Picture this regular occurrence in an academic library: a student sees an article from The Atlantic online that is paywalled and would like to seek it out from the library. The student connects with a librarian for help and is puzzled when the librarian asks for information like volume, issue, and date. The student is surprised to find out that the article they were trying to read online was also published in a physical magazine. There is a disconnect created when students engage with material in a digital format. Students identifying source types often conflate digitally accessed journal or newspaper articles with websites in general. It is important that educators do not take for granted that students understand that the digital sources they are using can often be traced to a physical item. As the Information Literacy Librarian at Alfred University (AU), I frequently help individual students understand periodicals. In the Fall of 2023, I developed a lesson plan for a history course to help students concretize digital sources by introducing them to primary sources in hard copy form and on microfilm before walking them through digital databases.
The Plan
The class comprised history majors, most of whom had some basic introduction to archives and digital database in another class. For this methods course I put together a lesson plan that would focus on the following learning outcomes:
- Students will explore the different formats available to access periodicals including bound periodicals from the stacks, microform, and digitized periodicals in our institutional repository.
- Students will evaluate the pros and cons of engaging with periodicals in different formats.
As an information literacy librarian, my lesson plans are almost always guided by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, a guiding document for professional librarians that defines information literacy and offers 6 frames for understanding how people engage it. I used two frames in this lesson plan: Searching as Strategic Exploration and Information Creation as a Process.
The Lesson
This lesson revolved around a set of three activities in three locations that got students to engage with and discuss each format of periodical: hard copy, microfilm, and digital. First, we met in a wing of the library with large open space and configurable study tables and chairs. Around the room I spread a handful of bound periodicals including Time, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Fiat Lux (the AU student newspaper), ranging from 1857 to contemporary issues. I asked students to find an article in one of the sources and answer the following questions:
- What is the publication date?
- What is the volume and issue?
- What is one article that is interesting to you?
- Do you think the article you found would show up in a digital search on the library website?
After students had a chance to flip through their chosen periodical and answer the questions, I facilitated a conversation in which students shared the answers to the questions. The articles that sparked the most interest amongst the students were published in Fiat Lux, latching onto the relatable and local content. While most students correctly thought that they could find their article through the library website, they were not sure how to do this. This framing teased a future conversation about physical vs digitized sources.
For the next activity, we moved to a small corner of the room where our microform machine is tucked away. I introduced the students to microfilm and microfiche, showing them how to handle microform and use the library’s old clunky microform viewing machine. Students took turns selecting different microfilm, loading it into the viewer, and tweaking the settings to bring the images into focus.
We discussed how microform supplements AU’s physical collections, filling gaps in coverage. Students identified the roadblocks to research that using microform could create and brainstormed work arounds. For example, the library’s microform machine does not have a functional printer or screen shotting mechanism. Students discussed taking notes by hand or taking pictures with their phones as methods of capturing relevant information.
To wrap up the lesson, we moved to the computer lab where each student signed into a computer and I provided brief demos on a big screen, showing students how to search for different periodicals. This included using the journal search function to find the popular magazines we had looked at in hard copy and microform, including Time and The New Yorker. We explored the ways that different databases provided access – some with full text HTML that excluded images and some with PDF scans of articles complete with color images and formatting, comparing the different formats to the physical and microform formats. Students were able to easily connect PDF scans to the physical format, but they found there was a disconnect between the HTML full text and the physical format.
In accordance with the student’s interest in Fiat Lux, the students engaged most deeply with my demonstration of how to use our digital repository AURA to access past issues of the student newspaper online. The students appreciated the PDF scans in AURA and were able readily make the connection to the physical periodicals they had interacted with thirty minutes earlier. Students appreciated the search capacities in the repository, with one student finding the earliest held issue of an AU student newspaper, a precursor to the Fiat Lux that had a different title.
The Discussion
We capped the lesson with a lively conversation about the pros and cons of searching for periodicals digitally. While students appreciate the tools available to them digitally, they expressed a desire to overcome the disconnect from the physical format. While they appreciated when they could view a full-page scan, students missed the ability to flip through the pages of a bound periodical and expressed concern about what could be lost in translation when a periodical is digitized.
By grounding the digital in the physical first, likely the reverse order of how students typically engage with periodicals, this library instruction session helps students make the connection between the physical and the digital articles.
Featured Image Caption: Mallory Szymanski, Historian’s Craft Instagram Post, October 23,2023, Digital, New York.
Clio and the Contemporary 
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