Editor’s note: This is the fifth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Jennifer Garcon is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Here’s how she does history.
What’s your current position?
I’m the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Penn Libraries, in addition to being a CLIR Bollinger Fellow in Public and Community Data Curation.1
My job entails developing strategies and practices that expand Penn’s capacity to care for vulnerable data and datasets by finding new and innovative ways to leverage existing Penn Library resources. Vulnerable data includes anything from information types that are in danger of loss because of technological obsolescence—VHS, audio cassettes, floppy disks; historic materials that are held by communities experiencing displacement and erasure; and born-digital information including decontextualized datasets, emails, digital photographs.
Because of my own academic background, as a historian of grassroots movements in Cold War Latin America, I am particularly interested in developing strategies to proactively plug contemporary gaps in knowledge. Some might find the use of data in my fellowship title somewhat confusing, but it’s meant to be intentionally broad.
Tell our readers what a typical day of work is like for you. For starters, is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
Each day can be pretty different and, honestly, it’s what I love about the position. My job is fostering “library innovation,” so I design and initiate pilot projects to test out new library practices and strategies that ensure equitable access to data and promote data advocacy. A central component of my work is learning about what projects already exist, within Penn and in greater Philadelphia, that have, at their core, questions of representation in the digital cultural record. Community data curation promises to facilitate greater access to historic records by reducing redundancy, alleviating cost, and expertise barriers to preservation. Because developing partnerships and collaborations is a central part of my work, I’m often meeting interesting people and learning about cool and dynamic projects; it’s my job to find out ways that Penn Library resources can be used to amplify that work. For example, on Monday, I could spend my day in meetings, planning projects with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Library of Congress, or the Smithsonian, and the following day find myself rummaging through the records of an iconic civil rights organization. On weekends, I might be teaching workshops and digitizing family records at a Free Library branch in West Philly or doing data collection at a festival. I work to develop preservation capacity at both the institutional, community, and personal level; an objective that aims to diversify the digital historical record.
Tell us about the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Why should we visit them? What can we find there? How can they help us with research?
University of Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s top research institutions, and its faculty, students and staff lead and initiate cutting-edge research, broaden expertise; and effect positive local and global change. Penn Libraries is a central partner in this work. Penn’s library system is composed of 18 libraries and commons and 5 associated libraries, with over 7 million physical volumes. My three favorite places are the Kislak Center for Special Collection, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, which is home to over 300,000 printed books and codices and over 14,000 linear feet of modern manuscripts that span the ancient world to the contemporary era and are global in scope; the Lea Library, which contains one of the largest collections on the history of the Inquisition in Europe and Spanish America including numerous works on witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural; and the Fisher Fine Arts Library which is home to a super cool Materials Library, with thousands of material samples including Vanta Black.2
Lea Library in the Kislak Center
Have you always been interested in history? Was there ever a moment where you knew you wanted to study history?
In short, not quite. I studied literature as an undergraduate and at the beginning of my grad school career. I completed an M.A. in Literature and had begun an English Ph.D. program before eventually changing course. As an English graduate student, I was preoccupied with questions of agency, memory, and melancholia. I wanted to study how dictatorships and authoritarian governments in Latin America were represented and resisted in literature. In my first year of grad school, I took a history course on Atlantic World History, which helped me see how closely wedded my work was to the questions of historians of the Revolutionary Atlantic World. I caught the bug, and started taking so many history courses it soon didn’t make sense to stay in my English program. I eventually withdrew from my English program, and applied for a History PhD program instead.
Before you began working at the University of Pennsylvania, what were some other history-focused/library or museum positions that you previously held? How did they prepare for your current position or working in history more generally?
Prior to working at Penn, I had worked for 5 years in various public humanities positions, primarily in archives and special collections and in museums. I was the Assistant Curator for Permanent Exhibits and the Collections Development Specialist at HistoryMiami Museum, a Smithsonian affiliated museum focused on the history of South Florida. I started at HistoryMiami working in their Special Collections and Archives, first handling backlogged acquisitions, and eventually conducting an inventory of the archives and identifying gaps in their collection. The museum’s collection was simply amazing but often hidden away; I felt extremely inspired spending my days in the stacks and began to curate small exhibits drawn from the archive that both amplified the richness and diversity of the existing archival holding, and were tackling some of the contemporary issues facing South Florida—including an exhibit focused on street protests, immigration and naturalization, and climate change.
I was later promoted to Assistant Curator, where I developed a work plan to revitalize the museum’s 30-year old permanent exhibit, “Tropical Dreams,” in ways that engaged local stakeholders in the process of critically reimagining the exhibit to represent and reflect Miami’s various communities.3 This position allowed me to focus on doing history in ways that were public facing and reached diverse audiences. My work at Penn is deeply informed by my desire to make knowledge accessible. I have primarily worked in and attended well-resourced institutions, where I have had the unique opportunity to spend endless amounts of time indulging the urge to learn about and engage the past. I want to find ways to make that experience more accessible for others.
Teaching and learning with Penn students about community data curation.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I think within academia, and for good reason, becoming and being a professor is imagined to be the end-goal for all advanced graduate students. I realized during grad school that the tenure-track wasn’t going to be a good fit for me, so I began thinking more broadly about the kinds of work I could find meaningful. I knew for sure that I was driven and energized by research, more so than teaching. I liked speaking to and learning from people, finding shared interests and developing projects that could pool resources. I love thinking of and designing projects. Plus I love tackling hard questions and solving a good puzzle. I think historians share many of these traits and that there are many positions outside of the professoriate that highly value them.
Where did you go to college and graduate school?
I went to Brown University for undergrad, where I studied English Literature with sub-focus in Gender and Sexuality. I received an M.A. in American Literature from Hunter College (CUNY), where I studied Rhetoric in Slave Narratives. I went on to do my Ph.D. training at University of Miami, and my focus was on 20th century Latin America.
What were your research interests in graduate school?
My research focused on media and grassroots social movements in the Cold War Caribbean, culminating in my dissertation, “Haiti’s Resistant Press in the Age of Jean-Claude Duvalier, 1971–1986.” Challenging prevailing interpretations that stress the immediacy of the political transformation leading to the Haitian President’s 1986 ouster, my dissertation instead traced a longer history of political unrest and discontent as expressed in the pages of newspapers, weekly journals, and in radio broadcasts. I tackled a central issue in Haitian political history: the fifteen-year endurance of a brutal regime headed by a seemingly weak dictator. I engaged in extensive archival and oral history research to explore the numerous pro- and anti-government newspapers, journals, and radio broadcasts in circulation between 1971 and 1986. My main argument was that the actions of journalists and their audiences during the period of limited press freedom redrafted the bounds of social and political citizenship and reshaped the nature of political engagement within authoritarian Haiti, in ways that nuance our current interpretation of expulsion of dictatorship.
Some of the vulnerable data Jennifer is working to save and utilize. For librarians and archivists, primary sources can take many different forms.
What were the most rewarding and toughest parts of tackling and completing your dissertation?
The answer to both was finding primary source material. My work focused on radio broadcasts and audio recordings, which allowed me to tackle some of the central questions of my dissertation, but is not often a part of the collections of traditional repositories. Rather, they are dispersed in private collections, which often lack the resources and expertise to prevent their imminent loss. My project’s engagement with audiovisual sources required me to develop multiple strategies for locating, processing, cataloging, preserving, and interpreting these vital documents. I had to find and access the appropriate recordings and then, before embarking on an analysis, I digitized, described, and processed the collection of recordings. I was tough, really tough, but learned a lot through this process.
How well did your particular history training prepare you for your position at your library?
Each day, I apply my methodological and theoretical training in a public facing way for an institution that is committed to promoting equitable access to knowledge. In order to facilitate my dissertation research, I independently digitized, processed, and analyzed hundreds of hours of radio broadcasting sources. Going behind the scenes and helping to find, secure, and create a catalog that facilitates research enabled me to apply the analytical and critical thinking skills in ways that could engage a broader public.
What is something people don’t know/understand/appreciate about working in a library?
People honestly don’t have a sense of all that can happen within a library. As a student, I thought of the library primarily as a quiet study space and a place to check out books. I rarely sought out librarians for support, and was largely self-directed in my research. As an employee, I get a more complete view of the full scope of services the library offers. Penn Libraries is a vital partner in the academic research and teaching occurring all over the University. There’s so much experimentation and innovation happening in libraries that change how people engage in teaching, research, and learning. We’re building web-platforms to provide access to historic material, geographic information system (GIS) mapping, 3D modelling, and AR/VR experimentation are positioned to change how people engage and interact with primary source material. Makerspaces enable people to 3D print and experiment with circuitry.4 There’s just so much happening in libraries, but I think that so much of it tends to be invisible.
Part of Jennifer’s duties involve teaching the fundamentals of historic preservation and how to make old sources new again and last in the digital age.
What do you find to be the most rewarding part of working at your library?
I love the collaborative spirit of library work. I’m amazed by the dynamic and vast skillsets of my coworkers, whom I’ve learned just so much from. The work continues to be intellectually rigorous and critically engaging. It’s about creative problem solving, which I just love. Moreover, I couldn’t pick a better place to work than Philadelphia, which has hundreds of cultural memory institutions with archival records. I was lucky enough to join the Philadelphia-based Archives for Black Lives Philadelphia (A4BLIP), a loose association of over 75 archivists, librarians, and allied professionals in the area responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s rewarding to be able to do work that feels impactful with colleagues who share a sense of urgency and innovation.
What advice would you share with someone wanting to work in a library or museum?
I think that gaining practical work experience is the first and best advice I could give. I gained a lot of hands-on experience applying some of the practices and theoretical methodologies of my academic training, and was able to, through working alongside and learning from formally trained archival and information professionals, make them translatable in the field of public humanities.5 I think it can sometimes be hard to make the work we do during the course of our studies legible on the job market, so developing work experience that allows you to show, in concrete terms, how that work is applicable in other contexts is crucial.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle?
I don’t know; this is a really tough question. What I will say, I haven’t yet learned of the scope of work that already exists. I’m keen on reducing redundancy and finding ways to build collaborative practices especially as a way to alleviate cost-burdens that inhibit access to knowledge.
If you weren’t a scholar, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
Not sure. I love to travel and eat, so perhaps something centrally involving those two things.
- The Bollinger Fellowship is a two-year postdoctoral fellowship through the Council on Library and Information Resource and the Bollinger Foundation. Jennifer’s tenure as a Bollinger Fellow ends in June.
- Vanta Black is one of the darkest known substances and absorbs over 99% of visible light. Learn more about the substance here.
- “Tropical Dreams” examines over 10,000 years of South Florida history, from the prehistoric era to modern day. The exhibit explores the first visitors to South Florida, the southward expansion after the United States took possession of Florida, and new technologies that shaped and have reshaped South Florida over the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Makerspaces are collaborative workspaces. They can be high tech or feature no tech at all. People who participate in makerspaces often work on projects related, but not limited to science, technology, and computing.
- Public humanities often refers to the work of engaging diverse publics through history, memory, and culture. It’s a wide ranging field that can be practiced in classrooms, museums, and all types of historical sites.