Hello there!
I’m Chris Reynolds and this is a condensed Portfolio of my work from grad school. This site offers a short narrative reflection of some of the knowledge and skills I’ve gained during my MLIS journey at San José State University. It includes 2 core projects that exemplify my success and illustrate how I’ve engaged with core competencies of librarianship and archival practice and a brief overview of my engagement with professional organizations and leadership.
During the summer of 2024, I completed a 100-hour internship at the UNO Archives and Special Collections.
Under the supervision of the processing archivist I inventoried, arranged, and described the UNO Native American Studies (NAS) Program Records and created metadata for their website through ArchiveSpace. This task gave me first hand experience with all of the main steps in processing via selection, arrangement and description. By sorting the material by types and subject matter, selecting items that should remain in the collection, evaluating items quality to ensure proper preservation, preparing the items for long term storage in appropriate archival folders and boxes, and describing the collection in detail on ArchiveSpace (including collection, folder, and item level descriptions).
Additionally, I was able to understand first hand why diverse representation within collections is essential. This collection centers a group that has been historically under and misrepresented. Containing unique first hand materials and accounts this minority group from around the 1970’s to now; through their accomplishments and struggles.
A group of artifacts that illustrates the need for representation is a poster, an event flier and a newspaper article I was able to connect. The poster was created to combat racial profiling through the use of indigenous mascots. This was a significant issue for the NAS department and Intertribal Student Council as the school’s mascot for a few decades was Ouampi, a racist stereotype of a Native American. By connecting these sources through the collection metadata future researchers will be able to better understand the context of the poster, see that the issue was significant enough to warrant a campus event and an article in the newspaper.
Starting in March 2024, four SJSU students (including myself) where selected to help build an archive for a small Lace Museum in Fremont, California. This monumental endeavor is still underway, currently I’m at just over 550 hours of work on this project.
We started with a room of unmarked boxes, filled with an assortment of items from lectures and letters, to patterns and lace samples. During my time with the museum I've arranged thousands of items into their correct collection, weeded duplicate and erroneous items, created hundreds of individual metadata records, spearheaded the creation of internal materials (including metadata handbook & controlled vocabulary), and developed a unique lace preservation system.
This preservation system is made of deceptively simple, DIY looking pockets and holders for the pieces of lace that aren’t large enough to be put into the collection, but can still be useful to understand a part of a persons lace journey. The system needed to be: supportive and hold the lace in a flat state; breathable, as textiles need sufficient air flow to ensure long term preservation; relatively inexpensive; easy to open and handle by older lace enthusiasts and researchers; non-adhesive based; able to fit into the file folders.
I ended up creating individual envelopes that are open on one side and are created with 4 folds; the envelopes are suspended on pieces of old folders (keeping them from becoming too bulky at the bottom of their folders). These are my own design based off of origami techniques.
This internship built on the experiences I gained at UNO, covering the processing process plus allowed me to help build the system from the ground up which was informative, if a bit challenging.
Throughout my MLIS, I took every opportunity I could to engage with professional organizations, student leadership, and creating & presenting research.
I started with the Association for information Science and Technology Student Chapter (ASIS&T SC) in the fall of 2023 as the chapters webmaster. This was an intense but highly rewarding experience as there were only four of us on the EC for the majority of the year. We each took on multiple responsibilities and worked together to put on educational and social events for the student body monthly.
This past year I took on the challenge of leading the ASIS&T SC as their Chair; being able to coordinate our activities I encouraged my teammates to peruse opportunities they found interesting which led to more speaker events and research into diverse online communication outside the traditional big tech controlled social media landscape. I'm most proud of our efforts to engage incoming students, and am thrilled that I've been able to bring our team from a group of 4 at the beginning of this year to a robust team of 16 at the end.
In addition, I joined the Society of American Archivist Student Chapter (SAASC) as Webmaster. This was a great opportunity to understand how different group structures effect activities as my role was more focused in this team. I attended the monthly Executive Board meetings, participate in brainstorming, but primarily maintained the groups website.
I was able to attend both the ASIS&T and SAA annual meeting in person this year, making many friends while learning about cutting edge research in the fields of information science and archives.
And finally, I was able to end the year on a high note by co-authoring a poster presentation, "From Clickbait to Clarity: Using R to Uncover Differences between Fake and Real News" at CIDS 2025 Online Student Research Conference, in March 2025 that won an Outstanding Student Presentation Award and having an original research manuscript "International Perspectives on Research Data Management Services in Academic Libraries" published in the SJSU Student Research Journal.
The end is only the beginning...
Looking back, my MLIS journey has helped me grow in so many ways. Through my courses, experiences with student organizations, and internships, I was able to explore various roles within LIS, some of which I hadn’t considered before, and others that once felt too far removed from my skill set to be realistic options.
I’ve gained confidence in my ability to write and engage with research, and I’ve started to see the potential in expanding my technical skills. I now believe I can be more of a technical person, as long as I give myself the time, patience, and the correct resources to grow. That shift in mindset has been invaluable. As I move forward, I feel more grounded understanding my strengths and in the areas where I still need to grow.
Wherever I end up, I hope to build a career that centers access, collaboration, and curiosity. This program has helped me see that my technical and creative interests don’t have to exist separately, and I’m grateful for that revelation.
Credits:
Created with images by Ivan Kurmyshov - "Woman reading a few books on the floor" • Gecko Studio - "Stack of books on bookshelf, close-up. Education learning concep" • Scisetti Alfio - "Fountain pen with heart"