About Me
“the boundaries between the aesthetic and the documentary—if they exist at all—are fluid, permeable, and constructed. What is valued as art in a gallery, as information in a library, and as evidence in an archive will be described in different ways.”1
My name is Rachel; I am interested in cultural heritage institutions and their roles within society, and received my Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) and MA (Museology) from the University of Washington, Seattle, in June 2012.
Now more than ever, the roles of these institutions and their relationships to our daily lives are not simple or easily parsed. There is a growing need for people who take a broad view of cultural heritage and the innovations needed to keep the benefits that these institutions provide from becoming undervalued and further underfunded. In keeping with the quote above, I believe that a strong component of this is the ability to speak to why cultural heritage is important in the language of museums, libraries, technology, management, and however else is required, and with the evidence to demonstrate these assertions. For me, the importance of this lies in the potential that cultural heritage offers us for educating and better understanding ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us, the power that grasping where we have been and where we are gives us to anticipate where we want to go next.
Some of the areas I am passionate about and excited to continue exploring are knowledge organization & information architecture (especially taxonomy!), research, reference work and readers' advisory, instruction, and experience design; for more on what I've done so far in these areas, see my resume and portfolio. I am also greatly inspired by travel; I firmly believe in its transformative power, allowing one to step outside one's comfort zone to gain fresh perspectives and reassess the familiar (and, as someone who minored in linguistics, I love the chance to quite literally hear and learn different languages); you will see evidence of this throughout the site. If you would like to contact me with questions, suggestions, or felicitous offers of employment, I can be reached at gdntmoon =at= uw.edu.
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[1] Schwartz, Joan M. “Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’ and the Margins of Archivy.” Archivaria 54, (2002): 142-171. Print.
