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Vice President, Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists

About the Candidate and Platform

Hello! My name is Emma Scales and I am a second semester MLS student on the Archives and Records Management track. I moved to Chapel Hill back in January from Colorado. I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, with Bachelor’s Degrees in Japanese and History and a minor in French.

My interest in archives was sparked by what began as a one semester history department internship in the University of Colorado Boulder Archives. I worked primarily with collections pertaining to the Japanese/Oriental Language School that was located at CU from 1942 to 1946. I enjoyed working in the archives so much that my supervisor kept me on as an archival intern for another two semesters. I finished out my time at CU as the Undergraduate Friends of the Library Fellow, mentoring under the Japanese Studies Librarian. During my time as a fellow, some of my projects included weeding the Japanese Studies Reference collection and expanding a list of free Japanese Studies databases.

Last semester I was the graduate assistant to the embedded librarian at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, where part of my responsibilities involved a large-scale digitization project of VHS tapes, slides, documents, photographs, and several cassette tapes. After leaving the HSRC at the end of July, I took up my current position of US EPA-RTP Library Intern, a contract position. I am currently on the Reference Rotation which means I work directly with EPA employees and contractors to address their reference requests, in addition to extra projects like creating displays for the library and updating software guides.

As the Vice President of SCOSSA, I will work to support the President’s goals for the group. From my time attending SCOSSA events last spring and this fall, I know that there are several events that are very popular among the group. I hope to be a part of creating new and engaging events that highlight the importance of archives and records management to everyone. I believe that SCOSSA is in a special position to advocate for archives within SILS and the broader campus community. The fun social events and professional programming are an important part of SCOSSA, but I would also like to see events that reach beyond the group to people around campus and the community and encourage greater interest in archives and even local history.