Amara Pugens’13 brings archives to life
Amara Pugens combined her love for space, 历史, and anthropology into a dream job as a digital archivist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
What does a normal day look like for you at the Air and Space Museum?
在归档工作中，你身兼数职. You might have one focus, but in the end you do a bit of everything. 我被聘为电子档案管理员, 但是基础是很重要的, so I’ve also processed tangible material. For my first project, I got to work with pre-World War I aviation materials from U.S. 飞行员.
In the digital role, my day-to-day work is putting our digital material in its place. If a collection is already online, I attach it to its finding aid so researchers can see it. I often transform its format so it’s 更多的 accessible and put it into our asset management system.
What do you enjoy most about working in the museum’s archives?
I like the diversity of it — not knowing what I’m going to be doing each day. I like that there are mysteries that can be solved and shared with the public.
我有一个很棒的团队. 我们的工作范围很广. I’m on a collections committee, and I vote on materials that come in. Every department gets to talk about it, and that pan-institutional collaboration is great. I also get to work with unsolicited materials. 当有人说, “I have something in my attic that was my pilot grandfather’s from World War II; would you want that?“我是第一个联系人.
Exhibitions or restoration departments come to see our technical manuals or drawings or blueprints to create a scale model to see if, 说, 电梯能装下一架飞机, 或者找到它的方位，挂起来. We’ll have outreach or education departments coming to us too. Archives touch many parts of the museum, but we’re tucked away. It’s nice to have a little of both — talking and sharing, but also solitude.
How did your studies at 贝洛伊特 prepare you for this position?
It was great how much I used the College Archives while earning my 历史 degree, especially using diaries as primary sources. Fred [Burwell ' 86，荣誉档案保管员] let us try different things and find our interests. He made sure we were learning the archives field and feeding our passions. I knew I was going to be an archivist after taking an aptitude test. I was upset that I didn’t get spy or secret agent, 但在档案和研究中, 你确实变得有点像侦探了.
One year, Fred had this idea and I ran with it. He was talking about taking photos of the campus as it is today. We don’t often have documentation of how things are; we take for granted that it’s always going to be like this. While I worked [in the College Archives], he let me go on campus taking photos of the intricate pieces that make it unique. I’d go building by building and take pictures of details like windows and doors. I worked with facilities and went into the cupola of Middle College, 伊顿教堂, and the catwalk of the Smith building when it was a gymnasium. I have some photos I’m pretty proud of in the digital archives.
和弗雷德一起工作你学到了什么?
One thing that I learned from Fred that I still use is a reference interview. Researchers come in and want to learn about something, so it’s cool to be able to ask the right questions to get to where they’re going and see that spark of excitement in them. That’s something I really like about this job — I wanted to be accessible to everyone. That’s what Fred is all about: sharing that knowledge.
My passion for diaries is thanks to Fred. In my pre-World War I project at the Air and Space Museum, there was an amazing journal where a pilot talks about these loop-de-loops that he’s learning, 突然间日记就结束了. He’d gotten into a crash and passed away. 你在学习航空, but then you realize that this is a person and you’re reading their story. As much as I love different parts of 历史 — aviation and space — it’s the human aspect that gets me excited.
