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The tenets of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) allow librarians to assess their teaching effectiveness through an evaluation of student learning. For the author, the sudden reliance on digital primary source collections during the 2020 pandemic lockdown provided a catalyst to examine her digital primary source instruction as a research project. In this case study, the author aims to examine library instruction for a required course for third-year history majors.

The author collaborated with a history professor to identify “bottlenecks” related to digital primary source research, and to design two new library instruction sessions with in-class activities and assignments to address these bottlenecks. The professor and author then evaluated the assignments to determine if students had understood and incorporated the methods modeled during the research instruction classes.

Teaching undergraduate history majors digital primary source research skills that will lead to the habits of mind of historians cannot be done in one academic quarter, for it takes time to develop disciplinary ways of thinking. Providing select core concepts more systematically earlier in the history major curriculum could make the enculturation into the discipline less fraught and confusing later, so that students begin learning foundational skills in their third year to carry them forward into their senior year when they write their theses.

Little has been written on digital primary source library instruction, which intersects with a variety of other research literacies. Assessing library instruction through the lens of SoTL is relatively new for academic librarians and has not been used in evaluating student learning in the digital primary source environment.

A gap in the literature on digital history was explored through the use of a survey of 104 high school social studies teachers, administered in a large urban/suburban school district in the southeastern United States. The survey examined the extent to which social studies teachers were using non-digital and digital historical resources and the ways in which they were using them. Results indicated that social studies and history teachers were using primary historical sources, but important questions remained regarding the nature of this use. Specifically, it was found that while the teachers in this survey reported using digital and non-digital primary historical sources in their classrooms, they did not report using these resources in a manner consistent with literature-based best practices for social studies and history education.

The authors received a grant to develop a digital educational tool to facilitate student engagement with online primary sources. Students and faculty were interviewed prior to developing the tool's specifications to ensure a user‐centered focus. This research paper seeks to report the results of a user needs assessment that explored students' use of primary sources and their learning preferences, as well as faculty's pedagogical goals for student work with primary sources.

Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students enrolled in humanities courses at the University of Colorado at Boulder were interviewed to help guide the development of this tool. The interview transcripts were analyzed to uncover several key findings.

The results of the user needs assessment suggest that primary sources have great potential to excite students' enthusiasm and enhance their learning experiences; however, these materials present several challenges that prevent students from using digital primary‐source collections to the fullest extent. Educational technology may be able to help students overcome these difficulties, but only if the technology is easy‐to‐use and designed to support faculty's pedagogical goals.

This study employed a semi‐structured interview methodology to collect the relevant data. Its central research questions could be explored in greater depth using other user‐centered design methodologies, such as artifact and task analyses.

This research will be used to inform the development of a digital educational tool for student use with primary sources.

This study contributes to the growing body of research on user needs for effective work with online primary sources in university‐level humanities education.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2018.

The paper provides a brief description of all 422 sources, and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and anyone interested as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper aims to teach educators a variety of ways to navigate the digital collections of the Library of Congress, which include primary source materials from the past which can be used to instruct students of all grade levels from elementary through college.

Workshops for preservice teachers, practicing teachers and their college-level and librarian counterparts focused on advanced searching skills and pedagogical structures which help students access primary sources and use them as evidence to draw conclusions about historical events in history.

Many of the Library of Congress’ holdings have been digitized, described and categorized for ease of access (subject, keyword and metadata descriptors) and for ease of rights management (copyright, ownership and permissions indicated for each digital object).

Digitized primary sources help students create deeper understandings of historical events and periods and allow for multiple perspectives on the same events, thus teaching students valuable skills in drawing conclusions based on primary and secondary information sources.

Online collections from the Library of Congress are free for use by teachers, students and the general public, and the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program makes available free training for teachers in how to use the materials, as well as provides lesson plans, project ideas and thematic units for use in K-12 schools and beyond.

Increasingly, high school classrooms have access to the Internet. The Avalon Project Internet webpage enables high school students to access primary sources on a variety of American History topics. Literacy strategies are a promising method to help students organize the information they access when they are reading primary sources online. In particular, graphic organizers help students to make sense out of complex issues presented in primary sources. The author describes how his high school history students used the Avalon Project Internet webpage and graphic organizers to comprehend the primary sources with which they were working. Suggestions are given to help history teachers implement this activity in the classroom. Background information on literacy strategies is provided with specific examples of graphic organizers to help guide teachers who are interested in utilizing the strategy with their students.

This article highlights some of the experiences of elementary students learning to use primary sources to engage in historical inquiry. Two teacher educators developed and taught social studies lessons in collaboration with 5^th and 6^th grade teachers. The elementary students had little previous experience evaluating primary sources and artifacts. Using both digital and non-digital sources, the students began to understand historical perspective and use historical evidence as the basis of their conclusions. However, difficulties were encountered during lessons using artifacts to understand historical events. The article presents descriptive evidence and the lessons we learned as educators.

Written by a librarian and history professor, the purpose of this paper is to describe a collaborative, primary source literacy project and report its effectiveness in teaching undergraduates to critically analyze information and develop primary source literacy.

The methodology used included a research project with 24 undergraduates and a pre- and post-survey. The research project and student survey incorporated principles from the “Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy”, published in 2017 by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section and the Society of American Archivists. The paper offers research and practical implications for librarians and instructors interested in strategies to teach information literacy. For instance, the paper includes a review of literature on “archival intelligence” or “primary source literacy” and describes the 2017 Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy.

Socially, the paper includes implications for how to create an inclusive learning experience for students with mechanisms such as a scaffolded assignment, hands-on instruction, imposter syndrome awareness and a no-Google policy.

Given that this is one of the first articles to document how practitioners are incorporating the new 2017 Guidelines, this is sure to be an original and valuable essay.

Purpose – ‐‐ The aim of this article is to locate and describe collections of digitized primary sources of value to scholars and librarians in the fields of women's history and gender studies. This bibliography focuses on digitized primary source collections related to the global history of women.Design/methodology/approach ‐‐ This article provides an overview of subscription databases and open access websites dedicated to women's history primary source collections available electronically. Priority was given to sites with materials or transcriptions available in English, those that represented a diversity of aspects within women's history and those that are curated by scholars in the field or supported by academic institutions. Two major criteria for inclusion in the list were that a large portion of the collection must focus on women's history and that the site could be navigated in English.Findings ‐‐ The majority of these collections are focused mainly on the history of American and British women and secondarily on the history of women from other cultures and global regions. While some primary sources have been digitized and made available online relating to Asian, African, South American and Latin American women's history, they appear as part of more general regional primary source collections.Originality/value ‐‐ Though there are a number of excellent librarian or scholar web guides available online, a thorough examination and comparison is lacking from professional literature.

The purpose of this paper is to situate the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access Movement (OAM). It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials.

The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on Open Access (OA) and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist. There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural data; persuade other institutions to contribute their data into the commons in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high-performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of data the author is now seeing being made available throughout the sector.

It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing.

This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area.

Increasing the quantity of high-quality OA resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase the understanding of history, culture and society.

This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the OAM. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use. As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data are made open.