Librarian
2021-present
I serve as the first Digital Librarian to manage the Adventist Digital Library. I bring best practices, professional standards, and a librarian’s sharp eye for accuracy to the project. I work to ensure that the architecture of the digital library adheres to researcher needs and expectations, so material can be easily found. I also provide tutorials and training to library users around the world and at home on the Andrews University campus, where I am part of the information literacy and reference chat team, and I collaborate with teaching faculty as a liaison librarian.
2015-2021
As part of the Pacific Union College team, my title was Special Collections Librarian. I wore many hats and filled multiple roles. I managed the Heritage Collection, which held more than 10,000 volumes. Weeding and collection development were my responsibility in the Heritage Collection and within assigned subject areas of the general collection, including English Literature, Modern Languages, Visual Arts, and Religion/Theology. Reference shifts were assigned to me, as well as information literacy courses which I discuss at more length in the Teaching section of this website.
2014-2015
At Maplewood Academy, I primarily served as a high school teacher. However, eager to keep my library skillset fresh and active, I voluntarily took on the job of managing the on-campus library. The collection faced many challenges and was being phased out of active use. I weeded outdated material, following policies I researched and wrote. When my work was done, the library became a multi-use study space and home to a much leaner, targeted collection of books.
Archivist
2021-present
At the Adventist Digital Library, I collaborate with contributors who wish to share archival material on the ADL site. With my knowledge of archival principles, I help describe and organize their digitized collections to optimize accessibility to researchers online. For example, I understand and advocate the value of presenting manuscript collections online in a structure and format that retains their original order, since order has meaning.
2015-2021
When I arrived at Pacific Union College in 2015, only one archival collection had been processed with a finding aid. Forty-six unprocessed collections were all in original, acidic boxes and folders. These collections were not yet shelved in alphabetical order. During my time at PUC, we doubled the size of the archives to include over 100 collections. I rehoused a third of those into acid-free boxes and folders, performing preservation tasks on the collections along the way. I partially processed two thirds of the collections and fully processed twenty three collections with complete finding aids. The finding aids are written using EAD-compliant metadata fields in anticipation of a day when PUC can implement ArchivesSpace or some other archival information management system. In 2021, I migrated the finding aids from Google Docs to PUC’s institutional repository website.
2013-2014
At Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., I processed and described/catalogued digitized materials from the Garden Archives, which is a collection of over 6,000 letters, manuscripts, documents, drawings, and photographs from landscape architect Beatrix Farrand’s friendship with and work for Robert and Mildred Bliss.
Sample Finding Aid
Stanley S. Slotkin was a successful Los Angeles businessman who was also an avid collector of rare books. He collected hundreds of thousands of books that he donated to various museums, universities, and libraries across the United States. In the 1960s, Slotkin began to donate individual leaves from books to institutions rather than whole works, as he felt intact books were too often locked away where they could not be seen. This collection consists of 54 of these individual leaves donated by Slotkin, which he removed from texts previously housed in the Biblical Library of Abbey Rents or the Antiquarian Library of Mark Slotkin. Each leaf is mounted onto or enclosed with a sheet of paper that includes a facsimile of the cover page of the work the leaf was originally from.
Finding Aid in EAD
During graduate school I processed this collection and encoded the finding aid in EAD. Since that time I have not worked at an institution with EAD-capable software, but I have done the work before. This is an example.
Finding aids I have created recently are built around metadata fields that are compliant with EAD, in keeping with archival best practices.
Institutional Repository
Pacific Union College established an institutional repository on Innovative’s software, Vital, in 2017.
I grew the repository by digitizing and uploading new college publications, archival collections, photographs, out-of-copyright books, and more. At the close of my time at PUC, over 5,000 digital objects were uploaded. Objects in Vital were cataloged using the Dublin Core metadata schema. Name authorities were pulled from the Library of Congress where possible.