About Me
My name is Katy Tuck and I am currently completing my MSIS at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information with an Endorsement of Study in Archival Studies and a Museum Studies Portfolio in progress (my anticipated completion date is May 2021). As an undergraduate, I completed many research and writing-intensive visual and critical theory courses and have a lifelong engagement with the arts. I graduated with academic distinction from California College of the Arts with a BA in Visual Studies in 2012.
During graduate school, I actively sought out and enrolled in many courses that prepared me for providing excellent support to libraries and archives including: Archival Enterprises I, Introduction to Records Management, Materials in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Survey of Digitization, Digital Libraries, Public Libraries, Issues in Museum Studies, and Database Management. In each of these courses, I honed and developed my knowledge of information management, including my technical and communication skills and best practices for the preservation, organization, digitization, and retention of records. I am currently completing my Capstone Project for the Texas Historical Commission where I am performing an inventory and assessment of the Kreische Brewery State Historic Site Collections in order to help the THC’s Historic Sites Division gain intellectual and physical control of recently transferred records. I never shy away from rigorous work, embrace learning new skills, and am passionate about helping people, which I believe will serve me well in the role of an information professional working in libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions.
My professional experience has also prepared me for this path. I currently serve as a Teaching Assistant for an Engineering Communication class where I run weekly virtual workshops of a technical writing course for undergraduate students, provide detailed feedback of submitted student work, and record grades in the Canvas platform. Over the past summer, I was a Summer Graduate Support Tech Intern in the Right-of-Way (ROW) Division of the Information Management Team at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) where I experienced operational exposure to government records management work. In this role, I inventoried and recorded key metadata of permanent ROW Division records for the State of Texas highway system in preparation for imaging by a contractor for the larger TxDOT Enterprise Digitization (TED) project, assisted on Knowledge Management Program interviews to capture institutional data from senior employees, and completed training in SharePoint file clean-up, TSLAC records retention, and the OnBase document management platform.
In the Spring 2020 semester, I worked as an Ask-a-Librarian GRA at the Perry Castañeda Library, where I greatly enjoyed providing reference assistance to patrons at the circulation desk, on chat, and via the library’s reference email account. In the fall of 2019, I gained experience processing an archival collection during my practicum at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, where I co-wrote and encoded a finding aid in XML. As 2020 President of the Society of American Archivists—UT Chapter, I served as a positive teammate and leader and developed a wonderful network of friends. I have a strong belief in the library and archival tenets of open access and education and I am excited to be embarking on this career path.
Selected Projects
As a student in Dr. Ciaran Trace’s Archival Enterprises I course, I processed, described, and co-wrote a finding for the Perry and Mabel Rader Collection (Iron Man Magazine) during a semester-long archival practicum at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture under the supervision of Digital Archivist Christy Toms.
Over the past summer, I was a Summer Graduate Support Tech Intern in the Right-of-Way (ROW) Division of the Information Management team at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) where I experienced operational exposure to government records management work. In this role, I inventoried and recorded key metadata of permanent ROW Division records for the State of Texas highway system in preparation for imaging by a contractor for the larger TxDOT Enterprise Digitization (TED) project, assisted on Knowledge Management Program interviews to capture institutional data from senior employees, and completed training in SharePoint file clean-up, TSLAC records retention, and the OnBase document management platform. This is a twenty minute presentation I gave in August of 2020 describing my experiences as an intern and detailing everything I learned.
Fellow iSchooler Vanessa Hutchins and myself were tasked by our Digital Libraries Professor Melanie Cofield to present on the topic of a current technology in the digital libraries field. We chose to present on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and the Mirador Image Viewer. This video (entitled “What IIIF?”) is a presentation of our research and reflects my interest in increasing access to archival collections and facilitating inter-institutional collaboration. My portion of the presentation is on the Mirador Image Viewer and begins at the 07:17 minute mark.
The Kreische Brewery (located in LaGrange, TX on a bluff overlooking the Colorado River) was one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. Founded by a German immigrant, Heinrich Kreische, and his family in the 1860s, the ruins of the grounds, consisting of the brewery and the Kreische family home, are now an historic site under the purview of the Historic Sites Division of the Texas Historical Commission (THC). The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department were the previous custodians of the site and its associated collections until 2018 when management of historical sites in the State of Texas was transferred to the Texas Historical Commission’s Historic Sites Division. Following the transfer of the site and all of the associated collections, the THC’s Historic Sites Division staff proposed a collections assessment and evaluation project in order to gain intellectual and physical control of these collections. I accepted this proposal as my Capstone Project, the culminating requirement for my MSIS degree at The University of Texas at Austin, and produced this collections inventory and assessment report, which includes recommendations for future preservation, use, and outreach.