Rach Teasdale

Hello! My name is Rach Teasdale and I’m currently finishing up my first semester in the Public History graduate program at Southeast Missouri State University. I’m employed by Southeast and work a full-time job in Kent Library with my time split between the Acquisitions Department and the Special Collections & Archives unit. I spend my mornings working in Acquisitions receiving all periodicals and ordered materials for the library. My afternoons are spent working in Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) working with the varied collections and donations received.

My job definitely influenced my choice of graduate program and then helped me to decide that the Digital Heritage MA option fit my exact goals. One of my main responsibilities in SC&A is managing the items in our digital collections management systems: ArchivesSpace and CONTENTdm. I recently started working with the software program CONTENTdm in SC&A to manage our digitized collections. As I was working with the metadata of the collections, I realized just how much I enjoyed this type of work. I’m jokingly referred to as the “CONTENTdm database whisperer” at my job, since I’m one of the few that can operate the program without too many hiccups! It feels a bit odd to say that I enjoy working with metadata, but there’s something satisfying about getting all that information together within my Excel worksheets, inputting it into programs, and having the end result of beautifully displayed collections on the web. All of this led me to determine that Digital Heritage was most closely aligned to what I wanted to do in the future. I am so thrilled to start the program and begin the path towards becoming a Digital Archivist.