 Good afternoon. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Tom Belton and I'm head of Archives and Special Collections at Western University, and I and my colleagues will be giving a presentation over the next 10 minutes about our research project. And so let's get started. Most of not all research libraries include archival collections, either as part of special collections and or university archives. In our organizational context. That is the archives and special collections team at Western University libraries in London, Canada. The work of archivists and librarians is clearly differentiated archivists work with university and privately donated records and special collections librarians on our team focus on rare published books and maps. This team of four archivists, therefore we wanted our study to focus on archival collections and the associated services primarily offered by archivists. We felt that this research would be useful to the research library community. If we were able to identify patterns and characteristics that could be ascribed more precisely to archival services and collections within research libraries. Although we began intending to study all our users we eventually decided to focus on the university's Department of History, and we hypothesized that archives made measurable impacts on the work of history faculty and students. We were interested in understanding how archival collections can be used to support teaching learning and research. We assumed that we had an impact on these areas, but did not know the extent, as we had never explored impact by conducting research or analyzing existing data. It should be noted that we had not previously engaged with Department of History faculty or students with any outreach or specific programming with the notable exception of graduate public history students. We investigated our impact on the Western Department of History as a case study to identify and understand the broader influence of the archives on teaching learning and research. In our variety of methods reported and discussed in the literature around measuring and assessing impact of archives and special collections. We selected our methodology after an extensive review of the literature and multiple conversations with ARL social The initial approach to the research involves three focus groups with undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty members. Data gathered throughout each focus group would inform a survey distributed to all students and faculty within the Department of History. These focus groups were scheduled at the end of March 2020. During the week of March 16, 2020, Western's campus was suddenly closed in response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic. The in-person focus groups were canceled due to this closure. This research project was put on hold for several months due to the uncertainty surrounding the global pandemic. The research project was restarted during the summer of 2020. Discussions ensued regarding the feasibility of continuing with the original method. It was impossible to conduct in-person focus groups during this period as the middle sex public health unit disseminated strict guidelines for indoor and outdoor gatherings. Online focus groups were considered, but two concerns were identified. Zoom fatigue and lack of engagement. We were not confident in our abilities to facilitate conversation in this new online environment and we were unsure how the online format would affect engagement with and between participants. Focus groups were not used for these reasons. Four techniques were utilized to measure the impact of Western's archives on the Department of History. These included a survey of faculty and students, analysis of instruction data, analysis of visitor data, and analysis of citations associated with research disseminated from the Department of History. We selected these approaches based on the results of our literature review. This multi-pronged approach provided opportunities to assess the impact of Western's archives from a variety of perspectives and outputs. The combination of these methodologies gave us a user-centered approach to measuring impact. So our findings. 63% of our faculty survey respondents indicated that they had used Western's archives in their teaching and research. Some respondents said that the archives did not have any impact on their work. Other respondents said that the archives had no primary sources in their area of specialization, and therefore the archives had minimal impact on their work. Senior faculty members are more likely to use Western's archives as 80% of our survey respondents who indicated that they had used the archives have been at Western for over 14 years. Improved access to the archives, specifically more and better finding aids, promoting phone and collections to the department, creating a liaison position for the department, and hosting meet and greet sessions for faculty members were all suggestions for improving the relationship with the history department. Some of the barriers that were listed in terms of using the archives included COVID-19, obviously, lack of finding aids and reliance on staff knowledge alone to access holdings. Our student survey respondents indicated the majority indicated that they had heard about the archives through the professor or through the library itself. This suggests the critical role of faculty members in promoting the archives to students. Many students respondents indicated that they were not sure how to use the archives, or that they did not need to use the archives. They also indicated obviously that the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their ability to use the archives. The most common reason cited for not using the archives is not knowing how to. The student survey respondents also advised that promoting services and collections becoming more user friendly, becoming more accessible, and increasing the online presence would help the archives become more useful. Most student respondents also indicated that they had not received any form of instruction. When asked if they had taken a course where instruction in archives and or primary sources would have been beneficial. Most students indicated that all history courses could benefit from students receiving some form of instruction. Our visitor data analysis showed that there were consistently low numbers of visits from both undergraduate and graduate students with no substantial growth in student visits over the course of our data analysis. The majority of graduate students visits were from the public history stream of the history department. And we should note that public history at Western consistently makes use of archival resources as part of their built heritage projects and that's built into their course curriculum. Our analysis also revealed that there's no consistent growth in terms of faculty visits from the history department. In fact, the majority of our faculty visits were from other departments within the university and not from the history department. We looked at instruction data, the number of undergraduates taught increased during the first half of the 2011 to 2019 decade, and then declined sharply through the second half of that period. This is because of discontinued courses and the retirement of many senior faculty members. Graduate student instruction was relatively stable throughout the decade. We did a citation analysis, we looked at, we have 65 doctoral theses and our scholarship at Western database. Nine of these theses referenced archival holdings in Western archives. The remainder, either referenced archival collections at other national or international institutions, or they had no reference to archival material at all. Certain 21 bibliographies were reviewed for the period. 47 of the authors were Western University upper year undergraduate students with majors or minors in history. Only one bibliographies included a reference to archival resources at Western archives. This result is not surprising as most of the articles were either national or international in scope, and relied heavily on published forms of primary and secondary sources. Very few of these articles used archival sources of information at all. For the period that we looked at we found 34 faculty publications listed on the faculty, faculty's website. And we looked at all the bibliographies to analyze them, and all of these only one publication cited reference to Western archives. So to conclude, we learned some valuable lessons throughout this process and a few of those stand out. Firstly, the examination of available data led to the unexpected learning that there is a need to collect better quality data, most especially in regards to visitors and instruction. And we believe this will allow for more effective analysis in the future. Additionally engagement with faculty and students is crucial. Other institutions can learn from our experience of the risks of a lack of constructive engagement, and it is important to be very deliberate and planned, especially in reaching out to faculty and students. The Department of History wants increased engagement with archives and special collections, and we need to meet those needs proactively. Lastly, and perhaps not surprisingly, we learned how challenging it is to measure impact, especially that of archives on teaching research and learning at an academic institution. However, this project provided an opportunity to reflect on and assess our activities and statistics in a way that we may have not otherwise. We certainly gained new insight into our users. So right now we would just like to acknowledge ARL for sponsoring this project with special thanks to Gordon, Kevin and Margaret. We also would like to thank our colleagues at Western Libraries, the Department of History and of course Western Research, Western University Research Ethics. Thank you.