Andrew Le
MLIS student
Q: Please share any additional academic plans (dual degree, research focus, minor, specialization, etc.) you may be pursuing.
A: I'm interested in archives & special collections, government & legal resources, and digital preservation
Q: Please tell us about your background and why you decided to come to the iSchool.
A: I began working in libraries in 2017 at my undergraduate university's archives. I spent a year as an archival reference student employee until that library suffered a catastrophic fire in 2018. My job basically turned into search and rescue for surviving items. That left a lasting impression on me, and I decided to pursue a career in the LIS field. I then moved to Chicago and worked in the University of Illinois Chicago's archives. I spent the downtime during the pandemic to apply for graduate school and ultimately settled on the UW!
Q: What excites you about the information field?
A: I love working with old stuff! Historian Francis Blouin says archival material has the ability to "transport" you to another place and time, and I couldn鈥檛 agree more. It's always an intellectual challenge to pick up something from, for example, the 15th century, and then imagine this object in someone else's hands at that time and place.
Q: What鈥檚 been your favorite iSchool course or learning experience (i.e. directed fieldwork, research project, etc.)?
A: I did a DFW at the Connections Museum Seattle, which is a small museum that collects local telephone history. It's very much a living museum in that they have brought these objects back to life. They have a functioning analog telephone server from the 1930s that can even process internal phone calls. I recommend anyone interested in "old stuff" visit just to be surrounded by it, whether you're interested in communications history or not.
Q: Tell us about an experience you鈥檝e had at the iSchool that has informed or reshaped your career goals.
A: My personal philosophy has always been more inclined toward being a realist, and I knew that to go into the field of archives I needed to refine my technical skills. I have been trying to develop such skills on my own, but sometimes I feel like my mind is just not made for technical things like coding. The MLIS program, however, has made me think more critically about adapting my existing skill set to improve my proficiency in more technical skills as well. The iSchool has helped me combine what I can do with what I thought I could never do.
Q: What about your iSchool journey thus far are you most proud of?
A: Something I鈥檓 proud of in my iSchool journey at the moment is I have reached a point in my career where I feel I have enough experience to be confident in my own knowledge and abilities. During my time as an undergrad, I often felt like trying to get scholarships, jobs and opportunities was more based on pure chance and luck. But the more I apply now, the more I hear back because of the experience I have gained, like through my current position working at the Odegaard Library. It feels really good to be at this point in my career, but also a bit scary because I have to keep doing a good job and can鈥檛 rely on luck anymore. But I am proud that I have enough experience to say that I know what I鈥檓 talking about.
Q: What is next on the horizon for you?
A: I just got accepted as an intern at the Museum of Flight, where I'll be working on a collections-wide scope document. It's really the perfect intersection of my personal and professional interests. I'm so honored to have this opportunity, especially as someone from a town nicknamed the "air capital of the world." I think my ultimate professional goal is to work at enough information repositories that someone will pay me to look at their old junk, kind of like 鈥淎ntiques Roadshow,鈥 but instead of giving them a dollar value I just tell them how cool it is.
Q: What鈥檚 the best advice you have ever received?
A: One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received happened quite recently in a conversation with Gates Foundation archivist Moriah Caruso. I chatted with her a few months ago about digital archiving stuff and I was talking about my apprehension about corporate controls of archives and hidden information. She said the most important thing to remember is that 鈥渢here is a distinction between consuming something and preserving something.鈥 Just because you can鈥檛 see or, in other words, consume something doesn鈥檛 mean that it鈥檚 not there or it doesn鈥檛 exist. As someone in the field of archives, this was really interesting to me because I hadn鈥檛 really considered it from that lens.