Services and support
Our knowledgeable and helpful staff can support your research efforts in a variety of ways.
Research help
Our librarians and staff can help answer questions about our collections and provide additional guidance on how and where to search for materials. We encourage researchers to reach out to us at any time during their research process.
Instruction support
Incorporating primary source material into your course improves critical thinking, creates a stronger connection to the past and improves information literacy skills.
Our staff would love to talk to you about the possibility of incorporating Archives and Special Collections in your classroom instruction. Whether you have an idea of the content you'd like to use, or you aren't sure what materials might support your teaching goals, we can help. Contact us to begin a conversation about instructional support we can offer.
Records management
Our staff can provide information on best practices, help create new or revise retention schedules, help organize transfer of records to the university archives and provide training on records management.
Digitization and preservation resources
While the Morse Department of Archives and Special Collections focuses our resources on preserving the materials in our collections, there are many practices we use that can be replicated at home for personal preservation purposes.
Every type of material has different standards for storage and preservation, and with a little care and time, many materials can be well preserved for decades outside of a traditional archive.
Helpful resources for preserving analog materials:
- Library of Congress, Collections Care
- Library of Congress, Preservation FAQ
- National WWII Museum, Preservation of Artifacts
- Northeast Document Conservation Center
Companies and individuals offering preservation services (listing here does not equate to endorsement by K-State)
Many people have a misconception that digitizing materials and storing them is enough to preserve items indefinitely. However, digital media is just as—if not more—sensitive to loss of information as analog materials. Both digitized and born-digital materials are subject to file corruption, data degradation, and digital obsolescence.
Helpful resources for preserving digital materials:
- National Archives “Digitizing Family Papers and Photographs”
- Library of Congress “Personal Archiving”
- Jessea Young and Javier Garibay “The .TIFF Life: Archival + Digital Preservation From the Perspective of a Librarian of Color”
- Andi Willis, “What Happens to Your Photos When You Die?”
- Stanford Libraries, “Best practices for file naming”
- Catherine C. Marshall “Challenges and Opportunities for Personal Digital Archiving”