I'm a junior at the College of William and Mary, and I started cataloging blueprints in the Special Collections Research Center in the Fall of 2009.

I'm a junior at the College of William and Mary, and I started cataloging blueprints in the Special Collections Research Center in the Fall of 2009.

I came to the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) in the Fall, excited yet a little nervous about beginning my Graduate Assistantship. I had heard wonderful things from other graduate students about their time as Graduate Assistants in the SCRC, and so I was enthused about beginning my assistantship here.

I am not an archivist. Old and fragile documents have scared me for as long as I can remember. Not in a masked murderer kind of way, of course, but in the sense that at any moment while handling archival material, one can accidentally drop a priceless artifact or tear a centuries-old newspaper. That’s pressure I’d normally like to avoid when possible. On top of that unnerving, but not necessarily crippling fear, there are the allergies.