Undergraduate Learning and Research with Provenance Information

Objects in multiple formats can comprise both the subjects and the approach making up “material culture”: a mode of investigating and understanding culture. Some colleges and universities steward millions of objects in academic galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM institutions). Convergence among such information professionals has led to recent offerings of an undergraduate honors seminar around campus material culture which is the focus of analysis in this paper. Students in that setting interrogated and applied the concept of provenance in reflecting on their object-based interactions. We analyze three categories of provenance lessons from the students to inform future teaching: (1) an object’s origins and pathways, (2) what provenance is and helps people do, and (3) new storytelling contributions.