“WHAT IS PAST
IS PROLOGUE”

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Gabrielle Roth is the Collections Management Archivist for the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors in Boston, Massachusetts. In this role she is responsible for overseeing the preservation, capture, access, growth, control and promotion of the Center’s archival collections. Gabrielle is deeply committed to ethical and sustainable collection development, access, and preservation; implementing active collecting policies around current events, updating processing procedures to replace restrictions with harm statements and using inclusive descriptive vocabularies. This past year, she successfully managed the move and care of the JHC’s collection during a year-long renovation project separating staff from resources onsite without a halt in reference services and archival processes.

Gabrielle received her Masters of Information Studies (MSIS) the University of Texas at Austin, focusing in archives and preservation, records management, and museum studies. She has a background in fine arts, earning a BFA in Sculpture from California State University at Long Beach in 2011 and a MFA in Sculpture from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2015. Her early career was rooted in the practices of preservation framing and design administration. However, it was a desire to further care for primary source materials and capture unheard voices that led Gabrielle to the archives. 

“As an archivist, it is important to foster a space that supports and engages with a diverse cohort of users across communities and the institution in both physical and digital environments.”