Abby Edgecumbe
Photo of Abby Edgecumbe
My name is Abby Edgecumbe, and I started at SLIS in Fall 2025. I am in the libraries/librarianship concentration, and I’m interested in both public and academic libraries. Currently, I work at the Schlesinger Library, which is a part of the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, as a Reading Room Assistant. I’m originally from Connecticut, and I got my undergrad in California. I am passionate about the role of LIS in responding to climate change and fostering community resilience. Before coming to SLIS, I earned an MA in Literature from UMASS Amherst, during which I worked at the local public library. Now, I live in Brookline and spend all my money at the Brookline Booksmith. Outside of school and work, I love to read, go on walks, and play mahjong!
Entries by Abby Edgecumbe
The end of the 2025-2026 school year is upon us! This milestone means different things to all of us in the SLIS community– graduation, or a few classes added towards that goal. For me, it marks my official halfway-point through the program. Wild, right? Time has flown. As you all may remember, I am in the Libraries/Librarianship track, so in honor of passing “Go,” I decided to share with you all what my program has looked like, and how I’m planning to finish out my last year. The MLIS has a selection of courses that are required for everyone, that many people take– either in bulk or at least one or two– in their first semester. These classes are LIS 407 Information Services, Behaviors, and Ethics, LIS 415 Information Organization, and LIS 488 Technology for Information Professionals. As a full-time student, I take 3 courses per semester, and those were the three I took in my first term. LIS 407 introduced me to library theory and presented some of the challenges librarians can face and…
This week is National Library Week! National Library Week is sponsored by the ALA, and each year comes with a theme. This year, the theme is “Find Your Joy.” In honor of finding my library joy, I’m going to share a few joyful experiences I’ve had in the MLIS and in libraries so far this year. In October last year, I saw a showing of The Librarians at the Brattle Theater, as a part of the Boston Globe GlobeDocs film festival. The documentary follows a handful of school librarians in the American South as they fight against book bans and for the freedom to read. The movie was absolutely incredible, and I really recommend it. The most joyful part of that experience was before the showing, when the organizers of GlobeDocs came out and asked all the librarians in the audience to stand up. Although I’m technically still in training, I did stand, and I felt so honored to be among so many amazing librarians in that audience. The picture to the left is me…
Going to Simmons ends up involving a lot more than going to school. While yes, I go to class and do homework and stress about final projects, the Simmons equation is more complicated. Kind of like an upper-division math class. Making and maintaining friendships, navigating the city, searching for work, networking, hobbies; all these things merge and form this crazy equation with square roots, imaginary numbers, exponents. And coming from a girl who hasn’t taken nary a lower-division math class in over seven-ish years, that’s saying something. For my first post on the Snippets, I thought I’d walk you through a day of me trying to solve that equation. The day I’m writing this, a Thursday, begins at the very unpleasant hour of 5:30am (if you are a recovering 11am waker-upper, you will understand the significance of this for me). On Thursdays, I work four hours at my job at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, beginning at 9am. Turns out, I like a morning, so I get up with enough hours to shower, watch a…
