My service learning project began in early September when I received eight new students to work on the Allegheny County Coroner Case Files Project. The case files are a large set of records (about 800 cubic feet) detailing nearly 100 consecutive years of documented mortality created by the county government here in Pittsburgh. The project comes out of a grant I received to physically preserve the records which are housed at the Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. In order to intellectually engage students who are the labor force for the preservation work, and to create a unique documentation project, I started a wiki:
“This wiki is a shared effort by interns working on the Allegheny County Coroner Case File Project at the University of Pittsburgh. Interns are not only preserving these important records, but they are also gleaning social and historical information from a primarily untapped resource. This online effort will allow the interns to contribute to the overall understanding of these records and to promote further scholarship by bringing to light the personal stories, points of interest, and the unusual and suspicious deaths in Pittsburgh’s history.”
http://www.coronercasefile.pbwiki.com
The wiki was constructed during the spring semester 2007 when ten undergraduate student interns took on part of the project-I needed a place to keep training documents and provide some sort of communication. A requirement for interns was to provide journals and reports to their departmental advisors-the wiki simplified this and we geared this work to reflect on the information read in the case files. Perusing the wiki we have created “themes”, “chronologies”, and personal blog pages. I learned a great deal about how undergraduate students reacted to the information and the technology and was fortunate that a few continued to work on the project over the summer.
A new batch of students-mostly graduate students- signed onto the project in September. This Service Learning Project will reflect on the two way learning experiences and maybe even evaluate the usefulness of the “wiki” as a sustainable source of documentation. Stay tuned! Your comments on the wiki are encouraged and welcomed!
