We’re pleased to introduce our other fellow, working this summer on ArchiveSpark and our full-text search tool.
- Who are you?
My name is Garrett Morton, and I just finished my Master of Science in Information at the University of Michigan School of Information.
- What’s your background?
As an undergraduate, I majored in history, which is how I got into archives in the first place. Before going back to school to pursue my master’s degree in information, I worked variously in archival processing, records management, and bookstores, all of which have contributed to who I am now in ways both intuitive and unexpected. I learned that you don’t have to be a historian to contribute to our collective understanding of our past, but also that helping people ends up being the most fulfilling aspect of anything I do. During my graduate degree, I have had opportunities to write finding aids for the William L. Clements Library at U-M, teach consulting and contextual inquiry to master’s students, perform program evaluation research, and work on a cross-disciplinary platform design team at Harvard Library. Over the course of my graduate education, I also realized that I have a strong interest in the technical side of archival and library resources, especially relating to metadata and the computer systems by which we access material. I devoured all the coursework I could find, and some besides, that allowed me to learn more about programming, systems administration, and metadata creation and maintenance. I also found classroom and non-classroom opportunities to try my hand at user experience research, turning patron experiences into the actionable building blocks that guide us in making it easier for patrons to achieve their goals.
- Why are you interested?
Coming at my technical interests without particularly strong prior technical knowledge or experience, it was easy for me to view systems both from the perspective of researchers and patrons who use them and from the perspective of the technical and information professionals who create and maintain them. I find the problem-solving challenge of designing an app or system to be rewarding and enjoyable, but it is particularly fulfilling to be able to see the tangible beneficial effects on patrons and researchers. I found this opportunity with the MHL particularly exciting because it offered me a chance to bring a lot of my sometimes-divergent interests together. Working with these valuable historical collections I could facilitate research, at the same time as using and growing my technical skills, while also applying my knowledge of user experience research to bring these aspects together. It feels so rare, as a current or recent graduate student, to see an opportunity where you can have such a direct impact on the individual people using an institution’s collection, but that’s exactly what this position at the MHL offers.
- What do you hope to do?
Over the remaining weeks of this fellowship, I will conduct further interviews with researchers which will help me gain a concrete, empirical understanding of ways in which current tools fall short of researcher needs. I then hope to build those observable needs into a prototype for a new advanced search tool for the MHL collections.