My main goal as Outreach Librarian at CADL Local History was to draw in younger and more diverse demographics. My time there saw a marked increase in the number of young and rural patrons we saw during open hours. I did this via two main initiatives:

First, I published a quarterly zine which was made available to patrons physically and digitally. View the first zine here and the second here! The zines featured old newspaper and magazine articles, recipes, photographs, illustrations, and more, pulled exclusively from our collections.

The zines were popular enough that I distributed 600+ copies of each. If they would have been professionally printed instead of done in-house, we could have distributed many more. The second zine was profiled in a local alternative newspaper.

Second, I headed up a project to collect as much local music as possible, with a focus on collecting physical local releases in all formats, with no limitations on genre or time period. We also collected live video, photos, flyers and posters, business records, band merch, and other ephemera.

Community response was significant, with many musicians coming in to donate materials once left to languish in basements, closets, and garages. We were also able to use library funds to purchase active artists' and labels' new releases, simultaneously becoming active supporters of local music and building trust with the scene.

In my two plus years at Central Michigan University's Clarke Historical Library, my primary focus was transcribing 50+ (mostly unpublished) letters written to and from abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier alongside then-librarian John Fierst. The project can be viewed here.

I also selected my own library of letters, which became the second prong of the project: Abolitionist, Feminist, Suffragette: Women in the John Greenleaf Whittier Correspondence Collection. This subset of letters focused on the connection between American abolition, women's suffrage, and feminism. For this part of the project, I transcribed all the letters and wrote all of the headnotes.

I was the only Clarke staff member involved with putting the materials online. For this, I used Omeka.net. This work included tagging all letters with metadata (through the use of .csv files) and writing supplementary content for the web.

I gained experience scanning and editing documents, reading old handwriting, transcribing, writing headnotes, creating metadata and an archival website, and curating a collection.

Before starting grad school, I worked as an archival intern for the FWD Seagrave Museum. The rural automobile museum chronicles the history of both The Four Wheel Drive Auto Co. and Seagrave Fire Apparatus. When I arrived, the museum's collection of 300+ glass plates had been sorted into boxes and assigned accession numbers. That was the extent of the work that had been done. There was no finding aid, no meaningful organization system, and no metadata whatsoever.

Over that summer, I scanned each of the plates individually with a flatbed scanner. Due to the relatively primitive setup, I had to scan many plates in 4-5 parts and stitch them together in Photoshop. I then further edited the images and exported access and archival-quality copies. I also created metadata. Due to a lack of records regarding the subjects of glass plates, I did a reasonable amount of historical research to identify people, places, and automobiles in the photos. I also met with stakeholders (primarily the foundation director) every few weeks to share my findings.

I made a public-facing Omeka site with watermarked access copies of all images, as the museum was interested in selling high-quality versions of the images.

Working on this glass plate negative collection provided me with experience scanning negatives, editing photos, performing historical research, and creating metadata and an archival website. Additionally, my time at the museum gave me experience working as a tour guide.