Meet…
12 June 2009
MARA Student Deborah Bahn Lands Archivist Position
Enrolling in the Master of Archives and Records Administration (MARA) degree program helped Deborah Bahn land a position as a public records archivist at the Washington State Archives.
Bahn is part of the first cohort of MARA students who started coursework for the three-year program in Fall 2008. She believes that the MARA program's focus on electronic records management gave her the edge in landing the job.
Bahn's duties include managing electronic records transfers by coordinating everyone involved, from state and local government agencies to her fellow team members. She also provides online reference services to patrons through the State's digital archives website 
, and she conducts workshops on how to conduct research on the website. It provides online access to the State's collection of more than 80 million digitized documents.
“It's an exciting place to work because we are pioneers in the preservation of electronic records,” Bahn said. “This allows me, along with my technology team members, to be very creative.”
In her first six months on the job, Bahn played a significant part in the team's progress to expand the scope and depth of records available online. The State website has won several awards from Family Tree Magazine for its genealogy resources, and now is adding more city ordinances and minutes from government meetings, with plans to add executive orders from the governor's office. Bahn's particularly looking forward to one day adding legislative records, an area of focus for her when she studied Public History.
Bahn transitioned into archival work mid-career after working for years as an accountant. When her youngest son started high school, she decided that she wanted to be “engaged in a field that I love.” So Bahn studied history and earned a Masters in Public History from Cal State Sacramento. Bahn toured archives around the nation while writing her senior thesis and fell in love with the profession, interning for two years at the California State Archives after graduation.
She then enrolled in our School's MLIS program with the intention of following the Archives Studies specialization. But when SLIS announced the new MARA program, she realized it would be a better fit for her plans to continue as a public records archivist.
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