Best Wishes to Erin Escobar

Every year Ebling Library is blessed with a variety of ISchool graduate library assistants, all bringing varied sensibilities and experiences to their work at the 2nd floor service desk. The fascinating background and sensibilities of Erin Escobar is representative of the wide range of life experiences that informs future endeavors in professional librarianship. Erin previously worked in art galleries and the retail and auction world of rare books, learning about cataloging with describing books for sale to collectors.

Erin’s work at Ebling, while routinely helping patrons with research and reference questions, also included capturing a photocopied record of our recent WW1 exhibition and comparing rare book donations with book on women’s health already held at Ebling, which both reinforced her love of working with older print material. Not one to let opportunities pass, while navigating a full-time academic course load and parenting two small children (during COVID!), Erin also gained experience in digital humanities as a metadata assistant at the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Collections Center (UWDCC), experience that should serve her well, as so many photographs, books, archives, and other ephemera now become discoverable via digitization and robust indexing.

Following graduation Erin will be working on a short-term project, remotely, with Madison’s Promega in a DAM capacity (not an adjective, an acronym for Digital Asset Management) corralling and preserving data for colleagues to use in marketing strategies. Erin hopes that someday there might be an opportunity to work with rare books, older collections, or archives, but until then, the sky’s the limit. Join us in congratulating a newly minted librarian! Best wishes, Erin.