Under the supervision of the Manuscripts Division processing team, the summer fellow will be assisting with several key projects, including “traditional” paper-based processing, processing born-digital media, inventorying AV materials, and researching access options for born-digital and digitized AV content.

Kat at Prambanan, a Hindu temple in Indonesia

Name: Kathryn Antonelli (but feel free to call me Kat!)

Educational background: I received my undergraduate education from Temple University. My degree was in Media Studies and Production, with a minor in French. I’m now about halfway through my Master’s program in Library and Information Science through the University of South Carolina’s distributed education option. This summer, I’m conducting an independent study on the ethics of archiving audiovisual materials (especially within collections of indigenous and minority cultural groups), so if you have any leads on interesting articles to read please do let me know. 🙂

Previous experience: Before finding my interest in archiving, I worked in event production at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. More recently, after moving to Chicago and starting my MLIS, I’ve had the opportunity to intern at the Gerber/Hart Library, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Oriental Institute, and the Newberry Library.

Why I like archives: I like archives for two reasons: the stories they tell, and the mysteries they solve. I do truly enjoy working with paper-based collections, but after my undergraduate program I became much more aware of how audiovisual media presents—or omits—information, which made those materials and the ways we can use them even more interesting to me. And, after a childhood full of Nancy Drew novels, I’ll count anything from puzzling out the (accurate!) birth date of a well-known dancer to identifying people in a photograph as a type of mystery solving.

Other interests: While baseball season is a lot of fun, and the weather is much nicer, I’m rarely sad for summer to end because it means college football is about to start. I’m an ardent Temple fan, of course, but I also watch every other game I can. My friends are always entertained by the irony, since outside of watching sports I am not a competitive person at all.

Projects this summer: I’m excited that my first task at Princeton is to process the Albert Bensoussan papers. The collection is in both French and Spanish and I love working with foreign language materials. Later this summer, I’ll be taking on more tasks with our born-digital holdings, so I’m also looking forward to learning how to use the new FRED machine to work with files in the Toni Morrison collection.