Library News
Congratulations Leigh Rupinski!
February 13, 2025
Congratulations to Leigh Rupinski, the Archivist for Public Services and Community Engagement, who was awarded this year's Pew Excellence Award for Teaching and Learning Enrichment! Leigh was commended for her strong focus on collaboration, both with other faculty and with students. Leigh got her start as a GVSU student working in the archives, a job she found at the suggestion of one of her professors. “I always say that the day [Curator of Rare Books and Distinguished Collections] Robert [Beasecker] handed me an X-Acto knife and a box of rotting slides was the day I thought, yeah I’ll do this for the rest of my life.”
Leigh works closely with other faculty to bring students to the archives and engage hands-on in primary source research. Prof. Abigail Gautreau’s History students completing their Capstone work closely with archival materials and choose to write an essay or build an exhibit of materials from the archives. In an article about their partnership in Archival Outlook , they note that “Archival research forces students to step back and allow the source material to direct the process, since they can only work with what they actually have, not what they wish existed, the way working historians do.”
Leigh also supervises the student colleagues that work in the Lemmen Library and Archives. As a former student worker herself, she cites the importance of her own student work experience in leading her to pursue archives as a career. Working in the Archives was “pretty critical” in setting her on the path to become an Archivist. During graduate school she worked at the University of Michigan’s Digital Conversion Unit, which had a “wonderful” atmosphere. But her early work in the field after graduate School was pretty isolating, and she wants our students to have a more supportive experience. Leigh works with student worker as a collaborator as much as a supervisor. She says she works “with students to develop individualized learning projects based on their interests and career goals,” and numbers several former Lemmen Library and Archives workers among graduate students and new professionals in the archives.
If you are interested in incorporating primary source research from the Lemmen Library and Archives into your class, please get in touch with Leigh! She will be honored along with other Faculty Teaching and Learning Center award winners at the Faculty Awards Convocation on February 18th.
