steps for conceptualizing and building an archive for personal or public use.

Building Archives

In this section we offer hints on selecting data and on the preliminary work of seeking the permission of people whose work or words or images will appear in the archive. Next we offer suggestions for organizing your data and on numbering (and naming) files that will figure in the archives. We follow with suggestions for building thesauri that will help you search specific items or data in your archives, along with prompts for coding. We provide links to other sites that will help you automate the ongoing elaboration of your archive, if you so choose. Finally, we include links to helpful sites worldwide.

Using Archives

We have conceptualized this section as a practical application of the first. We offer two exercises to put your evolving archive knowledge to work. First we prompt instructors to build an archive of past papers in a given course, then we prompt students to use that archive to familiarize themselves with the rhetorical demands of paper writing in that course.