Welcome Sadie Rain Hope Gund – Repository Project Curator

The Graduate Center Library is pleased to introduce Sadie Rain Hope-Gund to the Mina Rees Library and Graduate Center community. Sadie Rain is working this Fall 2019 semester as a College Assistant on two projects focused on Open Scholarship. Half of her time will be spent working on a long-term project of the CLAGSNews Archives, coordinating authors of CLAGSNews articles to request permission for repository upload. The second half of her time will continue a pilot project, originally developed by Electronic Resources and Scholarly Communication librarian, Adriana Palmer, on identifying the licenses of published works by core GC faculty to determine which could be uploaded into the CUNY Academic Works institutional repository. Each of these projects represents the Mina Rees Library’s dedication to open access, open scholarship, open pedagogy, and open educational resources. 

Before working at the Mina Rees Library, Sadie Rain was an archivist for the curator Catherine McKinley, who curated the show, Aunty!: African Women in the Frame, 1870 to the Present. McKinley owned an extensive collection of photographs of African women for which Sadie Rain created an interoperable database using Filemaker software. Before McKinley’s archiving project, Sadie Rain worked as a freelance archivist for private collectors whose collections needed database development. Prior to that, she was a curatorial intern at the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, working on the Deana Lawson’s show Planes, which opened in October 2018. 

When asked, Sadie Rain’s approach to this two-pronged acclimation to libraries has been on two converging paths: 

“On the one hand, I have always been an avid reader, libraries always felt like home. As an undergraduate, I worked in my universities’ library as a Student Assistant, preparing material for the digital collections. This was hands on, tactile experience with collections that led me to appreciate the work of appropriately handling delicate documents and photographs. On the other path, I was studying photography production and media theory. In my history of photography classes, I was underwhelmed by the lack of diversity, so I dug in archives to find pictures of the people I wanted to know more about. In media theory classes, I was introduced to the theories of The Archive, as a place of cultural memory and public history. All of these experiences and ideas floated in my brain while trying to figure out my life, before clicking into place. I need to become a librarian to do this important work!

“Working at the Mina Rees Library with the CLAGSNews archives are the perfect stepping stone to learning more about the current questions that are facing librarians, and exploring how libraries are politically minded institutions. 

We are excited to have Sadie Rain continue with us for this Fall 2019 semester. If you see her in the halls, be sure to say hello. And to find her online, go to sadierain.me to see her photography and archival work. 

About the Author

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is an Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library.