Celeste Brewer Email & Phone Number

Arrange and describe archival collections in all formats—including audiovisual, digital, and visual art—at appropriate levels, according to local and national best practices. Consult with collection curators, conservators, and Preservation and Digital Conversion Division staff, and Head of Archives Processing to develop plans for effective and efficient processing. Identify preservation problems and remediate if possible, or recommend for conservation treatment.Create standards-compliant metadata in ArchivesSpace information management system for processed collections and remediate legacy metadata to comply with current archival standards.Coordinate Preservation Assistants partially transcribing and digitally annotating high-value digitized audiovisual content available in the Digital Library Collections platform, July 2020-September 2021.Create and revise existing item-level metadata for analog audiovisual archival materials in preparation for digitization and ingest into the Libraries’ digital preservation and access systems, as part of a major Mellon Foundation-funded grant, October 2019-September 2021.Supervise interns processing archival collections for Graduate Student Internship Program in Primary Sources, June 2018-May 2019. (Program canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to covid-19 pandemic.)Assess the condition of unprocessed collections in response to researcher inquiries, determine interventions necessary to provide access, and prepare materials for use.Supervise student assistants conducting processing tasks in archival collections.Assist with data cleanup for ArchivesSpace implementation project, June 2018-Fall 2019.Manage Rare Book and Manuscript Library public service points three hours per week. Provide virtual reference support using LibraryH3lp software, one hour per week. Provide remote reference support to RBML users.

Completed processing of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program Records (150 linear feet/3.6 terabytes) and the Bob Fass Recordings and Papers audiotapes (approximately 4000 objects), and processed the Lawrence A. Cremin Papers (51 linear feet) and El Diario, La Prensa Photograph Morgue (75 linear feet).Created collection-level MARC catalog records and wrote and manually encoded finding aids in EAD for processed collections.Served on the Time Based Media Preservation Strategic Initiative working group to complete a proposal for eliminating gaps in Columbia University Libraries’ analog audiovisual media preservation workflow and addressing the preservation backlog of approximately 58,000 media objects. Project funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, October 2019-September 2021.Provided in-depth reference support to Ford IFP Records researchers, including six Research Award Winners in residence July-September 2016. Coordinated planning for September 2016 symposium at which Research Award Winners presented findings.Supervised student assistants conducting processing tasks in the Ford IFP Records.

Provided reference support to students, staff, faculty, and outside researchers both in person and remotely via telephone and email. Conducted in-depth research projects in response to department and institutional queries.Created and updated finding aids for collections using Archivist’s Toolkit information management system.Processed 170 linear feet of unprocessed and partially processed institutional records and selected and prepared for cataloging approximately 400 volumes of books and printed ephemera.

Conducted Quality Assurance of archived websites with applications to the study of art, using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It web application. Improved archived websites’ capture, behavior, and appearance by initiating patch crawls of missing URLs identified in QA.Submitted documentation of quality issues unresolved by patch crawls in support tickets to Archive-It partner specialists.Cataloged archived websites in RDA-compliant MARC records for access in the New York Art Resources Consortium's online public access catalog, ARCade, using OCLC Connexion and Millennium.

Greenville, South Carolina Area

Worked as a full-time intern processing and publicizing accessions to the department, with particular emphasis on re-organizing and maintaining the University Archives. Other duties included creation of HTML research guides and other finding aids on the Special Collections website; providing reference assistance to student, faculty, and community researchers; and writing articles to publicize events and exhibitions within the department.

Master’S Degree, Archives And Public History

Master’S Degree, Library And Information Science

Bachelor’S Degree, History

Activities and Societies: Phi Alpha Theta, Furman Humanities Review