Congratulations to Jessica Giles, FCPL’s newest MLIS graduate!

Submitted by Brooke Rose

Jessica Giles graduated last week from the University of Southern Mississippi with an MLIS degree and a Graduate Certificate in Archives and Special Collections. Her path to libraries, in her words, “went backwards.” She would see experts being interviewed on TV who had a large amount of information on a specialized topic and decided she wanted to be an archivist, which led her to libraries and an undergraduate degree in English Literature.

Before coming to FCPL as an Information Specialist at Sharon Forks in September 2022, she spent 5 years as a Library Clerk at the Walton-DeFuniak Public Library in the Florida panhandle, where she worked the circulation desk and completed other tasks, such as book repairs, processing new materials, and weeding projects. She delighted in giving tours of the historic Walton-DeFuniak Public Library 

In her MLIS program, Jessica particularly enjoyed her cataloging and metadata courses in addition to her archival electives. Her internship with Mississippi State University focused on creating metadata for the Charles H. Templeton sheet music collection. She has also repaired an old 2nd edition of a Webster English dictionary and worked on creating a photo archive of the Wallace Bruce weapons collection.

As a personal archive project, Jessica has been collecting and organizing random quotes. She experiments with different ways to organize the quotes, but her plan is to shuffle them, compile them, and give the collection to her son Connor for his high school graduation. Her favorite quote is “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” –Eleanor Roosevelt