Dr. Catherine Walsh joined the staff at HMML in 2019 as Rare Materials Metadata Librarian. She was named to her current position as Director of Cataloging in 2020. Prior to joining HMML, Walsh worked as a librarian, archivist, and cataloger for the Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives and the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in Indianapolis.

She has a BA in Art History and English and a MLIS from Indiana University, Indianapolis, and a MA in Art History from the University of Delaware, Newark. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Delaware in 19th-century American art.

In her current role, Walsh serves as project manager for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant HMML received in January 2020. The grant funds a three-year project to catalog 53,000 digitized manuscripts and create an online database of authors and titles originating from underrepresented or little-known literary traditions, the core of HMML’s growing collection. She oversees HMML’s growing team of catalogers to standardize HMML’s manuscript metadata so that such things as authors, titles, and locations comply with existing international standards.

What she enjoys most about her work: “I’m particularly enthused by the groundbreaking work we are doing to increase public access to cultures historically underrepresented in Western scholarship. Many of the authorities we are creating will be used by libraries and scholars around the world to group literature that was previously scattered and seen as unrelated. The biographical information we will provide for historical figures will facilitate scholarly recognition of previously unknown or undifferentiated persons. The HMML team is filled with amazing people, and it is inspiring to work with such dedicated and brilliant minds on this project.”

Stories by Dr. Catherine Walsh

•   A Christmas Hymn Sing-Along
•   Grief on the Page
•   Poetry and Agriculture, a Fragmentary Scrapbook
•   A Book You Would Love to Read...
•   Feeling the Heavens
•   Creating Relationships — Sharing the Past to Build Toward Future Scholarship
•   Soup, with a Side of Reform
•   The Case of the Mysterious Pie and the Amsterdam Theater
•   Malta Envisioned by an English Clergyman
•   The Power of a Name