Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Michael C. Weisenburg, Director of the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina Libraries.
The first time I hosted our early music class in special collections in the fall semester of 2015, I approached the session the way many of us do: with a carefully chosen set of materials, a plan for introducing students to the history and significance of medieval manuscripts, and a hope that the students would leave with a sense of what special collections can offer. In this case, the materials were medieval plainchant manuscripts from our holdings. Many of them were fragments, a few were large codices, and one had even been cut up and turned into a lampshade at some point in the early twentieth century. They are visually striking objects, of course, but they are also something more than that. They were made to be used. More specifically, they were made to be sung.
That basic fact sat at the center of the session, even if I did not yet fully know what to do with it.
Like many instruction sessions in special collections, the visit began as an opportunity for hands-on engagement with the past. We talked about the manuscripts as artifacts, their material histories, how they were made and used, and how they are now used as historic evidence. We talked about what students could learn from seeing these items in person rather than through a surrogate. We also talked about the music itself. How plainchant written on vellum carried forward a traditional performative repertoire across centuries in forms that still invite interpretation. Eventually, a question emerged that shifted the project from a one-off class visit into something much larger: if these manuscripts were made to be sung, why not have students sing from them?
It was a question that kept coming up with every class visit, and eventually that question became Singing the Archives, a digital exhibit hosted by the University of South Carolina Libraries and developed through a collaboration among Rare Books and Special Collections, Digital Collections, and the School of Music. What began as recurring instruction sessions grew into a project that asked students not just to view manuscripts, but to work with them through transcription, research, performance, recording, and digital interpretation. The resulting exhibit makes those manuscripts more accessible, but it also does something else that feels especially important: it makes them audible.
One reason this project matters beyond our local context is that it challenged a familiar tendency in academic libraries to keep special collections in a silo. Even when we are committed to teaching with rare materials, it is easy for that work to remain bound by the reading room. A class comes in, students have a memorable experience, the session ends, and sometimes a few of them will come back to the reading room on their own to work with rare materials as primary source examples for a final project. There is nothing wrong with that model; it’s the bread and butter of special collections instruction; it is valuable and sufficient. But this project suggested another possibility. What if special collections instruction is not only an encounter, but the beginning of a collaborative process? What if the session becomes a point of departure for student research, creative practice, digital scholarship, and public-facing work?
That was the real shift. The project moved beyond a one-time instructional session and became a shared enterprise across departments and academic units and has been sustained over time. Students engaged with the manuscripts in different ways depending on their roles and expertise. Some worked on transcription and the challenge of rendering medieval notation into forms that modern performers could use. Others contributed contextual research, editorial work, and performance-practice inquiry. Many of them blogged about their experiences and the challenges the project presented. Library colleagues in digital collections developed the infrastructure through which that work could become legible and accessible to a broader audience. Faculty in music brought disciplinary depth, pedagogical continuity, and the willingness to let students learn by doing. The exhibit became not just a final product, but an on-going record of shared labor.
One of the most exciting things about the project is that it reframed access. In libraries, we often talk about access in terms of discovery, digitization, and online availability. Those are crucial forms of access, and this project certainly benefited from them. But Singing the Archives reminded me that access can also be interpretive and sensory. A digitized manuscript image may allow a user to see a page, but a performance and recording can help users understand what that page was for. In that sense, the exhibit does more than reproduce objects online. It mediates between artifact and experience. It helps bridge the distance between modern audiences and historical materials by showing that these manuscripts are not static relics but living components of musical and devotional practice.
I also think the project offers a useful model for academic librarianship more broadly because it shows what can happen when rare books instruction sessions are treated as a springboard rather than an endpoint. Special collections are sometimes described as treasures, and while that language is understandable, it can also be limiting. Treasure implies rarity, value, and protection. It does not always imply use or engagement. What’s compelling in this collaboration was the way rare materials became a meeting point for teaching, research, technical expertise, and public engagement. The manuscripts became prompts for interdisciplinary learning and relationship-building across campus. Additionally, the manuscripts became even more fun. There was something exciting about hearing students sing from the manuscripts and sharing in their utter glee at being allowed to do so.
That’s the larger lesson. Special collections can be one of the places where academic libraries demonstrate their fullest value not because we hold unique things, but because we can convene unique forms of collaboration around them. We can help translate specialized materials into formats and experiences that invite broader participation. And we can do all of that without flattening the complexity of the objects themselves. In fact, we can do so better by helping the objects to live again and fulfill their original purposes.
Of course, projects like this do not happen easily. They require time, trust, and a willingness to share ownership. They also require us to think differently about instruction. A successful class session is not always the end of the story. Sometimes it is the research and development stage for something larger. That “a-ha” moment of realizing that students should not only study the manuscripts but sing from them depended on recurring contact, on faculty partnership, and on being open to the idea that a special collections session might evolve into a collaborative project neither side fully anticipated at the start.
One takeaway I would offer other academic librarians is that when we teach with special collections, we should pay attention to what students and faculty want to do next. Their off-the-cuff questions and spontaneous ideas may point toward a deeper form of engagement than we originally planned. In our case, that next question led from the reading room to the recording room, and then into a digital exhibit that made the project public. That path will look different at other institutions, but the principle holds. Special collections do not have to function as niche destinations within the academic library. They can be active partners in teaching, discovery, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Sometimes that begins with a simple question in the classroom. And sometimes, if we are willing to follow it, that question can help us hear the collections differently.