 Hi everyone. My name is Allison McKittrick, and I'm the Outreach Librarian for the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives at UT Libraries. Happy Ask an Archivist Day. Ask an Archivist Day is a wonderful opportunity for people to learn more about who archivists are, what they do on a daily basis, and their thoughts on the profession. So today we are talking with our fabulous archivist at UT Libraries Special Collections. So first we have Alicia Schumar. Alicia is the Assistant Head and University Archivist at Special Collections. She oversees over 4,000-liter feet of University Archives and builds collections that are key to the UT community. Prior to UT Libraries, Alicia worked at the University of Pittsburgh as the Archivist for the Frick Collection. Alicia earned her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. Next we have Chris Bronstadt. Chris is the Modern Political Archivist for Special Collections. She is also the Liaison Librarian for Political Science and Sociology. Originally an English major from Texas, she has a Masters in Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While a student there, she worked as a Reference Archivist for the McCormick International Harvester Collection, and so for a short while was Conversant Interactor. I love that detail. It's great. We also have Laura Romans, who is the Manuscript Archivist with Special Collections. Laura builds, maintains, and promotes the use of all manuscript collections at UT Libraries. She holds her MLIS from the University of South Carolina, and prior to working with UT, she worked on the South Carolina Digital Newspaper Program. So, hi everyone. Welcome. You guys ready to answer some questions? Yes. Okay. So, Laura, I'm going to start with you. One of our questions was, what path did you take to get into this field? Sure. Well, as an undergrad, I was a history major and had a work study scholarship, and they put me in the Special Collections and Archives at my undergrad institution. And so that was sort of how I learned that it was even a field, that it was something to do. And I just realized that I really loved working more hands-on with history. And so, I learned a lot while I was in that position. I worked on a lot of interesting collections, and then worked closely with the archivist there, who sort of just told me about, you know, going to get your master's. You could get it in Library and Information Science. You could focus on archives and Special Collections. So, I did that. That's how I ended up at University of South Carolina. And while I was at USC, I just tried to do as many different types of internships and jobs and volunteer work as I could in different settings, and just sort of kept really enjoying working in archives and Special Collections at an academic institution. So, that's kind of how I ended up here. That's great. Thank you. Alisha, what about you? What path did you take to get into this field? Well, I really had a similar path as Laura did. I started as a history major in my undergraduate, and I started with writing a research paper that I use our local university archives for, and then I figured out that that could be my main job that I was doing. So, I applied for a job as a student worker and started working there as a freshman and then continued on through grad school, went on to the University of Pittsburgh, and got another assistantship there where I worked in the archives. And I was to Chris's tractors, I had coal culture and how you mine coal. So, that's a pretty big industry in Pittsburgh, especially. So, I knew a lot about how you manufacture coal. But it was always fun trying to learn new things about the collections that you're working on. But yeah, I started as a history major and then fell in love with it. Great. Yeah. Similar stories we hear a lot. So, Chris, what about you? Yeah, my story is quite similar. But it was before I had declared a major, my brother and my sister had also worked at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, and I was the last of us to start working there. And somehow it clicked with me. They went on to do other non-archival things. But I stayed working in the archives for many years, and then decided to go to school for it. So, yeah. That's how I got here. That's great. Yeah. I didn't know that about your family. That's pretty interesting. Cool. Okay. So, second question here. I think, Alicia, I'm going to ask you this. Why are archives and special collections important to a college library? Well, generally, I like to say that's in a library. It's what makes our collections unique. Obviously, we are collecting rare one-of-a-kind primary resources that you're not going to find in every library. So, we do things a little differently. Some things are very unique. We digitize trying to make a lot of that open to everybody. But at the heart of it, it's what makes us different from the other libraries and other college libraries across the country. Laura or Chris, would you add anything to that? I mean, I think it's also like, sorry, a lab opportunity for history and English students, especially, but really any student on campus to be able to engage in research that helps their own, you know, you can sort of see how history is played out in these primary documents. A lot of undergraduates get really excited when they see University yearbooks from the 1920s. That's what our lives would have looked like back then. I think it just makes learning come alive in some ways. Well, and I'll jump on what Chris said there, too. Like, coming from a teaching background, you know, I love teaching history, but getting to actually, you know, touch it firsthand and research something that maybe somebody hasn't seen in a hundred years is just a completely unique, different, fun experience if that's what you love. So getting, you know, I was always amazed. I'm like, I get to just come in here and touch these things and research and, you know, see these things that haven't been seen or haven't been outside of an archival box in years. And, you know, it was just, it was a really fun experience. It took history from the books to the physical object, almost like a museum. Yeah, we are very lucky. We get to work with these materials, absolutely. Okay, great. I'm gonna move on here to Chris. This is our third question. If there was one thing first year students should know about us, what do you think it should be? I think that it should be that we exist, that the archives exist, and that they are more than welcome to use our materials. In COVID, that might look a little different than during when we don't have a pandemic going on, but we still have a lot of digitized materials that can be used for research projects or just understanding the past. So that we're here and we're here for first year students would be the big takeaway. I hope they get. Laura, what do you think? I think I would add on to Chris's answer by just also saying for students, a takeaway would be to think outside of the box in terms of what we have. So I think sometimes students think that maybe we just have a few things like, you know, really specific interests, but our collections are pretty vast. So I guess I would also say, you know, not only are we here, but we have a lot of material that can be used in a lot of different ways. So that's another thing that we can help them with is if they come to us, you know, just come to us with a question or an idea, and then we can try to figure it out together. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Alicia, what would you add? Well, I found the archives in my freshman year, first year. And so I think that is something that can really help you out in your subsequent years. Knowing what the collections that we have can kind of drive what you're trying to do with your different classes. And for me being a history major, writing the papers that I was writing, I got to do unique types of research that I wouldn't have known if I didn't know what was in our collections. And so I think that was a fun, although very eye-opening experience, you know, collections can be much larger than you think when you first start as a freshman, but it was really fun. And it helped me through my subsequent years to write those better papers. Yeah, all of that is perfect. Yes. And I'll just add, we love to know that the students know this in their first year, because we hate to hear them in their freshman year coming to special collections and saying, well, I wish I would have known this has been here the whole time. And so that's the one thing that we're trying to get out with our marketing and with our collections and digitizing our materials. We're here, you know, if you're ever just wanting to know what's in the collections, we have all of our finding aids online, easy to search. And so we hope to get you early on in your career, but we're always happy to have anyone that comes in the archive. Yes, absolutely. I was going to say, I might just skip forward and say, you know, how can students learn or see more about special collections if they're not on campus this semester? Alicia, why don't you just keep going? Yeah, like I was saying, yeah, we really try hard to digitize a lot of our materials since they are unique and rare. And a lot of times you can only get them here in special collections, the most used or the most unique, we scan them or digitize them or make them available through our digital collections. So you'll find a lot of our unique material available there, like Chris was saying, all of our yearbooks. Since I'm the University Archives, especially, we have our athletic programs that we're going back through all the sports and digitizing those that people really like to look at. We have some of our manuscripts in modern political archives that we're digitizing and making available so that people can get to that, and they don't have to come into the reading room to access our rare materials. But we're also available, the archivists ourselves are available through email throughout the pandemic to set up times and talk with you about different collections or even getting you access and scans the material that you might not be able to come in and do yourself. Yes, absolutely. Lara, Chris, would you add anything onto that, other ways that people can access or look at some of the things that we have? I'd just like to say that it doesn't hurt to ask to reach out to somebody in special collections, one of us, and just see what we can tell you, how we can answer your question. Even if you think you might not have something about this particular subject, we might, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Yeah, absolutely. Also, we might be able to find an archive that does. So if we don't have it, we have some good contacts to figure out where else they might be able to find it to. Very good point. Excellent. Okay. So we had a question here about McClung Museum. Chris, do we work with McClung Museum? Do y'all work with McClung Museum a lot? We do. We have similar goals to McClung, McClung being the museum on campus. So, you know, they're a museum, we're an archive, we both collect and make available different kinds of objects. The formats that we collect are a little bit different. So, we work with them to, there are some overlapping collections that we try to place in the right in the right place. This is belonging to the museum or this belonging to an archive. We also have shared outreach goals. So, you know, we would like to work with them about how we get a message out to the public, how we can help our collections can complement each other. So, if they're having an exhibit, well, what do we have in our collection that might complement that? So, we do work with them quite a bit to make that information more available to everybody. Yeah, absolutely. Alicia or Lara, do you have anything to add to that? Well, you can, what question we usually get to with the museum part of it is how is an archive in a museum different? Since we have a lot of the same collecting goals and obviously preserving history, it was like Chris was saying, traditionally, the formats are a little bit different. Archives would generally collect the paper manuscript and not maybe the object as much or the artwork, but now those lines are kind of meshing and we're working together for shared collecting and preserving goals. And, you know, if they're like Chris was saying, if they're having exhibits or we're having exhibits in the library that we can share that material, make sure that the public gets to view it in a number of different ways. So, it isn't just they have the artifacts and we have the paper. It is really that shared collecting goal. Yeah, we love MacLone. Great. Okay. Lara, why would special collections slash archives want family heirlooms like old photos and letters? Well, first, I think I want to touch on that. You know, a lot of times people think, if people even know what an archives is, then they usually do think about at a university that our library would have the university's records and be the university's archives, which is true and is, of course, a very crucial part of what we do. But we do also collect and preserve things related to just, you know, the culture and the history of our area. And so that does come from the personal papers of people, of families, local organizations, and, you know, family heirlooms are some of the most unique things that there are. And so people's letters, diaries, scrapbooks, photos, even if maybe they don't feel like they were necessarily, you know, they weren't famous or they weren't super influential. But their material can really give insight into a specific time, a specific place, a culture. And so, you know, those are definitely things that we love to have. I think it also just kind of speaks to, you know, a part of human nature, like we all, maybe not all, but a lot of people tend to, you know, react more to seeing, you know, a family's scrapbook versus, you know, reading old newspapers or something. People like to kind of see that personal side of history. And so that's definitely something that, you know, we like. And especially if it's, you know, a family that has collected material over the course of time, so over many generations, that's also really cool to have and can be a great research tool for people to sort of see how things have changed or stayed the same. So I think I like to think of personal photos, personal heirlooms as sort of like little microcosms of history that then people can use either on their own or to supplement, you know, other research that they're doing with maybe some bigger, more kind of like mass produced things. Yeah, that's great. Absolutely. Alicia, Chris, would you have anything to add to that? Well, I could just add to that kind of from the current perspective of what we're looking at. I've gotten a lot of questions on what was campus like back in 1918 during the Spanish flu. And so we have the local student newspaper and, you know, we have some letters from students that were going home or, you know, not on campus or joining the war effort at the time. And so it really does sort of tell the tale of what was happening both on campus and in Knoxville during the Spanish flu. So, and that story can help us sort of understand maybe what we're experiencing today and how students are experiencing it. Obviously they weren't taking Zoom classes back then. It was a little bit different experience since there was the war effort going on. A lot of the male students were not on campus at that point. So we had a larger female population and homecoming was canceled the year before. And so was a lot of the sporting events as well. So we've seen things like this before. But the student experience and them talking about how they were, you know, sad that their favorite things were canceled or maybe they didn't have the same experience that they had in years prior. But that, you know, that they were helping out with the war effort, making bandages and masks actually in the room in the library at the time. So I mean, it's a really kind of unique experience to look at that and look at the efforts that everyone is putting currently and how that they're very similar. And the student's experiences are very similar even though we have all this technology now. Yeah, that's a great specific example for sure. And it actually is the perfect segue into the next question, which is this is for Alicia. I understand that the UT libraries and other libraries, the country are gathering and are having our community's experiences of the pandemic. How does that fit within the archives' mission? Well, yeah, what I like to say is that we don't wait until history is made to record it and archive it. And so things that are happening today are historical. And so that we have to make sure that we're, you know, gathering that information from, like Laura was saying, that microcosm of history. Well, for me, it's our campus. You know, we didn't have that many letters in student responses to the Spanish flu. So I knew at the onset of this pandemic that I really wanted to make an effort to capture the campus community's feelings and viewpoints about what was happening so that, you know, people could look at this down the road and say, oh, well, I really have a really good perspective on that. And so what we did was create an easy form, a couple of questions that ask the students, staff, and faculty how they feel, how they're coping, how their home life is, how is it to take all your classes online? Are you going to take a gap here? Different things like that. And they can also submit their creative work. So we've had students submit artwork and poems that help them kind of navigate what they're feeling during this time. And so I think that is going to be very important for us to have, you know, 100 years from now. And so we have a couple hundred responses so far. And we're still collecting them and we'll continue to collect them. And then you can also donate multiple times. We started that last semester in the spring, right on the onset of sending that spring break when most of our campus community and students were asked to stay home with the shelter in place order. So and we're going to continue to collect that through the next year. Yeah, it's an important project. And we very much encourage everybody to experience if you can. Yeah, and your unique individual experience is important. So a lot of people think like nobody cares what I'm doing at home during quarantine, but people want to know. And that's the thing that I was asked frequently, what were people doing during the Spanish flu? And so I really only had the larger newspaper articles and public notices that were happening at the time. Other than the few letters we had from our students, we only had about 500 students on campus at that point. So, you know, it was a little bit tougher. So that's why I wanted to make sure that we have this to preserve on into the future. So, you know, if you're staying at home, you're learning how to bake sourdough or you're doing things like that, that's a trend. People are going to want to know that and see how kind of how we're making it through. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Alicia, this question is to you as well. What is a question that archivists like to ask other archivists? Yeah, this is always a funny one. When we, you know, meet in our, you know, our state conferences or in our meetings, this generally comes up in our annual Society of American Archivist meetings. And that's what's the weirdest thing that's in your collection? Or what's the, where's the weirdest place you've had to go to pick up a collection? And that can get the ball really rolling to know like, you know, I was in the bottom of a dumpster picking up this clay, you know, something that somebody threw away that they didn't think it was important, but it's vital for your, for your collecting area. Or I was in the, you know, the attic of a barn to pick up these, you know, this family's papers. So that puts you into a lot of weirder situations that you never really thought you'd end up as an archivist. Kind of a long, I kind of described along the lines of like American pickers, the show on TV where they're going into old, you know, storage facilities and old houses and things are dusty and dirty and maybe there's a snakeskin or two in those collections. But yeah, so that's generally what we talk about if we're asking about our new collections. A fun question. Yes, absolutely. And I was going to say, so Laura and Chris, you want to add as far as something weird, weird that you have in your collections or the weirdest place that you have been to pick up a collection. Chris, you want to start, Chris? I'm going to pick on one. Well, I've been to some tractor barns, not for McCormick International Harvester stuff. But so nothing weirder than that. But I think my favorite, my favorite things that are in my collection right now in terms of just like weird objects is a little vial of perfume or cologne, actually, that Estes Kefauver, who was a senator from Tennessee, someone made for him as like a campaign novelty. And we also have a lot of his hats. He wore a lot of hats on the campaign trail. And they're quite unique. So those would be my weirdest objects. Yeah, always think of him in that Coonskin cap with his perfume on with it. That was his signature Yes, this is great. Laura, what about you? I feel like this is also, you know, one of those questions to where we can always think of kind of different things like the answer depends on the day. But one thing I've been thinking about is we have a lot of collections of World War two veterans. And they, you know, they kept, they picked up and kept a lot of souvenirs from their time overseas in various places. And sometimes they're a little strange. And one that I can think of right now is that we do have a collection and it has a skeleton of a seahorse in a box. There's not really any information about it either. So I think that can also sometimes the knowing is weird, but also the not knowing. So not really knowing, you know, where it came from, why they picked it up, why they had it, why they kept it. So yeah, a skeleton seahorse, that's a strange one. That's a good one. And they're making an enclosure for a skeleton of a seahorse. It's also something you probably never thought you were going to do as an archivist. So there's a lot of that too. Like how am I going to store this unique object? So absolutely. Alicia, do you have a weird place or object? Oh gosh, I have so many. I mean, there could be anything from like, you know, the materials that Dr. Bass has donated. And when we did his exhibit on his, and he gave me one of his teaching schools to walk across campus with. Tell us who Dr. Bass is. He is a world-renowned professor in forensic anthropology. And he studied decomposition and many other things. I'm not giving him his dose due, but we have his research papers from all the digs that he had done over the years. And so we had the information on those remains that they had found. And so when we kind of talked about the life of his career, we did an exhibit. And so we needed some of the artifacts that are in the Bass building and within the McClellan collection as well. And so it was just fun to kind of put those all together. But the one we did recently with the 225th anniversary of the university, my favorite was the creepy smoky costume, the one of the first, the 1970s smokies costume that we, everyone was sort of horrified but could not turn away from. And so that was one of my favorite, you know, we would see students walking past the exhibit and they'd be like, wait, what is this? And so, which nobody thought was out of the time, it's super cute. It was homemade. But it was one of the first generations of having our smoky costume here on campus. So it kind of looks like a orange and white bunny costume that might give you nightmares, I don't know. Or you might love it, who knows. So that was always a fun thing to put in the exhibit as well. Yeah, we love the Smoky and the holes that go into the abyss of the eyes, right? That was great. We added on a mannequin before we put it into the exhibit and our student workers would come in to come to work and they'd be like, I thought somebody was standing there, this creepy costume. So yeah, we had to put that back in the box pretty quickly after we took the exhibit down. But he might come back. We'll see. We'll see. So that's great. All right. So, Laura, what does a day in the life of an archivist look like for you? Well, you know, basic caveat that, you know, every day is a little different, which is one of the exciting things, I think, of our jobs is we do kind of get to do a lot of different things. But if I have to answer, for me with manuscripts, I would say the bulk of what I'm doing is overseeing processing of collections. So a pretty typical day involves working with some fabulous student library assistant student workers, undergraduate and graduate. And so just sort of working with them to process collections, whether it's we're kind of always doing it. So starting collections, checking in on collections, fielding questions about how to organize what to do, what to do with weird things that they find. I would say that kind of makes up the bulk of an average day. But then of course, we're all sort of juggling all of the other sort of added things that we're doing. So kind of other various projects that our collections may be involved in. So working with you, Allison, on instruction or getting ready for, you know, for a class, pulling materials for a class, helping with the reference question, working on a digital collection or digital project, maybe working with a donor, you know, getting in touch, checking back in with a donor, things like that, that sort of those sort of little things kind of filter in throughout the day. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Chris, what about you? It's similar. I have a little bit of a different scenario because I have this little area of collections of the Modern Political Archive and I kind of do reference for that as well as being the Political Science and Sociology Librarian. So I do a lot of work for that as well. But definitely it's about making the collections available to people and making sure that they are kept available and described in the right way so that researchers can find what they need. Yeah, absolutely. Great. Alicia, what about you? Like Laura and Chris said, every day is kind of different. While you do have a plan for getting a collection from maybe picking them up from the donor's house or office to getting them to be finished into our archival box like I have behind me, there's a lot that goes into that. And so it's kind of like cooking a recipe that has a lot of things on the stove at once. And so we usually have a lot of things from starting preliminary inventories to processing collections, preservation, taking things up to our preservation lab and having repairs or special enclosures built for them. So it's always different and it's never boring. I get tons of reference questions that I never thought that I would know the answers to. So that makes me really great at just very random historical knowledge. But it's really interesting. And being it coming from a history background, that stuff is always really interesting to me to kind of search through the primary resources to find the answers for the individuals that are asking them and kind of tell that story. So I kind of look at it that we have a lot of things going on from day to day, but they all kind of go back to what Chris was saying is making sure that we have the stuff available and that people can access it. I mean, because that's our main job here is to make sure the stuff is safe and then make sure people can get to it. Yes, absolutely. I feel like I'm always telling students, you know, librarians are more than just about shushing people like access main concern. Okay, so Chris, how has the pandemic affected your work as an archivist? Well, it's an interesting question. I think that it's really made me more even more cognizant of how important it is to provide sort of offsite reference. And it's a little less comfortable for me in a way because I'm not by my collections every day. And I'm used to having that ability to just be like, oh, if somebody has a question about something, I can just go and see them. I'm now at a remove for a lot more of the week than I'm used to. So there really has become more of a focus on making things available. And for a time, I kind of slowed down on getting in collections. But I think, you know, I'm feeling a little bit more comfortable about bringing that back and growing our collections again. So yeah, absolutely. Laura, what about you? What changes are you seeing? Like Chris mentioned, I mean, I think one of the biggest things is that we're not with our physical collections as much as we normally are. Whether that like in her case, you know, mentioning to answer reference questions or research inquiries, but also just in, you know, how much we can spend on to process or the maintenance of those collections, which again, is a lot of what I do. So I think one way that we've pivoted within with the manuscripts collections is spending a lot more time to focus on the description of our collections. So we've been able to review our finding aids, all of our finding aids that predate all of us. Many of them do. So, you know, there are still some gaps there. Of course, we're not able to check them against the physical collection, but we can kind of give them some TLC in terms of little things like checking for grammatical errors or, you know, making note of things that maybe don't make sense that we'd like to check with the physical collection later on. Also doing a lot of language updating, making sure that our descriptions are accurate and inclusive of the collections that they're describing and the people that were involved in those collections. So, you know, in a way it's been, it's been work that hasn't been able to be a priority because we're doing so many other things, but, you know, we've been able to pivot and make it a priority now. So that has been nice, I guess, for lack of a better word. But I would say that's one way. And just also thinking about, I think it makes us just also a little even more aware and cognizant of our digital presence. And I think we were all there anyway, thinking about it, but now we're thinking about it even more and how we can increase that as we stay in a place of needing more digital presence. And that that may be a trend. Well, it'll definitely be a trend going forward. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. These are all big, big, big changes, big effects. Alicia, would you add anything to that? How has your work life been changing due to the pandemic? Yeah, it's well, it's definitely changing. You know, like Kristen Laura is saying, not being close to your collections to answer the questions that you get. So you kind of have to compartmentalize what you're doing in a week more than instead of having everything kind of going at once when you're in the office or in the archive. So that has been just a shift in the way that you kind of do your work from a normal day, like collecting up everything that you can do in the office and in the archives to do when you get the chance to come onto campus. And but one way that I think it's interesting for me personally was when everything was kind of up in the air with the pandemic, working on the project to document what was happening, even though it was very much up in the air, kind of gave me some grounding. So I kind of actually helped me through all the craziness that was kind of going on during, you know, March, April and May. Because if I could do anything, I could document what was happening at least. And so maybe I didn't know what the next four weeks held. But I've had some sense of semblance of, you know, I'm doing what all that I can do in this moment, even though I'm at home. Maybe I can't do everything that I was doing on a daily basis. But this is something else that's important. And that will be that will be something that we would want to see in the future. So that actually helped me through a lot of, you know, through the pandemic and through the social justice issues to make sure that from what the students are doing in that kind of outreach that that is documented in the archives for future generations. So that was a good point of, you know, making sure it was here and grounding me through that kind of craziness of the time and still documenting all of that too. So yeah, like, like Laura was saying, having to come up with things for our students to do remotely or in person when they are able to come in. We really focused on Volopedia, which is our encyclopedia, our digital encyclopedia of the University of Tennessee. So we've been putting in new definitions, new entries, new images to the current Volopedia. And so that's been really helpful since we've had questions from all over campus for hundreds of different things that we can't get to if we're not with our collection. So we every time we answer a reference, we create a new entry. So so that someone can find that, you know, just through Google searching. And so it isn't something that you have to know that there's an archivist here collecting this that, hey, when I want to find this out, maybe I can just get through this through our digital presence as well. Yeah, absolutely. The digital presence is the big thing now. And we I mean, COVID's not going anywhere anytime fast. So we'll continue to be developing that I'm sure. So all right. And you all are all doing amazing work through this pandemic. I do just want to say that guys are doing great. Okay, so last question. Is there anything else about the field that you think people should know? Chris, I'm going to start with you. That's okay. Oh, geez. Well, I mean, I know there's a million things, but just anything that's burning that you feel like you need to say. Well, I'm going to say this, but I'll, you know, it was based on something that Alicia was talking about before. I can't remember if it was if it was now or or another conversation previously. But we, you know, we don't deal with just old things. We are interested in continuing to document the present and looking to see how to keep documenting with how, you know, people obviously use computers now to make to make documents and not just word documents, but texts and video files. So we a large part of what archivists do is is trying to ask answer the questions of how do we capture this information? How do we store it? And how do we make it accessible to future users? Yeah, absolutely. Those born digital objects. Okay, so Laura, what about you? I think I would add that we also, for the most part, would of course depend on where you work, but by and large, a lot of archivists are, we do wear a lot of hats. And so just to know, you know, maybe for better or worse, but just to know that not only is it not just old stuff, but that we're also not just always processing or organizing collections, that we, there is a space for a lot of different things. So if you're interested in development, you know, building relationships with donors, if you're interested in instruction, if you're interested in social media outreach, marketing, things like that, like these are all pieces of what we do. And so I think just something nice to know is for people that are interested in the field or, you know, that there's, it's pretty broad, we do a lot of different things. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Absolutely. And I don't think people understand how broad the field is. So that's good. That's good. Alicia? Well, I was one of those people that didn't understand how broad the field was when I started as a freshman working in a university archive. I, you know, thought of all the traditional things of what you do to be an archivist, you know, picking up the collections, preserving, you know, doing preservation and processing it and getting it out and then doing instructions. So I did really kind of understand that. But there are parts of being an archivist that I did not know was going to be something that I did on a regular basis too. You know, teaching is one thing, but then there's outreach and then there's all sorts of like we've gotten added training in digital forensics and knowing how to code the background for a lot of our finding aids at one point and some of our digital collections and how those are searched for and accessed through our catalogs. There's a lot. It is both very old things and very, very new things. So, you know, trying to describe what I do to people that might be, might not be familiar with the field. They're like, well, aren't you just sitting in a room, you know, working with old books? And I'm like, no, not even in the least. I mean, some days, some days, sure. But most days it's a combination of everything. And, you know, it's talking to people about our collections. It's trying to think of things that we can celebrate and post through one of the one of the university's many, many social media channels. And, you know, it's curating an exhibit. It's figuring out what the background, you know, figuring out a background information that we want on our touchscreen exhibit. It's a lot of different things. But for me, it's something that I really enjoy. I'm never bored. I'm always learning something. I had no idea that I didn't know. And now I know that I need to know that. So, that's the fun thing about it. So, I think, so you're not going to be locked away in a dungeon somewhere processing collections. But you will be doing a lot of different things. So, if you're new to the field or you're getting into the field, that's what I would say is definitely learn the foundational skills, but also lean heavily into the new digital curation kind of track. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you all so much for talking with us today. And I should let everybody know if you do want to get in touch with us at that's really more special collections in the university archives. You can email us at special at utk.edu or visit our website. I see a little ticker going down there at the bottom of the page. Please visit our website. And if you have any questions, just email us. And we'd love to help you in any way that we can. So, thank you all. Thanks, Alison. Thank you.