How my drive to make information accessible has shaped my life
I’m obsessed with collecting and organizing.
By Andrew Walsh, as told to Haley Young
It’s really no surprise that I ended up being a librarian.
Every Christmas when I was a kid, I would painstakingly categorize all of my presents into different piles after opening them. I was obsessed with organization.
I collected everything — baseball cards, VHS tapes of soccer games I’d recorded on TV, and books — and I wanted to make sure I arranged them in a meaningful way.
I was initially drawn to libraries because of the massive amount of information they store and the way they keep it all organized and accessible.
Having a giant, physical archive is really appealing to me — it’s pretty cool to get to pore over so many different documents all in one place.
But I also love the freedom you get with a digital archive. You have almost unlimited options for organizing data, and that’s really exciting for the kid who used to make sure everything he owned was properly categorized.
After all, database design is, at its simplest, taking a collection of things and putting it together in a way that’s useful. That’s exactly what I was doing with my Christmas presents all those years ago — and it’s exactly what I’ve been doing in my career and side projects ever since.
When I first moved to Dayton from Madison, Wis., five years ago, I knew nothing about the city’s history. It was an accident that I ended up here. To be a librarian you have to be pretty flexible geographically, and I was just entering the working world, trying to get a foothold as a young professional in higher education.
It didn’t take long for my curiosity to build about Dayton’s history — how it was once an industrial powerhouse, has since lost much of that industry, and is now remaking itself with new values. I started learning as much as I could.
I began to write a book about it, called Lost Dayton, that will be published in June. And now I’m also putting the information I’ve gathered together into a companion website called Dayton Vistas.
I’ve been interested in writing and blogging in the past, but it’s been a pretty undisciplined hobby — Gignite has helped give some structure to my passion. I have a few websites that run on autopilot right now, but I’m hoping to do more with Dayton Vistas.
While I didn’t actively seek out a life in Dayton, I’m here for the long haul now. I’ve really settled in both personally and professionally.
I noticed in the beginning that a lot of people were down on their town, and it’s been exciting to see that perception shift over the years.
There’s a lot of information out there — I’ve spent time going through historic society and library archives, both physically and digitally — and I’m trying to collect it all together in one place so that it can actually have an impact.
And collecting is not only about compiling things, but also about organizing them.
As a librarian, I see the impact daily of information being organized and easily accessible, the same way I saw it when I was just a kid.
I hope that Dayton Vistas can help continue to change the perceptions people have of Dayton. A lot of initiatives are in the works to make the city nicer, and every project builds to a greater whole — the same way every piece of information I collect builds to a greater whole.
Read Next:
