This winter, get to know the staff responsible for keeping the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums running. Today’s feature: Jenelle Clark!
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m the accessioning archivist in the Department of Special Collections. When my department receives new materials that aren’t going to be cataloged as books, my job is to document those materials in our systems and make sure they’re stored safely until an archivist can fully describe and arrange them. Recording this information about new acquisitions as soon as we receive the items is important because it helps us track what these items are, where and when we got them and what their history is (provenance!), and other important details about their physical condition and how the materials can be used. I handle lots of different kinds of materials, from university records and faculty papers to items that our curators collect. For small amounts of material, the archivist doing the processing work of describing and arranging the materials is also often me, which frees up our processing archivists to tackle the big or complex collections.
Also, if you submit your dissertation or thesis to the library via the ETD system, you’ll most likely interact with me during the review process!
Tell us a little about your background.
Archives is a second career for me. I started in sociology, where I got most of the way finished on a PhD before deciding that academia wasn’t the right fit for me. I ended up spending a couple of years as an adjunct lecturer while I figured out a new path for myself, which turned out to be in archives. I started here at the Sheridan Libraries as a project archivist processing the congressional papers of senators Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes, and moved into my current role last year.
What is something people might be surprised to know about you?
I’ve visited countries on five continents. Besides travel to most of the fifty US states, I’ve been to eleven other countries around the world.
What’s the best part about working at the Sheridan Libraries & University Museums?
I have my dream job. I have the best coworkers, and every day I get to come in and work on something new. To give an example of what a typical week might look like, in a single week in September I got to process WWII British propaganda cartoon posters, a number of vintage board games, and giant photographs of Roman tablet inscriptions. I’m constantly showing coworkers the fun things I’m working on, whether it’s a Belgian playing card set from around 1780, a commonplace book containing gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations of shells, or a newspaper issue edited by Frederick Douglass just before the Civil War was declared. It’s also a job that occasionally lets me dive down research rabbit holes, as I try to identify the unknown creator of an item based on small clues contained within it so that its history and creator can be properly contextualized and recognized. Sometimes that research pays off in a big way, such as last year when a special collections student employee and I managed to uncover the real history behind a set of photos taken in Nagasaki after WWII. At the end of the day, I find it incredibly satisfying to work on so many fascinating items, knowing that my work helps spur research and engagement with historical materials by letting people know that these items relevant to their interests exist in our collections.
What is your favorite hobby?
I think it’s a tie between reading and playing tabletop roleplaying games. I’m a voracious reader and avid collector of sci-fi and fantasy books (you may have seen my blog post last year with Sue Vazakas), and I play D&D just about every weekend. I love other tabletop games too; right now two of my favorite indie games are For the Queen and The Quiet Year. Those two games are both great for newbies because they’re played without a game master planning the game ahead of time, they don’t require players to acquire specialized items like polyhedral dice, and can be played in just a couple of hours. They just involve a group of friends sitting around a table, drawing cards and answering the questions on them (and in the case of The Quiet Year, collaboratively sketching a map over the course of the game) in order to collaboratively tell a story.
Imagine you are a ghost. What 3 objects would someone need to conjure you? Why?
A book by one of my favorite authors, a set of fancy polyhedral dice, and some good loose-leaf tea. You might be able to figure out why the first two are on the list based on my hobbies, and the last is because 100% of my caffeine intake is via tea and I have high standards for it.
If you could be a background character in a book/film/show/game, what book/film/show/game would it be? Why?
That’s a hard one because so much of the media I enjoy is set in worlds where all kinds of terrible things are happening to the main characters, and by extension all of the background characters too. One that would certainly be interesting for its inhabitants is Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle trilogy, which imagines a future Earth of micro-democracies in which the world’s population is divided into blocks, or “centenals,” of 100,000 people who then vote for their local government, which might end up being a global political party that’s jockeying for regional dominance and international power based on how many centenals they control, or which might be a local party focused on supporting local interests and traditions. Another major societal change Older introduces in the series is a Google-like entity called Information that aggressively fact-checks and readily provides other useful information as a sort of maximally useful, ubiquitous search engine. Of course, both the centenal system and Information have their own problems, explored within the novels, but they’re a fun thought experiment at this particular moment in time.
You have to eat the same thing every day for the rest of your life. What is it?
Any proper food item I could name here would quickly get old for me if I ate it every day, so I’m not going to name a favorite dish or even a favorite ingredient. I do have a sweet tooth, though, so I think I’d pick either Kendal Mint Cake (a British candy associated with hiking that is basically a block of strong peppermint-flavored sugar) or the kind of maple sugar candy that’s soft inside and instantly melts in your mouth.
What show have you binge-watched recently?
I think the last show I properly binge-watched was Spy x Family, though I don’t do much binge-watching these days.
What’s the best concert you’ve ever seen? What made it special?
I once saw Lindsay Sterling perform with Amy Lee of Evanescence. They were an incredible pairing, between the soaring violin and ethereal vocals. If we include musicals in the concert category, however, I think the best show I’ve ever been to was Hadestown. It’s a perfect musical on every level, with excellent music and an engaging story (a truly phenomenal retelling of Greek mythology) that fit together seamlessly.