Staff Profile: Emily R. Cottle, CA

Written by: Emily Cottle

In the coming months, this blog will feature articles from and about other grant funded personnel who will temporarily be a part of the department here. Until then (and probably even after!), you’ll be hearing from me a lot, so I wanted to take the time to introduce myself.

Emily Cottle processes a photograph collection.

As you’ve already gathered, my name is Emily Cottle and I’m the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian here at Delaware State University. This is a position I’ve held since June 2012. I was hired as the first professional archivist in the history of Delaware State. (Come back next week to learn a little more about the department itself and the collections.)

If you’d like to get the standard "Emily went to school here and worked here" blurb, check out my bio on the Contributors page. Here, however, I wanted to make things a little more interesting and use a Q&A format. If you have any other questions, pop them in the comments section below.

DSU Archives: How did you decide you wanted to be an archivist?
Emily Cottle: I had decided to major in history during my undergrad at Penn State based largely on loving history and had no solid plan for what career this degree might lead me to. After meeting with an advisor, I took an internship working in the archives at a small local historical society (the Centre County Historical Society). It didn’t take long working on processing a photograph collection for me to get hooked. My internship adviser spoke highly of the archives program at Simmons College in Boston, so off I went!

DSU Archives: What’s the best part of your job?
Emily Cottle: Hmmm… that’s a tough one. I’d have to say it’s a toss-up between working with researchers and processing collections. I love working with researchers because each reference question I receive is like a new scavenger hunt to embark upon. You never know what kind of question you’re going to get and thinking of creative ways to find information in the collections is definitely a challenge, but I love it. I love processing collections because you’re constantly learning new things. Each box you open has a piece of information you’ve never encountered before. I find that constant learning process really exciting.

DSU Archives: This article is getting pretty long, so one last question – Why should readers follow this blog?
Emily Cottle: Easy, because this blog is exciting! But seriously, this blog is going to give a detailed behind the scenes look at the operations of the Delaware State University Archives and Special Collections as we journey through the next two years working on our IMLS grant funded project. We’re still a young department, so readers will get to see some of the challenges associated with building up a new repository. Readers will also get some detailed profiles of interesting figures from our institution’s history and glimpses at some of the treasures in our collection. And we really want this blog to be an interactive and engaging site, so please use the comments section to introduce yourself or to tell us what kinds of articles you like or don’t like or want to see more of. Or if you have questions that we aren’t answering, let us know that too and we’ll do our best to remedy the situation. 

Thanks for sticking with us through that long one today, folks! Come back next week for a brief history of the Delaware State University Archives and Special Collections Department.