Meet the UMass Communication Department Librarian – Jeremy Smith!
By Grace Keller and Gabriella Grondalski
Jeremy Smith is the liaison for Communication students at the W.E.B. Du Bois library. He grew up in Amherst and North Holyoke. After high school, he spent two years at Holyoke Community College studying video production and then transferred to UMass to study Communication. “When I was at HCC I had become interested in video production and when I came to UMass the Communication degree seemed like a natural fit.” In his final semester, he found an internship with the Media Education Foundation, the non-profit founded by professor Sut Jhally.
During his internship with Jhally, he would go through tapes, create handwritten logs, and flag clips for Jhally to pull and edit. He ended up taking on a part-time job with the foundation in order to continue with his work. Eventually, Jeremy became the office manager, where he learned how to bookkeep and use QuickBooks. He then moved over to the foundation’s production side, where he created graphics and edited films. By the end of his time at the Media Education Foundation, he was coordinating interviews, as well as producing and editing films.
As a child, Jeremy enjoyed collecting and organizing comic books, and through his work at the Media Education Foundation, he was able to practice these skills. In 2007, he went to library school at the Simmons College satellite campus in Mount Holyoke. At Simmons, one of his professors asked him if he wanted to work on a grant in UMass archives to digitize the Du Bois papers. Since taking on that role, Jeremy has been at UMass working on various projects. “I support the Communication department and am the liaison for the library. I support students with their research, do instruction sessions for classes and talk to students about how to find things in the library. I am also on various committees, and respond to emails about research.”
Currently, he is working as an archivist, sorting through the Daniel Ellsberg papers. Daniel Ellsberg worked for the government in the 1960s and leaked secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. In 2019, UMass purchased his collection of documents as well as his archives. According to Jeremy, “500 boxes were sitting in his basement in California and UMass got them.” Jeremy speaks in a history class about Ellsberg, and many students have been reaching out to him for assistance with research this semester. He also helped organize a conference about Daniel Ellsberg that will be taking place on April 30th and May 1st, all are welcome to attend.
Some research tips that Jeremy shares with students are a Communication subject guide, a distilled version of all the communication databases and resources that UMass carries. “That’s the best place to start, and from there you can make an appointment with me for any extra help with your research. It is perfectly within my job duties to meet one-on-one with students that need library help or to point them to another entity that could help them with their research.” He also shared something that many students at UMass do not realize. The library gives us access to ancestry.com, canopy, free movies, and more. There is also a database called Press Reader, which holds popular magazines and newspapers from around the world. “I encourage students to take advantage of the databases while they’re here.”
Some advice he has for Communication students is, “Don’t limit yourself to finding work directly in a communication field, because the skills you learn in the major can be applied in many different fields. Communication and understanding how people communicate is a really important skill. If you don’t find work or a job in a pure communication field right out of graduation it doesn’t mean you won’t in the future or that you shouldn’t limit yourself to thinking that way.”