Staff Notes: Emily Walters

Emily Walters (Special Collections) has won the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) Emeritus Award , which will support her travel to the MAC meeting in April where she will speak about the Changing the Landscape project.

In her presentation, Emily will talk about how archives weigh efficient practice with user needs and how less typical record formats present rewards and challenges. Architectural records, being both documentation of professional activity and artistic artifacts, are critical to understanding the environment in which people live, work and define their community. This session will address how archivists are meeting the challenges of connecting these materials with a broad range of researchers in the context of efficient processing, digital, and engagement trends in the archival profession.

Currently Emily is leading NCSU Libraries' CLIR Hidden Collections Processing grant to process six modernist architecture and landscape architecture collections containing over 40,000 original plans and drawings in both paper and electronic formats.  In this project, she is tracking and analyzing costs, undertaking user studies of resulting finding aids, revising practice based on this evaluation, and generating a model for expedient processing of architectural materials.