Description - Analysis - Reflection

I chose to include three assignments here, which may be sprawling but I hope it also gives a view of my trajectory throughout the MLIS program. The first is a Collection Policy for an imagined archive of Lowcountry cookbooks (inspired by my beloved job at a culinary bookshop in a previous decade). Written for ISCI 766 in Fall 2023, this marked the first Archives-specific class I took and I remember feeling encouraged at all the ways archiving can look like community work. Not only did I begin to understand that the details of a project (i.e. policy) can help bring ideas to life, I connected that to drawing the boundaries of shared memory. To me, this is what fuels real interdependence and social progress, so it began to matter very much to me that I could find a way to participate! 

The second entry is an essay about how archives, collective memory, and social activism may overlap, submitted for ISCI 711, also in Fall 2023. I may have been reaching to constellate some of these points in hindsight, but it nonetheless represents some of the most exciting research I have done to date in terms of archival theory and examples of radical remembrance. Exploring archives as active sites, not just for preserving evidence but for creating memory, also means reconsidering archivists as mediators between institutional processes and the communities they serve. Knowledge is co-creation (that old chestnut) and users are the experts. Archival acts, particularly those that creatively and resourcefully employ counter-hegemonic tools (e.g. social web 2.0 and DIY practice), give us collective power to create new pathways and reconstruct cultural myths.

These courses and projects were enlightening, but I wondered how to apply this theory in a specific context. Last Fall, I completed an internship (ISCI 711) at Special Collections at College of Charleston. I also worked with a mentor, retired Head of Archives Harlan Greene, there in Spring of 2025. So I have included my final reflection of these experiences, which demonstrates the direction my Certificate in Specialized Study has taken, and where I hope it will continue. The repository itself is interesting because it is combined with the SC Historical Society and holds much of the city’s manuscripts. The records of the families whose lives and business shaped the development of the Charleston peninsula are all under one roof, and scratching the surface of this collection only proved how much metadata matters. Just as policy gives shape to a collection, resource descriptions give it depth, not to mention render it useful to all.