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Hello! My name is Tara and I live in Chicago, Illinois. I recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University after completing my coursework and earning a Master's Degree Museum Studies, along with a Post Baccalaureate Degree in Digital Curation. I worked for 6 years as a nationally certified stenographer (court reporter) before pursuing a different career path in 2015. In 2017, I received a Bachelor's Degree in Library and Information Science and subsequently went on to finish my graduate studies at JHU.

Over the last five years, I volunteered and interned at multiple museums, archives, and libraries. During this time, I quickly learned that I was highly interested in, fascinated with (and actually quite good at) archival science. I have always been passionate about history and thoroughly enjoy learning about the past. In addition to my deep enthusiasm and love for learning from the past and sharing this knowledge with others, I have begun to wonder how my legal background, technical skillsets, and professional experience as a certified court reporter an translate into my new profession. Some interesting thoughts come to mind about the possibility of combining both my stenographic skills with my graduate degrees and educational background in information science, collection management, archival principals and theories, digital curation, and cultural heritage management, and translating these areas of expertise to assist with initiatives and projects dealing with oral history. I would love to experiment with these ideas and believe in its potential to expedite or help institutions create, process, and preserve oral histories with greater efficiency, accuracy, and discoverability.

Finally, I am extremely passionate about and particularly interested in working with museums, libraries, and archives to revamp the monolithic, traditional knowledge organization systems (which were not designed to inclusive or diverse, and therefore is not representative of 21st-century society we live in today). I believe it is our obligation and responsibility as archivists to correct the inherently inaccurate and biased historical records that exist particularly with regard to Native tribes and their Indigenous Knowledge or ways of knowing, both of which have been systematically silenced, misrepresented, and/or erased altogether due to colonialism, genocide, and oppressive Western ideals on how a marginalized community's memories and legacies should be organized and interpreted for all of society.