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Max Daniel was starting his dissertation research on Sephardic Jews in America, and worrying about finding enough material, when the UCLA Library’s Center for Primary Research and Training (CFPRT) hired him to process a large, unprocessed archive from a 100-year-old Sephardic congregation in Westwood. It’s the kind of perfectly timed opportunity researchers dream of.
“It was amazing being in on the ground floor of working with an archive about an area of American Jewish history very little had been written about, that was both central to the core of my dissertation, and part of my own family background,” said Daniel, who earned his PhD in 2022.
Not only did Daniel’s work with CFPRT in 2018 and 2019 provide him with the core material for a prize-winning thesis, his meticulous work processing and creating a finding aid for the materials—including more than 53 boxes, cartons, shoeboxes, and tubes—made the collection accessible to the UCLA community and the public.
Jet Jacobs, who is based in UCLA Library Special Collections and oversees CFPRT, said this mutually advantageous collaboration between scholars and the Library was the main impetus for establishing the program in 2004. The initiative was made possible thanks to generous support from The Ahmanson Foundation and has been instrumental in helping the Library process its growing backlog of collections.
“This innovative program connects UCLA scholars with cultural heritage materials relevant to their research, and these scholars use their unique subject and language knowledge to process and describe collections that might otherwise remain unknown and underutilized,” noted Jacobs, the head of public services, outreach, and community engagement in LSC.
“This is hugely beneficial for the Library, while the scholars gain first-hand experience working with professional archivists and interpreting primary sources, and the opportunity to apply this original research to their thesis and dissertations,” she said.
For Daniel the experience was rewarding from several perspectives. To his surprise, he found material in the archive related to his family as well as essays his thesis supervisor had written as a teenager. The highlight, however, was hearing from students and researchers who consulted his finding aid for their own research.
Currently the Public Historian and Jewish Heritage Collection coordinator at Special Collections in the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston, Daniel said his CFPRT training was also fundamental to gaining this role.
“There’s just no way I’d be where I am right now without my experience in CFPRT,” he said.
This sentiment is echoed by CFRPT scholars from throughout the program’s 20 year-history. At the same time Daniel was working on the Sephardic materials, Mario Gallardo processed the papers of Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health and Professor of Pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Gallardo described CFRPT as “a lifeline that let me continue schooling and develop a network of mentors and connections that allowed me to climb from one institution to the next.”
“As a first-generation college graduate from a family of Mexican immigrants, graduate school was uncertain,” he said.
"If not for the CFPRT program and the influences and connections it brought me, I would have dropped out of my master's program at UCLA within the first quarter.”
Gallardo says his experience with CFPRT set him on the path to find roles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Library Digital Library Program, and the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Gallardo is currently an emergency preparedness consultant working for the California State Library's "Ready—or Not" Cultural Heritage Disaster Preparedness Project, assisting historical and cultural organizations’ care for their collections and preparing for disasters.
Timothy Holland, an early CFPRT scholar joined the program in 2005. He says the program came at a crucial time in his and his colleagues’ academic careers as they were figuring out where their professional lives were headed.
“We received incredible library and archival training and the experience of working at a cutting-edge library in a renowned, world class institution, so it’s not surprising that many of us went on to have real success,” he said. “My experience was incredibly positive, I met so many interesting people and the program really demystified archival research for me.”
Holland, who recently published The Traces of Jacques Derrida’s Cinema(opens in a new tab) (Oxford Univ. Press, 2024), is now an assistant professor at Emory University.
A recent CFPRT scholar, Maggie Tarmey, is bringing the skills he learned back to the UCLA community as the librarian for Geography, Maps, and Economics where he manages the Henry J. Bruman Maps collection of historical and contemporary maps from around the globe.
“During my time as a CFPRT Scholar, I discovered my passion for outreach and honed crucial skills that I now use daily in my role as a librarian at UCLA,” he said. “These experiences gave me the confidence to dream big and implement new approaches in my work.”
