Pamela Pierce is wrapping up her tenure as Digital Library Coordinator and Archivist for the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. In May 2018, she will start as the Repository Librarian at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

I never intended on working in the documentary editing field. I came to my position as digital library coordinator and archivist at the Theodore Roosevelt Center in North Dakota, when I was mentoring students who aged out of foster care at a non-profit in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. I started applying for jobs again, because I wanted to use the two master’s degrees that I labored to earn. I will also continue to make loan payments on those degrees for the foreseeable future. If someone had asked me before my ND move what documentary editing was, I would have said that it had to do with film and telling a realistic story. Only part of that answer would have been true. Documentary editors strive to represent history’s truth.

Even though I lucked into my position at the TR Center, out of my passion for the West, its history, and my deep appreciation for place, I quickly immersed myself in the position. The best part of the job (see published essay where I write about how I’m the librarian version of Mick Jagger) was hunting down documents. The TR Center strives to create a comprehensive digital library of all archival documents connected to Roosevelt. After my first trip to the Newberry, I loved the document chase. The TR document trail and accompanying events took me to Chicago, Tucson, Cody, Indianapolis, Boston, Shreveport, New Orleans, Reno, Minneapolis, New York, and L.A. It was a great ride.

The Association for Documentary Editing gave me the opportunity to collaborate in ways I couldn’t have imagined. ADE is composed of folks who collect, transcribe, annotate, and publish historical documents, making that information available to a wide audience. My favorite collaboration was the work I did with the Jane Addams Papers Project. After the ADE 2016 New Orleans conference, I came back with more than a couple of shot glasses, a sunburn from my noon graveyard tour, and a healthy respect for strongly mixed drinks. I brought back the idea of doing Addams/TR Twitter Wars. The TR Center and Jane Addams Papers Project exchanged World War I related tweets representing Addams and Roosevelt’s opposing opinions on the war.

I’ve now accepted a position outside of the documentary editing field. However, throughout my job search and the various interviews I did involving digital archives, institutional repositories, and the future of making information available online, my involvement and experience with the skills represented by ADE were a definite asset. I know what it means to take a document and make it accessible for generations to come.