Hello, my name is Heather Lloyd!
I am a graduate student at the San Jose State University School of Information and I am nearing the completion of my degree in Library and Information Science. I have complemented my studies with hands-on work at the small, community-led Bolton Hall Museum, located just a short walk from my home, in old town Tujunga, California.
I am a lifelong learner, but also a lifelong artist. I created the painting on the left, titled The Company You Keep, in 2018. I took a leap and began my MLIS studies in 2021. I feel like this painting perfectly foreshadowed my journey into librarianship and archival work.
I started as a volunteer in the Little Landers Historical Society Archives in February of 2023. In June of 2024 I was made a key-holder for the museum, and in January of 2025 I was elected as an Artifact & Document Archivist on the museum board.
Work days at BHM are full of discovery, collaboration, and creative problem solving. I have participated in several projects which have allowed me to hone my skills as an archivist in tandem with related coursework. Perhaps more importantly, this work has afforded me many opportunities in building community, connecting with my neighbors, and making lasting friendships. People often imagine archivists working in isolation in a dimly lit vault, and sometimes I do that, but more often my experience has been an expression of teamwork and togetherness. I see the goal as building bridges between the past and the present moment to provide people a deeper sense of place.
Memorable projects
Back to School with Bolton Hall Museum - Fall 2024 to Summer 2025
This is our rotating exhibit, currently on display, which tells the story of Sunland-Tujunga's public schools. It also coincided with Plainview Elementary School's centennial anniversary.
The picture at right was taken at our Curator's Open House. Shown are myself (center) and my co-curators John Gregan, a recent SJSU iSchool alumnus, and Maritza Mejia who is also a current iSchool student.
In addition to collaborating on curation and research, I did all of the exhibit fabrication. As a small and completely volunteer run museum, we also had to work with a very limited budget. My biggest challenge was creating the fabric-wrapped backing panels for the cases. The visual design is a nod to elementary school bulletin boards and vintage scrapbooks. The organization of information is meant to mimic a school yearbook with the exhibit divided into vignettes of class portraits, academics, clubs, performing arts, sports and student life. To expand on our limited space, we also utilized a digital frame, creating a slideshow of digitized photographs.
One of the highlights of my curation experience was the chance to collaborate with other local archives. We visited the archivist for Pinewood Elementary School here in Tujunga, and also made a trip downtown to visit the Los Angeles Unified School District Art & Artifact Collection/Archive and Museum. We toured the vault, hunted through the old card catalogs, and later had the opportunity to scan negatives of some fascinating photographs and architectural renderings under the supervision of Curator/Archivist and Collection Manager, Cintia Romero.
Additionally, we curated a 2025 calendar, for sale in the gift shop, which features selected photos from the exhibit with a short history to complement each month of the year. Choosing our favorites without repeating images used in prior calendars was a fun challenge.
Sunland-Tujunga Historic Home Tour - 2025
Bolton Hall Museum will soon be hosting a docent-led tour of 6 historic local properties in close proximity to the museum. In addition to contributing to research, I created the tour logo and did all of the graphic design and layout for our promotional materials. These included a 24 page full-color tour booklet, an ad solicitation brochure, flyers and posters, vinyl banners, and postcards. I also generated and embedded a QR code linking to the museum's website to facilitate ticket sales. The QR code also allows for ticket sales in advance, but also instantly onsite the day of the event, so there are no worries about turning any visitors away. Because this is a fundraising event, every ticket sold makes a difference.
On the day of the home tour I will be working as a docent, leading tours at the Verdugo Hills of Peace pioneer cemetery. This site is particularly special to me because my very first project at BHM was updating the obituary records in our card catalog. The cards contain basic information about deceased Sunland-Tujunga residents and point to corresponding issues in our historic newspaper collection where their obituaries appear. Additionally I located older obituaries from an accession of missing editions of our historic local paper, The Record Ledger. I also worked on a weeding and deduplicating project that had me going through our research files of newspaper clippings pertaining to flooding at the cemetery.
Acting as a docent at the cemetery provides me the opportunity to share information from our archival holdings with the public in a more immersive fashion, and allows me to promote BHM's broader mission of preserving the historical record of Rancho Tujunga. Over the years the cemetery has suffered tremendous neglect, but community-led efforts in recent years to preserve and restore it are making great progress. Still, more visibility and education is needed to protect this site which is rarely open to the public, but boasts some of the most beautiful views in the area.
Index of Collection Subject Headings and Inventory of Artifacts
This is an ongoing project I am working on meant to aid volunteers in search and retrieval. It is a complex organizational project meant to facilitate cross-reference, control vocabulary, and make the collections more useable.
Because the museum has a community-specific scope, many topics in our research files are interrelated or have a degree of overlap. This makes cross-referencing particularly important. The digital file will be keyword searchable, but because the museum is staffed by volunteers with varying levels of access, our index must also be available in a printed, analog format.
Collection materials and artifacts are located in the archives room, the research library, and in the main museum area but, because space is limited, physical locations are not always intuitive. Understanding exactly what the collections contain, where they are housed, and what research materials are available to support the collections, will conserve time and effort when volunteers have limited availability, in times of higher volunteer turn-over, or when there are backlogs of research requests.
- support for curating and breaking down exhibits
- support for creation of public programs and events
- support for research requests
Thank you for sharing in my adventures!
Bolton Hall Museum is in transition. This Summer we will be redoing our permanent exhibit which has not been updated for over twenty-five years! I am excited to see what new adventures lay just ahead. And I look forward to continuing to apply what I have learned at the SJSU iSchool about preservation, archival reference and outreach, curation, archival description, information seeking, and the countless other important aspects of archival work and librarianship.
Credits:
Created with images by Heather Lloyd - "The Company You Keep", Robert Allan - "Bolton Hall hero" and "Cemetery detail", leeyiutung - "Worn grunge wall with light. Architecture abstract background" • Thomas Söllner - "Altes Buch auf Holztische bei Kerzenlicht"