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The Meet Your Steering Committee Series allows the section membership to better get to know the Committee. For more entries, click here.
Selena St. Andre is the National Education Association (NEA) Archivist at The George Washington University (GW), working within the Special Collections Research Center in GW Libraries and Academic Innovation. In this position, Selena manages all aspects of access and research related to the NEA Collection and other education-focused collections. She earned an MLIS from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2022 and this is her first full-time position post-MLIS.
As an early-career archivist, my biggest challenge has been finding balance between multiple projects and priorities while also remaining an active member of my department, library, and field.
Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?
I got my undergraduate degree in history, like so many archivists do, from James Madison University (JMU). I concentrated on public history at the time, knowing I wanted to directly interact with historical materials and stories. Originally, I wanted to work as a museum curator, but after working in various internships while at JMU, nothing felt quite right. Then in my senior year, I got a student job at JMU’s Special Collections (working with current Steering Committee member, Tiffany Cole). Through that experience, I quickly realized that working in archives felt exactly right! After encouragement from my supervisors, including Tiffany, I started an MLIS degree after taking a couple of years off from school to become an archivist.
What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?
There are a few projects I’m excited about but one in particular is getting a good handle on AV materials in my collections. Before, and since I’ve started, we’ve identified a number of preservation issues with the AV materials – particularly vinegar syndrome on 16mm film. This combined with a large backlog of AV waiting to be processed, spurred one of my goals for the year – to do a comprehensive inventory of our legacy media holdings to make available, identify preservation issues, and begin prioritizing digitization needs.
What are some of the challenges you face in your position?
One of my position’s biggest challenges is also something that I generally enjoy. Although I work within a Special Collections department and have a lot of colleague support, the day-to-day work is similar to that of a lone archivist since the NEA collection and archivist position are endowed and separate from the funding of GW projects. As an early-career archivist, my biggest challenge has been finding balance between multiple projects and priorities while also remaining an active member of my department, library, and field. It’s definitely been a learning curve to being in a position that does it all soon after coming out of graduate school and student positions that were theory or project-focused, but it’s also been extremely rewarding to face this challenge earlier in my career.
What is your favorite way to keep up with the archives field?
I’m still figuring out what ways work best for me, but right now I mostly keep up with the field through announcements and discussions from SAA section listservs or my regional archives association, MARAC. I also really enjoy archives Twitter (aka X), even though it’s a shell of what it once was. Twitter is probably still the main way that I keep up on the more general happenings, but if anyone has suggestions on an alternative, I would be happy to hear them.
What is it like being an Early-Career member of C&UA?
Being an Early-Career member of the section has been a joy! Other than working on the blog and helping to standardize governing documents, I’ve enjoyed seeing the inner workings of an SAA section steering committee, especially one as active as the College and University Archives. It’s a great experience to have so early in my career as I think about where I want to put my time and energy into the field. I would highly recommend that anyone consider running to be an Early-Career member within SAA to gain an understanding of how the people in SAA support each other and how sections play a larger role in moving SAA and the profession forward.
The Academic Archivist 