Over the past few weeks, my ASTU class was tasked with sifting through and reviewing archival documents at the Rare Books and Special Collections area of the UBC Library. The project of each group was to choose specific archival records or fonds and identify a knowledge gap or silence and from here, our work would be linked to specific collections at the RBSC. In this blog posting, I will reflect on the teamwork I noticed in my group along with raising the question of how the silences we identified will hopefully be filled.
After working with my group, I believe over time, we grew and as a result, ideas and thoughts became more cohesive. It was interesting to see this change, and after a few false starts on the project, it took off. When I mean false starts, I mean that at first some of the ideas fell through. Despite this we persevered and eventually created a new approach to the project. Out group effort eventually culminated into the creation of a website were we covered the second generation of the McLennan family through their official McLennan family fonds. The McLennans were a very influential family in Canada who hailed from Ireland and eventually laid down their roots in Montreal Quebec. We attempted to approach the project by analyzing the travels of one McLennan through his journal but the legibility of the handwriting proved a challenge. I was amazed to see how we grew as a group. Group projects are quite different than what I recall from high school and in all honesty, this experience made me rethink what the “dreaded” group project is. I took away from this group project that group projects can be useful as a team building exercise. In the end, I believe our presentation went on without a hitch despite me not being able to practice the script with the rest of the group.
Of course, other groups went on with their presentations with the same strategy of identifying the silences and creating a form of consumable media to fill that silence. After listening to all the groups and even my own, silences were indeed present and were filled. With this in mind however, I thought to myself, how long would it take for the work done to be recognized by their particular audiences. This raised the question to me of if maybe, we will have to create a type of campaign to alert the scholarly community that the silences have been filled and hopefully a base has been created to further the research done.
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Works Cited
Website: http://cvmichaels11.wix.com/mclennanfamilyfond