It demands, therefore a high standard of accuracy and editorial exactness. By doing this kind of work the students are, after all, doing what professional historians do all the time, and to that extent the students are not pupils but colleagues in this enterprise. Over the years about a dozen of these papers have been published in various journals or collections of essays. All of the papers, except for the very few which for one reason or another do not meet the basic standards set for the course, are duplicated and put on permanent file in the Special Collections along with the documents, where they become part of the scholarly record, available to others who work in the college archives. Juniors often find themselves looking up seniors who worked on documents in a similar field as theirs, pumping them for help and useful tips.
Willing staff makes a difference.
Handwriting alone can daunt a first time researcher while translation and transcription can produce dozens of questions from a single student over a month's time. Support from the special collections staff, their familiarity with Quaker principles and language, helps students avoid pitfalls and carry a project through to a successful conclusion. Student response to the course has been overwhelmingly positive from the beginning. In most cases it allows juniors at the beginning of their major in history to work fairly closely on very specific scholarly problems with one or more members of the department. From the faculty's viewpoint there is no doubt that it has vastly improved the level of research and writing represented in regular term papers for other courses.