By Paul Black
SPRINGFIELD – A Wisconsin native with nearly 12 years’ experience in museum and collections management has been selected as the new archivist for the Illinois Great Rivers Conference and MacMurray College.
Lynne Phillips of Appleton, Wis., was selected from a field of 35 candidates for the shared position between the conference and college. The recommendation was forwarded to the Conference Commission on Archives and History which affirmed the decision at its Feb. 13 meeting. Phillips begins work at MacMurray’s Pfeiffer Library – the location of the Conference Archives – on March 1.
Phillips succeeds Lauretta Scheller, who retired after 14 years of service to the Conference Dec. 31.
One of the major projects for the Conference Archives will be the start of a three-year digitization project, aimed at bringing many of the most requested items in the collection online. The Conference has allocated $20,000 in additional funds in 2018, and proposed budgets for 2019 and 2020 to underwrite funding for this project.
“Museum collections have been my passion and career for 15 years, starting with volunteering, to my Museum Studies degree to the workplace,” Phillips said. “These institutions have large archival collections and I have managed their care, storage and organization. I also provided access, which included seeing to research and reproduction requests, helping and supervising researchers and giving people behind-the-scenes tours.”
For eight years, Phillips was collections manager of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Md., where she supervised interns and participated in developing a five-year strategic plan. She has curated exhibits on the U.S.S. Hornet, where she curated exhibits on World War I, baseball in the Navy, NASA and the Navy at the Hornet. She also was an associate registrar for three years at the Walt Disney Family Foundation where she worked with a team in assembling a collections department and writing a collections policy for the Walt Disney Family Museum.
A graduate of Ripon College, where her great grandfather was president with a B.A. in biology and French, she also has a master’s degree and was a Ph.D. candidate in physiology at the University of Texas-Houston School of Biomedical Sciences; and additional master’s degrees in history from the University of Texas-Clear Lake and in museum studies from John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, Calif.