First-year Personal Librarians: Vedder Hall (Floors 3 & 4)

What can your First-year Personal Librarian do for you?

• Keep you informed with periodic e-mail messages highlighting resources and programs
• Assist you with your research assignments by helping you identify the best sources and formulate search strategies
• Answer your questions about library services and resources
• Connect you with librarians across all subject areas
• Support you even when you’re not on campus—for example if you’re on break
• Help you when you don’t know where to start, or can’t think of what to do next!

Your First-year Personal Librarian is Ilse Allen.

Ilse is the Research Services specialist for History, International Relations, and Political Science. In addition, she is involved in Archives and Special Collections instruction and educational initiatives in collaboration with the staff in SCUA. Ilse has had a long career of working with students in many capacities in academia and encourages anyone who needs help or advice to reach out. As the newest member of the research services department that started in July 2024, Ilse will be learning about Bucknell and exploring the area as well this academic year!

A native of the Binghamton, NY area, just north of the Pennsylvania border, Ilse's family has deep roots in the Coal and Amish areas of Pennsylvania on her maternal grandparents' side. At Binghamton University as an undergraduate, her studies were focused on the history and anthropology of the colonial slave trade in the Americas. At Binghamton she discovered the museum studies field-which combined a love of history and the study of material culture-and in a few years she moved to Boston, MA to attend Tufts University, earning a MA in Museum Studies and History. Her master's thesis and accompanying exhibit, "Dual Identities" specifically looked at African American Sailors in Newburyport, Massachusetts and was an overall study of African Americans at sea in the colonial and antebellum periods throughout the United States. Ilse also holds an MLIS from Simmons University where she studied cataloging, user instruction, and specialized in archival access and use and digital archives. She is specifically interested in uncovering underrepresented voices in the archival record and finding ways to apply reparative archival methods to fill in gaps in our collective memory of the past.

Ilse enjoy science fiction and horror movies, live music, pub trivia, photography, creating mixed media art from found objects, and hanging out with her long-time partner and their fur children, Ray (an 80-lb black lab/golden retriever mix who loves a good stick) and orange cat, The Fonz (who loves his best pal, Ray, and a window to watch the birds).