Student Spotlight: Belle Kozubowski, Digital Program Digitization Assistant

The Special Collections Research Center blog series "Student Spotlight" features student employees who contribute to the work of the SCRC. Guest author Belle Kozubowski is a graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill. Belle has been working as a Digital Program Digitization Graduate Assistant since May 2023.

Please describe in a sentence or two the work that you do in the Special Collections Research Center.

I work to digitize and attach metadata to a variety of materials as the Digitization Graduate Assistant. Most of these materials are selected by curators for digitization, but some are also researcher requests. I get to work with a super wide breadth of materials, including photo negatives, papers, framed art, architectural drawings, and scrapbooks, which keeps things exciting!

What has been most interesting to you about your work?  What new things have you learned? Have you made any surprising discoveries?

I really love getting to work with such a wide variety of materials, it has helped me to apply much of the theory that I’ve learned throughout my MSLS. One of the things that drew me to archives is the ability to peek into the past by looking at and interacting with materials, and I’m so lucky to get to do that through my work. It’s always so fun to learn more about how people of the past thought, wrote, acted, dressed, and ate, among other things!

If you met someone who was unfamiliar with archives and special collections, what would you want them to know? What should new researchers know about the work you do?

One of the biggest things that I’ve learned through my MSLS and my job here at NCSU is that the archives are for everyone! For so long the image of the archives as a “treasure room” has kept people from feeling confident that they have a place at our institutions, which I think is one of the greatest pitfalls of our field (and one that I hope continues to change throughout my career!). I hope that as we go into the future, more people who have previously felt excluded from archives and special collections will feel as though they have a seat in the research room. 

What are you studying, and what do you hope to do in your future career?  Has your work in the SCRC changed how you look at your studies or your future career plans in any way?

I just graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with my Master’s in Library Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management, and I truly loved my time in that program. I hope to work for a university special collections or a museum archives, and am hoping to move to Atlanta to pursue my career goals! Working at NCSU has helped me to get a better understanding of the size and scope of an institution that I would want to work at, as well as best practices and common workflows in the field

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your work with the SCRC?

I am always looking for interesting food history and foodways in our collections, and I recently came across this beautiful wedding cake from circa 1930-40s! It was pasted into a biography in the Carl Alwin Schenck collection. 

My research group and I completed our Master’s practicum on North Carolina foodways using materials from Wilson Special Collections (https://scalar.usc.edu/works/recipes-resurrected/index), and foodways has been a research interest of mine for as long as I can remember. Being able to not only interact with, but also recreate and taste foods from the past using archival recipes is one of the most fascinating and enriching ways that I’ve been able to interact with the archives.