New faculty spotlight: Larissa Krayer

Larissa Krayer is a new faculty member at the McGoogan Library of Medicine.

Name: Larissa Krayer
Hometown: Flemington, N.J.
New title and department at UNMC: Assistant professor, digital archivist, McGoogan Library of Medicine

Research/professional interests:

Digital preservation
Access and usability
History

How I fell in love with digital preservation:
While volunteering in museums during my undergraduate studies, I loved being able to see and experience all the amazing things held within their collections. But I quickly realized how rare it was for these treasures to be accessed by the general public. It was sad to know how few people truly got to learn about and experience these things buried in collection storage.

When I went on to graduate school, I became passionate about sharing the objects, stories and information with wider audiences and quickly began to focus on digitization. I’ve spent a good part of my career photographing and digitizing collections to make them accessible to the public.

As times have changed, more and more of our history is shifting to born-digital, which adds a whole new level of challenges. But at the heart of it, I love being able to share the amazing things held within archives, special collections and museums with the general public, making these things accessible and ensuring they will be available for generations to come.

Degrees:

M.A., University of Washington, 2007, museology

Memberships:

Midwest Archives Conference

Three things people may not know about me:

I love visiting National Parks and hope to some day visit them all. Currently my favorites are Grand Teton National Park and Olympic National Park.
I foster dogs for Basset & Beagle Rescue of the Heartland.
I love Indian food.