Amanda Widom is a recent MLIS graduate from the 哔咔漫画 School of Information. She recently became a Digital Project Archivist at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee collecting and cataloging records related to the organization鈥檚 response to the Ukraine Crisis as part of a foundational grant. Prior to her Master鈥檚, Widom was an Archives and Special Collections Intern at the University of Florida, where she processed a collection donated by a Jewish family from South Florida documenting their experiences during World War II. She also worked for two years at the Florida Museum of Natural History digitizing skipper specimens for the North American Lepidoptera database, LepNet.
She is currently working on a paper examining the challenges facing Judaica librarians and genealogists in accessing archives on Imperial Russian Jewry. While doing her own digging into her family鈥檚 genealogy, Widom recognized the difficulty of accessing materials related to Imperial Russian Jewry, and was inspired to begin work on a paper making that information much easier to access. Having been awarded a scholarship to attend the Association of Jewish Libraries Conference in June, Widom is one step closer to her goal. Asked to reflect on what she is looking forward to about the conference, Amanda states, 鈥淚 am excited for the conference as it will be an opportunity to network with Judaica librarians who have had professional experience with accessing these materials. To me, librarianship is about making information from various experiences available to our communities. I am excited about this opportunity as it will provide me with the tools necessary to further my research and to effectively build the Ukraine Crisis archive in my new position.鈥�