What brought you to the MLIS program at Dal? I visited my best friend in Halifax, and I knew I wanted to be here. I come from Ontario and I didn’t want to go to university there again. I applied to the MLIS program because I knew I wanted to be involved in academics but I wasn’t so sure I would have wanted to do a PhD and become a professor.

What drew you to the internship at the Dal Libraries? After working at Halifax Public Libraries and a small archive in Halifax, I knew that I really wanted to work at an academic library. On the archives side of things, I knew the Dal archives was involved in digital archiving and I wanted to be involved in that. I also knew that Dal has a large private manuscript collection from professors and authors and processing those records is really attractive to me.

Your educational background: My educational background is in computer science and history. I took a lot of computer science courses both in high school and during university, but I don’t have a degree in it. I have a B.A in History where I did a lot of distant reading which is digital humanities with text mining and keyword analysis.  I took French, Italian and some Spanish in university too, I have a love for language and linguistics.

What you’ve been doing during your internship: During the fall and winter of my internship I was doing archival appraisal and arrangement and description for Dalhousie’s MedIT medical imaging collection and the personal fonds of Dalhousie English professor James Gray. During the summer, in addition to helping with the daily operations of the archives, I have been doing a collection assessment of all physical carriers of born digital material in our holdings in order to physically separate the carriers, and report on our holdings to help make informed decisions about processing priorities, storage allotment, software and hardware requirements, and appraisal of the material. I have also been working on some of the workflows to do with the archives catalogue such as re-engineering an archival processing data entry workbook so that it is more user friendly and works with a new version of the catalogue.

Fun and interesting facts: One of the interesting facts I like to share is that I have two daughters, and my partner runs a day care in our home, so there are lots of kids in my life!