Saturday, March 26, 2011

Close-up on a Volunteer: Ann Eignor

Ann Eignor is another of our dedicated volunteers whose friendly face can be found in the Grems-Doolittle library at least twice a week. Ann has been volunteering in the library for over eight years. She originally began volunteering with us because she was looking to fill in her free time after retiring from being a school librarian. We seemed like the perfect fit, both because she was familiar with libraries and because she was interested in history. But the reasons she was first attracted to the library are not the only reasons she has stayed a volunteer for so long. Ann continues volunteering because she likes the people here.
Over her time with us, Ann has been involved in many projects. Mainly she has been responsible for the organization of the society’s original documents collection, which she works on with Mary Liebers. This is a never-ending task which involves filing documents into folders, organized by topics. Once a document is physically filed, it must also be added to our computer database. By putting the documents in the database, we can search for a keyword or topic, such as Union College or Proctor’s theater, and the database tells us about books and documents involving these topics.
Now that the documents collection is mostly organized and only needs to be maintained as new documents come into the collection, Ann and Mary have begun working with the maps collection, organizing the maps by location and also entering them into the database. Ann told me that besides the people she is working with, she most enjoys the satisfaction of being able to find library materials more easily because of all the time she and the other library volunteers have put into organizing the library collections in a more user-friendly way.

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