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Record W7123341911 · doi:10.17723/2327-9702-88.2.247

“Putting It into Practice Is the Best Way to Really Learn Something”: Evaluating the North American Graduate Archival Education Curriculum1

2025· article· W7123341911 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe American Archivist · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicDigital and Traditional Archives Management
Canadian institutionsLibrary and Archives Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsExperiential learningGraduate educationConfidentialityGraduate studentsProfessional developmentHigher educationIdentification (biology)Best practice

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Despite the vital role graduate archival education plays in preparing aspiring archivists for practice, we lack empirical evidence concerning its efficacy. This study is based on a survey of 406 students and new professionals (SNPs) (five or fewer years in the field). It addresses the following research question: based on their graduate education, how well prepared for practice are SNPs in North America? To address this question, the authors explore the topics SNPs suggested were most useful, the assignments they found most fruitful, their perceptions of topics lacking adequate coverage, their overall rating of their professional preparation's effectiveness, and the ways in which they thought professional preparation might be improved. Notably, SNPs lauded the payoff of experiential learning. They also foregrounded topics related to the 2016 “Guidelines for a Graduate Program in Archival Studies” (GPAS) clusters Arrangement and Description and Digital Materials Management. SNPs suggested that improved professional preparation could come from augmented course offerings, enriched course content, and most important, more hands-on/practical experience. SNPs were vocationally preoccupied; they showed only modest interest in “archival thinking.” The authors juxtapose their findings with both GPAS and A*CENSUS II and suggest that communities of archival practice (COAPs) are a profitable direction for future archival pedagogy.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.856
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.006
Scholarly communication0.0020.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.047
GPT teacher head0.339
Teacher spread0.292 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it