Research Information System
7th European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), ELECTR NETWORK, 20 - 23 September 2021, pp.377-384, (Full Text)
While institutional histories are important information resources for researching the history of higher education, the nature of such documents requires thorough examination to establish their authority within the context of graduate research. Often institutionally sponsored, these histories may be biased towards narratives of the administration that commissioned them. Graduate students studying the history of higher education often find a plethora of histories dedicated to a single college or university-but may struggle to determine their historical veracity. They must account for a history's provenience, vis-a-vis the author or the institution's intent. An analysis from a large-scale bibliographic project informed the development of a definitional typology that provides a framework to enable graduate researchers to navigate the use of institutional histories in their studies. Using this typology offers graduate students a template by which they can effectively assess an institutional history's historiographic and historical content.