archivistrising321.blogspot.com

  Hello, my name is Maci Bird, and I was a Special Projects Archives Processing Assistant over the course of this summer. I’m currently a junior at CMU this fall majoring in anthropology and public history. I’ve had the pleasure of continuing to be here at the Clarke, up close and personal with lots of super interesting collections and materials. I worked closely with another coworker, Daria, who was wonderful and always super helpful and fast. I was able to work on completing 5 collections this summer, including Madison, Jelenek, Pine River Superfund Task Force, CMU Office of Academic and Curricular Affairs (OACA), and the Luedke Engineering Collection. Daria and I also worked on and completed the weeding and removal of the 67,000 Madison digital files that were donated with the rest of the physical collection, and that was super interesting to learn to work with digital material and learn new things about how to use a computer w...

My name is Daria Batzner, and I’m going into my fourth year of my undergrad here at CMU as a History Major and Dance Minor. Over the Summer of 2026, I worked as a student archival processing assistant. I mainly worked with the Barbara Madison collection, which was quite the first experience with archival work for me. I spent a lot of time going through Madison’s papers, and I learned a lot about how to process material along the way. Once I had finished processing and encoding the Madison collection, I moved on to other smaller collections that were much easier to process. The switch to working with collections with an original organization system, like the Pine River Superfund and related collections, made everything seem a lot easier. Even though the work could be confusing or tedious at times, I loved every minute of it.   During my time at the Clarke, I worked closely with Marian. She taught me how to process collections, including what should be withdrawn vs. retained, how t...