Professional Development Statement

I began pursuing a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) after working as a student library worker in UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library. There I learned an appreciation for the vital functions of the library, and more importantly the ways these functions interacted with users: students, scholars, and the wider public. As a student myself, earning my degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing, access to informational resources and channels of support shaped my experience at such a large public university. Leaning into this pivot in my academic path, I took IS 431 Archives, Records, and Memory with Anne Gilliland as an undergraduate; this experience informed my own emerging interest in archival studies and practice. I became familiar with the work of Michelle Caswell, SAADA, and the larger community archiving movement. This introduction to the contemporary archival field assured me of my own desire to follow this line of work, particularly in strengthening the ongoing project of community archiving. I am deeply interested in building structures of support for communities to collect and preserve their own cultural memory, with their own intellectual control.

Beginning my entry into the program, I was fortunate enough to be accepted as the University Archives Processing Scholar by the Center for Primary Research and Training, located within YRL’s Special Collections. This opportunity allowed me to experience the University Archives, processing departmental records and materials relating back to the early founding of the campus in Westwood. Here, I developed my own professional practices in the archives, and fostered my emerging interests in archival processing, description, and management practices. I published finding aids for University materials and worked to organize and update many of the records that had gone unprocessed for years. In pursuing the archival field, I am interested in creating more accessible and widely-inclusive archives that bend towards social justice and equity.

This past year, I was lucky enough to be selected to intern at Visual Communications (VC) through UCLA’s Community Archives Lab, as funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. VC is an Asian and Pacific American media arts organization, which houses a large archival collection sourcing from APA communities and legacies of social movement and film production. As an archival intern, I have continued the work previously undertaken by Yuri Shimoda in digitizing and indexing VC’s massive photographic collection. I have expanded my own technical breadth of expertise while working for VC, building on my contributions to digitization projects with Beyond Baroque, UCLA Digital Library, and Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. In interfacing with these materials, I have also had the opportunity to collaborate with community members through metadata tagging parties, in efforts of accurately describing and documenting the history and lives they contain. My engagements with the community have been deeply affecting, as I have seen in the tagging events how events, people, and memories are recalled and re-connected to lived experience. The archive has also been an important site of community resilience in Little Tokyo, especially during a public health crisis that has affected the livelihoods and stability of many Asian and Pacific American and diasporic communities, through both the lack of health infrastructure and pervasive racism and xenophobia. Witnessing firsthand the functioning of a community archive has been a rewarding process.

I have worked within a diverse range of institutions, operating at varying scales and with different communities of users in mind. For instance, my first archival project was in the Venice poetry landmark, Beyond Baroque, a formative and creative space I have visited since my time as an undergrad at UCLA. With Johanna Drucker, I worked alongside students and the institution’s staff to organize, arrange, and digitize materials that were tied directly to my own understanding of poetic lineages and genealogies in Los Angeles. In another period, I worked at UCLA’s Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, working in the Herbarium to sort, package, and collect botanical specimen collected over two centuries. Although my working title was herbarium technician, I was gifted my very own plant press and designated as an Herbarium Fellow, enabling me to collect future specimen for the repository. Processing both living and once-living material, this environment required a shift of technical practices, adding to my understanding of what conservation and access entails for differing research communities.

My academic interests have led me towards implementing digital humanities practices in the archives, where computational and data-driven tools are used critically to aid humanities research questions. This framework has allowed me to both look critically at the data-centric narratives that are compounded in LIS professions, while also not shying away from supporting quantitative data with qualitative methods when applicable. As Digital Humanities practices are becoming increasingly incorporated into libraries and archives, and I hope to support the critical application of emerging technologies to provide aid to students, users and the public. Throughout the program I have been a member of README, a forum for UCLA IS students that advocate for digital rights to privacy and agency. As an emerging professional, I intend to use my voice to promote ethical and critical practices within the field. Within my time working at UCLA Special Collections, I was privileged to work alongside members of the “UCLA Six,” a group of six temporary archivists whose experiences with contracted archival labor informed my own understanding of labor relations within institutions. Integral to my own work ethic, I believe in building networks of support for budding information professionals and the communities that rely on the vital resources we provide. By attending conferences and professional events such as the 2019 Society of California Archivists’ annual general meeting and “Sustaining Visions and Legacies: The Future of Special Collections Libraries” hosted by the Clark Library, I have endeavored to stay actively engaged with the issues and discourses concerning the LIS community. I hope to participate more directly in the future by contributing conference papers or posters.

My immediate professional goal is to continue building my own professional experience and skillset, whether within a community archive, academic archive, special collections, or museum role. In whatever role I undertake, I aim to work towards integrating sustainable practices and building capacity for underserved communities within the institutional setting. Moving ahead, I hope to use my skills gained from the MLIS program to support the archival field in constructing more accessible, stable, and resourceful structures that can better serve our user communities. Developing my nascent professional career during this junction in history, I am committed to working alongside a community of archival professionals in acting to preserve the materials that spawn from the present moment of crisis, and in doing so, developing an understanding of what this work will entail in the future.