My name is Sarah Wingo. I am in my second and final year at the University of Michigan’s School of Information (UM-SI) working on my master of science in information, and recently completed my third week as a part-time editor for the Text Creation Partnership (TCP).
TCP is tucked away in a strip of the Hatcher Graduate library‘s third floor north stacks, in what is known as “the cage.” Even if you stumbled across the cage in your search for a book or journal housed in the Asia Library stacks, which share the third floor with TCP, it’s likely you wouldn’t know what we were all up to hard at work over our computers. I first learned about the University of Michigan’s branch of TCP last summer while doing an internship funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), dealing with digital preservation for MLibrary. My supervisor at the time wanted me to have the opportunity to see the variety of work being done at the library, and on a visit to MPublishing I happened to meet the Text Creation Partnership Project Outreach Librarian Rebecca Welzenbach, who explained the project to me.
My personal interest in TCP stems from my educational background prior to coming to UM-SI. I did an MA in English at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, where I specialized in Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists. I then chose to pursue a library science degree because while working towards my MA, I frequently used special collections and became increasingly interested in the stewardship of rare books and manuscripts and in using technology and digital media to create new ways of accessing and interacting with these materials. The TCP is an interesting fit for me because it combines my interest in early English texts with the technological aspects of creating access for the scholarly community that first sparked my interest in librarianship.
