My wonderful student Maci continues on in the archives

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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 when documents are older and a bit finicky. While the Madison, Jelenek, Pine River, and CMU OACA Accreditation collections have all been processed, typed, encoded, and catalogued, the Luedke collection is the one I will continue to process into the fall. It was such a dense collection, with 17 cubic feet and dozens of folders to organize the original order from the first addition of the collection, so it’s been a slow process, but an extremely rewarding one, nonetheless. All of these collections have offered different challenges that I’ve had to work through, such as ethical rights to materials, personal materials, massive amounts of duplicates, and hundreds of photographs to sleeve.

I have been able to get hands-on with all of these collections, and it’s been such an amazing experience to get to learn archives and archival practices. I have such an appreciation for archivists and the work they do after being here for 8 months now. I have grown to love coming into work every single day, and I am so excited to finish my undergraduate degree so I can go get my MLIS and continue this work every day. I have seen such a tremendous improvement in myself and how I view the work I do, and I’m so pleased that I’ve been able to develop in this way. We’ve been able to complete so many collections entirely, and I’ve been able to do collections entirely by myself, which was a huge confidence booster for me because previous collections were collaborative, but I know that sometimes working in the archives you are entirely alone, so to be able to do that was a good feeling for me. I’m very grateful to everyone at the Clarke for teaching me and working with me, and I am very excited to continue being here going forwards!


Daria Batzner and Maci with the shelved Barbara Madison collection.

Thanks for a very productive summer Maci. You did a great job.  I'm looking forward to working with you this academic year.

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