Katie Coldiron

Bio

A native of Kentucky, Katie moved to Florida in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She was introduced to library and archival work at UF, and parlayed different roles held during her time as a student into a position digitizing Cuban Judaica items and periodicals on the ground in Havana, all part of a post-custodial digitization project undertaken by the UF George A. Smathers Libraries. Following this experience, Katie enrolled in a library and information science master’s program at the University of Texas at Austin. During her time at UT Austin, Katie served as a graduate research assistant for digital projects at the UT Libraries, where she assisted area studies librarians on various facets of their digital projects. As a student during the onset of COVID-19, Katie combined her interest in digital archives, which had become even more important, with archival work seeking to preserve the stories of historically underrepresented groups and themes in the archives. As her final capstone project, Katie translated from English to Spanish the metadata of all the public access interviews of the Texas After Violence Project, a community archive and documentary project that seeks to preserve the stories of Texans impacted in various ways by the state’s criminal justice system. She is very excited to begin her post-graduate career as an archivist in Miami: her favorite city. At the WPHL, Katie advises partner organizations and interns on the different archival aspects of their digital collections, from metadata creation and copyright clearance to sustainable digital storage solutions and digital humanities tools for showcasing/enhancing collections.