A Critical Decade: The 1960s and the Tamiment Library

The United States in the 1960's is known for socio-political changes that helped set off a chain reaction of intersectional movements that are still very active today. Today, when many get their news from Facebook and the White House is spinning alternative facts that send marchers to the streets, undergraduate students at New York University are becoming more engaged and aware of their socio-political surroundings and growing frustrated with the simultaneous abundance of information available to them and the difficulty in parsing truth from fiction. In archival instruction at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives as the Public Services Librarian, I am able to invoke left and labor archival materials from the 1960's in particular with greater frequency and efficacy than ever before because of student interest in patterns of activism and the more obvious than ever primal importance of information literacy in the context of resistance and protest.

I argue that this critical decade can connect students to the present and help them learn information literacy and the context of today's activism in a particularly effective manner. The level of engagement that classes that have come into the Tamiment Library for instruction have exhibited when presented with archival materials from the 1960's is remarkable and the ease with which they are able to access the motivations of the decade, thereby augmenting their own developing research skills, is an approach that GLAM professionals as well as history instructors of all levels can exploit to achieve learning outcomes.