Welcome to the (Writing Program) Archives: Making a Case for Writing Program Material Curation
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Abstract
With this project, I examined archival documents from the North Dakota State University First-Year Writing Program that were created by a previous writing program administrator, Amy Rupiper Taggart, with the goal of reviewing and understanding the materials through the lens of writing program administration, organizing them using archival theories and concepts, documenting and displaying that organization through the use of a finding aid, then bringing together the fields of archival theory and writing program administration to make recommendations. Through the process of exploring the materials a number of key findings emerged, and these led directly into my considerations and recommendations about deciding what to keep and discard, how material should be organized and maintained in a usable format, and how WPAs should approach the archiving of material that requires contextual knowledge or contains private information, and a discussion of three key considerations writing program administrators can use when assessing materials.