Jen Hunt is the special collections conservator at the Hesburgh Libraries and has been in her role for more than seven years. Based in the Reyniers Life Building on the north edge of campus, she tackles conservation projects in a laboratory setting repairing and preserving library collections in support of teaching and research. Through her work Jen comes in contact with a wide array of materials ranging from Knute Rockne’s chemistry workbook and gradebook to documents from the 15th century.
What do you like most about your job?
I love working with the collections. I love that I have a good blend of hands-on work as well as getting to work with people. We have amazing folks working on campus, and I get to work with all of our curators and archivists who actually know the details of the materials and what they are, where they come from, and why they’re important, so I get to share in some of that story. I can talk a lot about the physical side of the materials, but I don’t often know what they actually are or why they’re historically important. Our team here is really great to work with as well, too. We’re very collaborative.
I also get to see my work out in the library and visitors to campus get to see it, too. My job just has a lot of really nice elements that come together that make it fun. I get quiet work time, but I also get to be out there as well a little bit.
The biggest, most important thing that we do here is that we’re focused on making these collections accessible.
What makes you feel appreciated?
I love to see the collections being used, because then I feel useful. And I love to hear stories from our curators . . . or that a researcher is excited to be able to use this item that we’ve never been able to share before. For me, knowing that things I’m doing are actually helping people achieve their research goals is really satisfying.
What is an unexpected aspect of your job that people won’t get from your job title?
I probably do more paperwork than people imagine. I think folks think I’m at the bench 24/7, but there’s a lot of information that we need to capture. I do documentation and reporting for every object that comes into the lab, and that’s to make sure that I am capturing everything about that object before I treat it so that we always have a record of what it was like and what additions I’m making to it. This is really important so that researchers down the road are aware of any changes I’ve made to the original object through the course of treatment . . . it takes a lot of time with photography and narrative reports to capture that information.
[Another aspect is] negotiating all of these things with curators and making sure that I understand what their goals are for the object. I’m definitely not making those decisions by myself in a vacuum, so there’s a lot more complexity than just coming in and sitting down and doing the treatment. There’s a lot more collaboration that goes in before we get to that point.
What do you like most about working at Notre Dame?
I definitely love being on a college campus environment. There’s so much activity going on, it’s a great place for anybody who has curiosity . . . so many different people and perspectives just makes it exciting. There’s always something new that I can learn. I’ve worked for a couple of universities and I just think there’s such a good, positive can-do attitude on campus that I really appreciate.
What is something special you’ve worked on?
We have a number of a really interesting collections that are not paper based or book collections, which I find fascinating. Within our sports collection, one of my favorites is a 13-inch plastic Jackie Robinson doll with a Jackie Robinson comic book, which is super fun because it comes from a time period when materials were more ephemeral. Twentieth-century materials are generally not the same quality as medieval materials, which have clearly lasted hundreds of years.
Something like the Jackie Robinson doll captures a moment in time, and we’re using this doll to teach different perspectives about this African American baseball player. We hope to encourage students and patrons to think about the times Robinson lived in, and then consider the contemporary impact of this type of mass-produced commercial object—a toy that kids played with—I think it’s so fascinating to think of objects in that way. I love some of the more modern things for that reason, because it’s close enough history that I can kind of understand a little bit of how different those perspectives were compared to the way we think about people today.
Originally published by at ndworks.nd.edu on September 08, 2025.