Current and Previous Atkins Fellows

Xena Becker is the LGBTQ+ Digital Humanities Fellow at the Atkins Library. She is working with the Special Collections and University Archives to create a digital timeline of important events in LGBTQ+ history in Charlotte. The goal of the project is to showcase materials and identify gaps in the current collections. She plans to pursue a career as a rare books and special collections librarian and is especially interested in teaching with these materials.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature with a Minor in Education Studies from New York University, where she conducted research on the history of LGBTQ activism at the school and its relationship to broader queer community organizing in Greenwich Village. While at NYU, she worked at the Fales Library and Special Collections. Her interest in librarianship began with a class co-taught by English faculty and the Librarian for Printed Books at Fales titled “Papyrus to PDF: An Introduction to Book History Now.” She currently works as the Graduate Assistant at the Scholarly Commons and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois. She is eager to use her experiences this summer to expand her expertise in digital humanities and digital public history.

Jenny is the Innovative Collection Spaces Fellow at Atkins Library. She is currently enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in their MLIS program and will graduate in May 2020. Her B.A. is in Art History with a certificate in Museum Studies and Fine Art Gallery Practices from Humboldt State University. She has a M.A. in Higher Education from Appalachian State University. Jenny’s research interest is in diversity librarianship, in particular how academic libraries can help Hispanic students succeed.

Jenny is the incoming LISSA president at UNCG. She currently works as a reference desk intern at Jackson Library at UNCG and as a graduate assistant for the MLIS department.

She is a California native and the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

Kate is the Collection Management Systems Fellow. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Information Science at the University of Michigan School of Information, specializing in Digital Curation. Favorite projects include creating a digital exhibit of photographs from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, analyzing record data from George Washington University’s rare book collection, and developing a long-term digital curation plan for the Penn Treebank project. After graduation she hopes to work in the Digital Humanities field, managing digital collections, developing online exhibits, and facilitating computational humanities research. 

Kate holds a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on witches in ancient Roman literature. Before entering graduate school, Kate interned in Rome, Italy for a non-profit that promotes classical education. She currently works as a Curatorial Assistant at Michigan’s Papyrology Collection.

This summer, she will work with the Special Collections Library’s collection management system to clean up archival record data and create custom reports to gather statistics and analytics for the Atkins Library’s Special Collections.

Jenny is the Assessment and Analytics Fellow at the Atkins Library this summer. She is currently a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign pursuing her Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science. Jenny’s interests are library assessment, reference services, and information literacy instruction.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science from Calvin College and went on to work for the Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative as the data quality assistant, managing records for several hundred preschool students across eight locations. She also worked as a research assistant for Calvin’s political science department before deciding to pursue her Master’s Degree. During her past year at U of I, Jenny worked as the library assessment graduate assistant at the main library doing things like space assessment, survey implementation, and statistics compilation. This spring Jenny also collaborated on a research project about library representation in undergraduate science textbooks. This summer Jenny is working on an assessment/research study to demonstrate the impact of library resources and programs on student learning and success by aligning library and other student engagement metrics across the university and tying it to measures of student success. When she is not working Jenny enjoys hiking, playing board games, and creating stained glass pieces.

LaQuanda T. Onyemeh is the Electronic Resources Management Fellow at Atkins Library. She is currently a MLIS (Master of Library & Information Studies) student at UNC Greensboro.  She has a dual degree in Psychology and Sociology from State University New York, Brockport. During her second year of law school she received an opportunity to work at the law library and quickly recognized that her passion and purpose was in the library. She decided to put a pause on her legal education and pursue librarianship. Recently, she has worked as a Remote Metadata intern for the Law Library of Congress where she created descriptive metadata for the Hein Project.  She  assigned metadata and topic categories to over 900 Supreme Court opinions located in the United States Reports.  LaQuanda also demonstrated expertise in conducting legal research and navigating through legal databases, and assisted her supervisor in reviewing interns' work in order to help provide open access to legal material on the Law Library of Congress’ website.  LaQuanda is currently a  graduate assistant at the UNC-Greensboro Teaching Resource Center.

LaQuanda has received the following scholarships: M. Sangster Parrott Fellowship from UNC-Greensboro, Southern Eastern American Association Law Libraries  (SEAALL) Student Scholarship, and George A. Strait Minority scholarship from American Association Law Libraries (AALL).
 
Her ultimate goal is to become a law librarian who actively teaches legal research, and promotes lifelong learning and intellectual freedom. She enjoys helping others find the information they need. Early in life she quickly realized education is the key that will change her future circumstances and she has been committed to that realization ever since.  She is open to all the new possibilities librarianship offers.

Hobbies include painting, traveling and taking pictures. She enjoys learning new things, and she is always open to soak up new information, and sharing what she has learned with others.

Erin is the Born-Digital University Records Fellow at the Atkins Library. She is currently a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pursuing her Master’s Degree in Information Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. Erin’s interests are in born-digital processing, digital archiving, and data management.

She holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Psychology from Appalachian State University and went on to work for the State of North Carolina as a courtroom clerk, managing records for two busy specially designated DWI courtrooms. She also worked as an administrative assistant for a cloud computing company before deciding to pursue her Master’s Degree.

During her past year at UNC Chapel Hill, Erin worked as a Research Assistant through a Data@Carolina at UNC Chapel Hill to promote and bring awareness to needs in research data throughout various departments at UNC Chapel Hill through the Research Data Management and Sharing MOOC created by Dr. Helen Tibbo and the ODUM Institute.  

This summer Erin will lay the groundwork for a large-scale ingest of University records to the digital repository. She will assess the amount and the different kinds of born-digital information held by individual University offices and she will develop workflows to be used by the University for ingesting necessary, born-digital University records for proper preservation and archiving, as well as making these digital, public records accessible through the repository.

Natalie Ornat earned a Master of Science in Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2017.  She served as a Research and Instruction Graduate Assistant within both Davis Library and the Undergraduate Library, and as the student library liaison for the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes.  Her work researching the impacts of reading and writing on individuals living through the siege of Sarajevo earned her the Dean’s Achievement Award and an invitation to present at the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies.  Natalie came to the field of librarianship with a background in teaching.  She was a 2012 Teach For America corps member and taught at a middle school in Charlotte, North Carolina.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Graduate Certificate in Teaching from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Natalie serves as the Public Services Fellow where she will work to create greater collaboration through teambuilding and workflow analysis in the newly created Public Services unit.

Whitney Ray is the Digital Image Processing Fellow at Atkins Library. After graduating from The Evergreen State College, Whitney served as an AmeriCorps VISTA and worked for A Slice of Pie Productions on a documentary film on the history of The Automat. She has since found her place in archives, the study of narrative, and multimedia preservation.

Whitney is pursuing her MSLS at UNC – Chapel Hill, where she specializes in Archives and Records Management. Committed to equipping students with research tools they need to succeed in an information-dense world, she has spent the last year as a research and instruction assistant at Davis Library and taught information literacy sessions at the Undergraduate Library. She has also worked in the Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, providing quality assurance to a digitization project and working to ensure access to North Carolina Court of Appeals records across different formats. Her most recent position was in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, rehousing and describing negatives from the Durham Herald-Sun Collection.

This summer Whitney will work to preserve and disseminate born-digital photographs created by motorsports photographer Bryant McMurray.  She will complete the accessioning of the photographs using established processes, then develop and implement a workflow for processing the digital files and ingesting them into a digital repository on the Islandora platform. Whitney will work with digital production and metadata librarians, and possibly the photographer himself, on the creation of metadata and workflows.

She’s looking forward to exploring the city of Charlotte this summer, particularly any running trails with lots of shade.