Interview with Ana Nino - June 17, 2025
How do the practices in a botanical archive differ from other types of special collections or museum archives?
Botanical libraries–chiefly ones focused on taxonomy and systematics–differ from most libraries in that they tend to hold on to older publications rather than weeding out-of-date material. They do this due to the fact that taxonomists seek to trace a scientific name’s etymology, or what the original name was and how it has evolved over time with taxonomic revisions. In many ways, however, botanical archives possess material types as standard cultural heritage collections–featuring lecture notes, early versions of manuscripts, field notebooks, and field photographs.
How do you collaborate with researchers or curators from other disciplines, and what advice do you have for working across specialties?
Through the Carlquist project, I have collaborated with my Co-Principal Investigator–a botanist and lead Administrative Curator at California Botanic Garden’s Herbarium– as well as my Senior Personnel colleague on the grant–the Botanical Research Institute of Texas’ Biodiversity Informatician. There are many parallels between library and information science and biodiversity informatics, and this team member and I worked together closely to develop digitization workflows, file transfer protocols, redaction of the names of threatened species, AI-mediated transcription efforts, and other workflow procedures that have sped up project progress while ensuring high quality work. With our Co-Principal Investigator, we meet on a monthly basis to apprise each other of project progress, to determine what needs to be done to carry out certain tasks–like establishing linkages and planning a forthcoming collection exhibit–in lockstep. I have also worked with art professors to provide access to the library’s collections for sketching purposes. Advice I’d give for working across specialties is: communicate consistently, create meeting agendas, take note of what has been completed and assign future action items with deadlines–figuring out realistic timelines for all parties involved. Learning a bit about the other fields in question can help, too, but don’t necessarily feel pressure to become an expert in a field you’re unfamiliar with.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in maintaining access and preservation for older or more fragile materials?
Lack of preservation and conservation experience as well as lack of a means to digitize these materials (which are often oversize or bound). It’s also so tempting to want to show our rarer materials off regularly, such as our dried specimens in bound books (also known as exsiccata), but I have to keep in mind the wear and tear this has on the material.
What transferable skills from working with scientific collections—like this one—can be applied to more general special collections work?
In working with the Sherwin Carlquist Archival Collection’s materials, I learned to glean metadata from archival materials’ containers as valuable metadata can be found on slide mounts, slide boxes, and field notes. Another transferable skill is project management and determining which tasks to prioritize at specific times in a project. With a massive digitization project such as the Carlquist project, I had to take inventory of roughly how many film materials had valuable auxiliary metadata provided to reveal the plants’ identities. When realizing the majority of the collection did not have scientific names, dates, or localities handwritten on them, I decided to prioritize having volunteers transcribe field notes. These field note transcriptions served as a lynchpin for being able to create metadata by essentially serving as a reference.
Are there particular digital tools or platforms you recommend becoming proficient with for a career in special collections or museums?
Becoming aware of different open-source and proprietary products for collection management systems, digital asset management systems, digital preservation systems, and archival management systems is a good idea, even if you don’t possess experience in working with them.
Museum CMSs include PastPerfect, Emu, CollectionSpace, and Collective Access (which is also an AMS). Archival management systems (AMS) include ArchivesSpace, Aeon, Access to Memory, and ArchivEra. It may be useful to also know about digital exhibit platforms like Omeka, ContentDM, and CollectionBuilder for the purposes of curating certain digitized artifacts and archival materials.
For web archiving, ArchiveIt, Webrecorder, and Archive Box are worth looking into.
For digital asset management and digital preservation, Archivematica, Preservica, AM Quartex, and Rosetta, and Specto are worth looking into.
What types of jobs or institutions should I be looking at if I want to keep building experience after this internship?
For work in archives, museums, and special collections, I’d suggest searching for Exhibits Coordinator positions along with Library Specialist, Archival Specialist, Librarian, Archivist, and Digital Archivist positions. These positions will hone your reference, research, processing, and technical skills. The Kimbell Art Museum also offers a part-time library intern program for graduate students and recent graduates that may be good for building experience in art museums. Volunteering offers a great way at building more skills in these arenas, and IS-ANNOUNCE is a wonderful resource that blasts out job opportunities, as well as ArchivesGig and INALJ. Other places to network and to learn of archives to volunteer in the DFW region are the DFW Archives Bazaar event and the Metroplex Archivists group, which is mediated through Facebook. Lastly, SJSU’s MLIS Skills at Work publication is fantastic and offers insights into industry trends and suggested keywords for searching for job positions.
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