6.1 Plan your research

In Making History you are tasked with producing a major research project. The process of researching and presenting your work is a key part of how you connect with the ‘history industry’, as Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton have termed it.^[1] Unpacking recent developments within this field, including in the Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) sector, becomes another valuable avenue for you to witness public history in action. This chapter provides key background to these developments, while also mapping out useful research activities (via H5P) that you can work through during your research process. If you record your reflections within these activities, you can download them as a document at the end of each one. Many of the research activities are contextualised with examples you can learn from and apply to your own topic. You can also find inspiration in the examples of past student projects and reflections in this book.

This chapter explores the different approaches GLAM sector institutions take when expanding access to their collections to help you navigate copyright, Creative Commons licenses and more access considerations for your public history projects. All have relatively recently started doing work with First Nations communities to navigate their important additional access, cultural safety, and sharing considerations. Archives often have additional privacy concerns to consider when deciding what can be made openly available.

Some key points to remember when planning and doing archival research:

• Think about who might have created records on your topic (people, organisations, government departments, and so on)
• Identify and use the language they might have used in the time and place you’re researching.
• Record your search strategies and citations as you go.
• Draw on multiple sources and perspectives.
• Look out for finding aids, research guides, reports and/or fact sheets related to your topic produced by librarians, archivists, or historians.
• Browse the collection or start broad and filter down.
• Think critically about what systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia that determined what histories are preserved and the gaps and biases in archives – and about decisions made around what records are digitised.
• Remember that not everything is online (and not everything should be) and that even if something is available online that does not mean you can use it in published work without asking permission.