I came to the School of Information (SI) with an academic background in history and a passion for open-source and open-content projects, chiefly Wikipedia. Now that I am an SI student, I am able to pursue these two passions for history and open content together. As an Archives and Records Management specializer, I feel deep connections to both archivism's rich history as an enabling force for historians and its great opportunity at the present to reach out to a much broader audience through digitization and open-content initiatives. It is a very exciting time to be an archivist.

My goal is to become part of the new generation of archivists as a professional who is as comfortable with a computer as with archival preservation boxes. My dream is to continue the legacy of previous generations of archivists by retaining archivism's primary focuses on preserving physical objects and enabling scholarly research, but at the same time also developing a commitment to safely creating digital surrogates from the originals that can be shared with the world as open content via the Internet. With newer technologies such as tablets, e-readers, and smartphones, the public experience of the Internet is becoming more tactile, and it is my hope that these technologies can be used to create highly-realistic experiences for the general public with the digital surrogates of priceless historical documents. Then, these treasures of world culture could become incredibly accessible to people everywhere on Earth. I desire to be one of the archivists who participates in this exciting process of "opening the archives" to the world.