Taking the Archives Out of the Basement: Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives’ Community Outreach Projects

Tara Maharjan (Rutgers USA)

Abstract: This presentation will look at the ways that the Rutgers University Special Collections and University Archives has used outreach to engage with the university and public communities. Such outreach has included pop-up exhibits, creating games based on our collections and recreating games from our collections, zines, and button making.

The talk will discuss how outreach has enabled the discovery of collections and educated people about special collections and archives.

About: Tara Maharjan is the Processing Archivist at Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA.

Her work at Rutgers includes arrangement and description (including EAD finding aids), social media and outreach, and curation of the New Jersey Beer Collection. She holds Masters's degrees from Simmons College in History and Library Science with a concentration in archiving. Prior to Rutgers, Tara worked as a Cataloguer at the Internet Archive and a cookbook librarian for America's Test Kitchen.