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Thank you to our latest student assistant blogger, Megan Nigro, who is here to talk about her time and work in Special Collections & Archives. 

Hi everyone! My name is Megan Nigro, and I am a senior at Wake majoring in sociology and minoring in dance, philosophy, and neuroscience. These academic commitments and my extra-curricular commitments to dance company, mock trial, Best Buddies, Club Gymnastics, tutoring, and costume design have kept me busy throughout my 4 years at Wake, but I always make time for my work at ZSR that I enjoy so much.

I started my work in the Special Collections and Archives of the library in September 2014. I began in the Digital Media Lab with working on scanning, describing, and tagging images and documents into Wake Forest’s digital archives. Later that year, I also helped scan and share documents that patrons request from Special Collections. During the summer of 2016, I started working in the preservation lab, which is run by Craig Fansler. I helped preserve letters written during the Civil War. For the past 2 years, I have been making archival boxes which hold books that would otherwise become damaged in either Special Collections or the regular ZSR stacks. It’s always interesting to see the books that will become a piece of Wake Forest’s archives, whether they are contemporary printing or historic.

This year, I have been working on my honors thesis in sociology measuring the rates of minors in U.S. adult prisons, and I have become even more appreciative of all the work that goes into preserving and digitizing all sorts of images and documents that people may want to use for research or for personal interest. This summer, I will be working at a law firm in the Financial District in New York City to assist them in digitizing and filing their cases and files. As someone who will be entering the legal field in a few years, I am thankful to know a lot about how documents can be properly digitized, preserved, and shared. I am also thankful that I will be genuinely appreciative of all the work that will go into my being able to access documents and cases in the future because of all the hard work that research librarians, archivists, and their assistants do.

In the fall, I will be attending Seton Hall Law School as a Distinguished Scholar, and I plan to become heavily involved in the health law concentration and health justice and hospital clinic. I will miss all of the employees who I have been working with in ZSR Special Collections and Archives throughout my college career, and I would like to especially thank Rebecca Petersen May and Craig Fansler for guiding me through my time working at ZSR.