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Yesterday was the last day of classes here at WFU and today, ZSR Library is hosting its traditional end of semester pizza party to thank our students. So we at Special Collections and Archives are saying goodbye to our student assistants who are graduating and moving on from Mother, So Dear. We have a pair of students graduating this spring – seniors Megan Nigro, who wrote about her work last week, and Natalie Cascario. Today, Natalie writes about working in Special Collections over the last four years (she has worked at Wake Forest longer than me!):

Hello! My name is Natalie Cascario. I’m a senior psychology major with minors in neuroscience and communication. After graduation, I will be attending Emory University School of Law.

I’ve been working in Special Collections and Archives since my very first week at Wake Forest, so four years! I’ve done a little bit of everything: the public services desk, shelving books, gluing books, taking and uploading photographs of artifacts to the Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/zsrspecial/, shameless plug), transcribing interviews, and cataloguing and archiving collections on my own.

Most recently, I have been working on organizing the Baptist Church Artifacts Collection under the instruction of Collections Archivist Stephanie Bennett. The collection for the most part consists of church plates commemorating baptist churches throughout North Carolina, but there are also some baptist communion pieces as well. I input information about each piece into our cataloguing tool, Archivist’s Toolkit, and give every piece a unique identification number. I photograph the piece and upload the picture to our Flickr album for religious artifacts. Then I wrap the piece in bubble wrap and tissue paper and place it in numerical order in acid free boxes. I enjoy the process of taking a seemingly random assortment of pieces and transforming them into a cohesive collection that researchers and historians can utilize for personal and academic projects.

One of my fondest memories of working at Special Collections is when I got to archive my own sorority’s collection. It was fun to see how past traditions are still continuing even to this day. My friends within my sorority laughed at the pictures I would send them of the old scrapbooks, and it was a wonderful way to connect my personal life with my job.

I’ve truly enjoyed working in Special Collections. It has played a big role in undergraduate experience, and the funny, supportive librarians that work here will always have a special place in my heart. Although I do not intend on becoming a librarian or an archivist, my job here has taught me organization and time management skills. It’s also been a great escape from the stress and pressures of my always busy academic schedule. I am thankful to have been able to spend my Wake Forest career with Special Collections and Archives.

We will miss Natalie’s willingness to take on just about any job here, big or small, confusing or cool. Thank you, Natalie, Atlanta and Emory are lucky to have you!