Meet
A
Member

July 2007

Michelle Belden

--Manuscripts Curator at UNC-G

--I got my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology and women's studies at Duke in 1997, got my MLS from UNC last year.

--Started work here December 18. This is my first professional archival job, though I interned with the Town of Chapel Hill and Duke while a graduate student.

--Current work-related reads are "Making North Carolina Literate" (a history of UNC-G) and "Our Mothers' War" (documents the experience of American women in WWII; we have a women's veterans archive).

--My favorite collection in the manuscripts division is our writer's archive, which houses the books and papers of instructors in and alumni of UNC-G's MFA in creative writing program. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do with that yet, however.

--So far I've processed a large collection for the Greensboro Artists' League and am now processing the Margaret Coit Papers (she was a graduate of Woman's College and won the Pulitzer for her biography of John Calhoun).

--Also I am working with a coworker on an exhibit documenting the history of nursing at UNC-G, and I've got a student assistant helping me do a thorough survey of our manuscript collection so that we can get all processed collections cataloged and make long-term plans for dealing with the backlog of unprocessed stuff.