By JoAnna Lincoln
I fell in love with providing access to history when I took Marian Matyn’s Archival Administration class at CMU. A single semester in the archives wasn’t enough for me, so the following semester I began volunteering in my spare time, processing small, multi-box collections. By then I was hooked and proceeded to spend the summer of 2018 as an intern at the Clarke Historical Library, processing dozens of feet of materials across widely ranging collections.
After graduating from CMU in 2018, I went on to earn a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan in 2020. During the summer of 2019, I interned in the photo archives of the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Interlochen where my projects included photograph digitization, file migration, community metadata entry, and recording and transcribing oral histories. In the Fall of 2019 I interned with the Ann Arbor District Library as an Events Assistant in the library and Processing Intern in the offsite archives. I learned about successful library programming on a large scale, maintaining donor relationships, and metadata maintenance of massive photograph collections.
In November of 2020 I found employment as a Library Assistant at the Perry Branch of Community District Libraries. I am currently the Branch Manager of our New Lothrop location. I am digitizing our local history collection to provide wider access on our new website. I did not expect to find myself working in a public library, but I find immense joy and satisfaction in my work.
Featured image depicts JoAnna with one of Michigan Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Weaver’s series, which she had just processed.
