By Dr. Phillip Stone ’94
As the community engagement archivist at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Jennifer Coggins ’12 enjoys connecting individuals to Yale’s vast collections.
One of the world’s largest collections of rare books and manuscripts, the Beinecke holds over a million books and thousands of linear feet of archives and manuscripts. The collection ranges widely and includes ancient papyri, medieval manuscripts and the papers of modern authors such as Langston Hughes and Judy Blume. The library sees over 175,000 visitors attend its exhibits and events and around 3,000 researchers in its reading room each year.
Coggins likes that no two days are the same and that she’s always learning something new from the collections or from the people who are researching in them.
“I get to work with so many different researchers and community groups, people with all sorts of research questions they are trying to investigate,” she says. “I get to know a lot of different areas of history and people from the past.”
Coggins leads a program to help New Haveners preserve their own personal, family and organization archives. She hosts workshops, provides consultations, helps people think about how to organize and describe their materials and provides access to supplies and equipment.
“It’s really rewarding being able to support people in preserving and passing on the materials and stories that are important to them,” says Coggins, who is currently working with the New Haven Free Public Library to establish a public Memory Lab in their makerspace with equipment for scanning photographs and documents and reformatting common audiovisual formats.
Coggins also focuses on Yale and local history. She helped produce an exhibit to coincide with a new book about Yale’s historical connections with slavery and abolition. Since then, she’s been coleading a project to research Yale’s earliest Black students, preparing biographies and locating photos of as many of those individuals as she can.
Coggins got her start in libraries as a student assistant at Wofford’s Sandor Teszler Library and credits the staff with introducing her to academic library work. A history major, Coggins learned how to undertake historical research and evaluate historical evidence in her courses. Writing an honors thesis gave her the opportunity to do archival research. Some of her research was in the papers of Hayes Mizell ’60, who provided funds to help researchers use his collection at the University of South Carolina.
“It was my first experience as a user of archives in a less-guided fashion, and it made me want to facilitate that experience for others,” she says.
Coggins was also part of Wofford’s Success Initiative, which she credits with helping her learn the projectmanagement skills that she still uses in managing exhibition work and other major projects.
After graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors, she earned her master’s degree in library and information science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she worked as a graduate assistant in the university archives. After graduation, she stayed on in a role in university records management. She helped campus offices decide what records needed to be transferred to the archives. She moved into an outreach role, allowing her to focus more on university history and the use and promotion of the collections. She also got to work with student organizations, helping them preserve their records. In 2019, she moved to Yale, becoming the collection development archivist for the manuscripts and archives department before moving into her current role.