Laura Ishiguro
The majority of material on this website emerges from the Gold Rush Program, which I was lucky to run for three years (2014-2017) in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. The Gold Rush Program was a research-training program intended to introduce undergraduate students to the methods, skills, and strategies of historical research. It was called the Gold Rush Program because we practiced historical research with sources and archives related to the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes in British Columbia, but the program was also intended to build students’ familiarity, understanding, skills, and confidence in conducting historical research far beyond this specific subject and context. This dual focus is reflected in the website’s Doing History modules (which introduce key research skills) and its Stories and Library sections (which focus more specifically on gold-rush topics).
On this page, I offer a more detailed explanation of the Gold Rush Program and its design. I do so both to share my experiences with running the program, and to provide more information on its general design and relationship to this website’s materials in case you find it useful for replicating or revising for your own teaching/program purposes. If you have more questions about how I designed and ran the program, please feel free to contact me by email.
Getting the program started
What did the program involve?
A sample schedule for the program
What were the outcomes?
Concluding remarks
Getting the program started
I designed the Gold Rush Program to run between May and August, with a small team (or “lab”) of students hired each summer. I ran it with generous funding administered by my department, which enabled me to pay the students for their time and work, as well as some research travel. I hoped that this would allow them to commit more time and energy to the program by alleviating some of the very real financial pressures of student life, and the particular necessity and weight of summer jobs in particular.
Each spring, I advertised the program as an opportunity for History majors looking for summer jobs; thinking about a possible future in graduate school, research and/or history-related work; and wondering how they could gain relevant experience. As I explained in the call for applications, students hired into the program could expect to gain training, mentorship, and experience in historical research, while working hands-on with archival sources related to British Columbia’s mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes – a foundational but still understudied topic in the province’s history. Each student hired into the program could expect to work approximately 145 hours (flexible schedule) over the course of the summer, and they did not need previous knowledge or experience with archival research and British Columbian history; the program promised introductions to these areas, after all!
I asked that applications include brief statements of interest (in one page or less, tell me who you are, why you are interested in this position, and why you think you would be a good candidate for it), a short resume or CV, and the name and contact information of one reference (if possible and relevant to stage of study, an academic reference such as a current or former professor). I then interviewed applicants and, depending on the year’s funding, hired between two and four students for the summer.
What did the program involve?
Each summer, the structure and schedule varied depending on the students’ other commitments. In general, though, I designed the program to have two months of regular meetings – generally one meeting per week, typically lasing one to three hours, in which we learned and practiced a particular skill. Between these meetings, the students then practiced the skills and conducted research on their own and together, often meeting once or twice per week without me. The program then had two months of less regular team meetings. During these months, the students chased their own research leads and practiced the program’s key skills, both on their own and together. They also went on some funded research trips to archives out of town. During these months, we maintained regular email contact – generally one research update or discussion per week with me – and occasionally met to touch base.
A sample schedule looked like this:
Month 1
- Meeting 1: introductions and planning. Historical background on British Columbia and the gold rushes through a mini-lecture and discussion. Introduce literature searches and scholarship, and distribute resources on library research. Also distribute the published primary source, “Harry Guillod’s Journal of a Trip to Cariboo, 1862,” edited by Dorothy Blakey Smith for the British Columbia Historical Quarterly xiv, 3-4 (1955): 187-232.
- Between meetings: begin a literature search and reading scholarly sources on nineteenth-century British Columbia, and read Guillod’s journal. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
- Meeting 2: introduce digital collections, using the Cariboo Sentinel as one example, and distribute resources on doing online research. Also discuss the Guillod primary source: what did students observe about it? What did they learn from it? What questions do they have about this historical context now? Also distribute list of public historical representations of the gold rushes and/or nineteenth-century British Columbian history.
- Between meetings: read/watch public histories and begin Sentinel research by browsing the issues from one year. Continue finding and reading scholarly sources. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
- Meeting 3: discuss public histories, experiences with digital collections, and preliminary Sentinel research.
- Between meetings. Continue Sentinel research by browsing and/or searching, try other digital collections, and continue to read scholarly sources. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
- Meeting 4: discuss scholarly representations, experiences with literature searches, and ongoing Sentinel research.
- Between meetings: continue Sentinel research by browsing and/or searching, using other digital collections, and reading scholarly sources. Do some work on a bibliography or list of resources that you have found useful this month. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
Month 2
- Meeting 5: meet at Koerner Library. Introduction to research using microforms and the BC Newspaper Index. Distribute resources related to doing microform research.
- Between meetings: return to Koerner to use the microforms again, including searching for topics in the Newspaper Index and browsing several issues of a BC newspaper. You can also continue to practice any of the other forms of research already covered. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
- Meeting 6: meet at UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Introduction to archival research, and explore materials that I requested. Distribute resources related to doing archival research.
- Between meetings: return to Special Collections to request, handle, and read materials. You can also continue to practice any of the other forms of research already covered. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies.
- Meeting 7: meet at UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Introduction to handwriting and transcription. Explore materials that I requested, and practice transcribing sources together. Distribute resources related to doing transcription.
- Between meetings: practice transcribing letters, either by returning to Special Collections and/or by using digitized sources. You might want to work on this together or workshop each other’s transcripts by email. You can also continue to practice any of the other forms of research already covered. Come to the next meeting prepared to discuss your findings and reflections, as well as your experiences with these research skills and strategies. Also come prepared to discuss your research directions for the rest of the summer.
- Meeting 8: workshop transcriptions. Discuss research skills, strategies, directions, and plans for the rest of the summer. Discuss what to look for in the archive, how to design useful research questions, and how to move from research to analysis.
Months 3 and 4
- Practice the research skills and strategies covered in the program so far. You might choose to do so by pursuing research on a particular topic that has interested you, and/or by engaging with historical research in a more open-ended way by using any related sources. I particularly recommend practicing research strategies with which you still feel less comfortable.
- Plan research trip(s) using the travel funding provided by the program. Remember that you might want to contact archivists ahead of a trip with any queries about the collections you hope to access.
- Write short contributions for the website. These can include discussions of your research experiences and findings, or guides for particular kinds or sites of research.
- This work can be conducted alone or together. Send research updates every week, including discussions of your findings, experiences, skill development, challenges, and/or questions. I will respond to these points by email. The whole team will meet on occasion to discuss our work, and to consider further how historians move from research to analysis.
- At the end of the program, you will be asked to write a short final report on your experiences. This will include highlights of what you did and how you feel it impacted your studies or personal interests in history, especially BC history.
What were the outcomes?
The students themselves were the main outcome of the program – their new skills and knowledge, their experiences, and their ability to apply this training to new research projects. This has looked like many different things for the students. For instance, Alice Gorton joined the program in its first year, and participated again in the second year as an assistant. Building from her work in the program, she write an outstanding Honours thesis in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia in 2016, which examined the history of leisure, gender, and race in the gold-rush Cariboo.
This website is, of course, another outcome of the program. I developed and honed a number of resources on historical research that were used in person in the program, but which have now been built into the Doing History modules of this website. In addition, the site relies on the students’ research, writing, and engagement with these resources.
Concluding remarks
I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to run this program for three years, and I would recommend it highly to anyone considering whether they might develop a similar venture.
For me, it has meant an opportunity to work closely with nine outstanding and engaged students (one for two years), and to support them as they built up capacity for and confidence in original historical research. I think there’s a real need for slow skills-based work and research training like this, particularly to support the diversification of the historical discipline. The program also offered students the unusual opportunity to explore and play in the archive within a specific planned outcome or pressing deadline. This enabled them to chase leads that interested them (rather than, say, working as a research assistant on my own project) and it enabled them to encounter dead-ends without worrying that a class essay or thesis was now not feasible in a given timeline. For me, it has been rewarding to watch them pursue their own research interests in and beyond the program. And as they have done so, I have learned so many things about my field of specialization – nineteenth-century British Columbian history – and I now have so many new questions for research that remains to be done. I have also learned a lot about doing historical research, both by teaching it in this much detail and by learning from the students’ experiences and questions. And, in the end, the program has also given me the opportunity to develop and hone the resources on this website. I hope that here, they will continue to do some useful work.
Thank you to the students, my department, and the funder who made this program possible. Thank you, too, to the archivists and staff members who have supported our work in the program in so many ways, especially in UBC Rare Books and Special Collections.