Forgotten Industries // Le Blog // Entry 007 // FI-MTM-007
Adapted from the personal statement I submitted with my application to Dominican University's MLIS program on 2026-09-30. The parts addressed to the admissions office have been rewritten so it stands on its own; the rest is as sent. — Le Sauvegarder
Around 2015 I bought a CaseLabs computer case, the high-water mark of the custom PC world I was part of at the time. After my father died of an overdose, it went into storage with everything else I could not face. It stayed there for over a decade. When I finally opened it again this year, I found that I did not want to build anything. I wanted to know what was there, where it had come from, and how to keep it from being lost again.
The years in between were a reconstruction. I started over at an opioid treatment clinic, the only place offering that care for a hundred miles, where I learned about patient relationships, boundaries, and how thin the line between recovery and loss can be. The day I administered naloxone to a man overdosing in his car, I started asking myself how much I could actually do for another person. If I was going back to school after ten years away, I decided, I should aim as high as I could. I earned a degree in biological sciences from Arizona State University and was admitted to medical school at the University of Kansas.
I completed my first year there, and somewhere in it I realized that I was no longer the person who had set out to become a physician. That person wanted to prove he could do the hardest, most selfless thing available. The person I had become had rebuilt his life around something quieter: care, attention, and the long work of putting things in order. Leaving was not a retreat from service. It was an honest reading of who I am now.
What I did next showed me where that pointed. Over four weeks, working with a collaborator, I designed L'Archive, the working digital archive at forgotten-industries.net, and built it full stack: a static site generated from durable source files, holding records of recovered machines and parts, technical notes, a provenance page, and a public source trail. Every item carries a classification, a history, and a reason for being kept. While building it I kept running into the questions this field exists to answer: what is worth keeping, how you establish where something came from, and how you make a record findable by someone who will never meet you. I want to answer those questions with training, not instinct.
That is why archival studies and digital curation read to me as a fit, not a fallback. They keep what I love about science — evidence, method, rigor — and join it to what I value now: stewardship, provenance, and thinking in decades rather than semesters. My scientific training has not gone anywhere. This year I became a co-author on a peer-reviewed article in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, and I want to bring that same discipline to the records that research, institutions, and ordinary lives leave behind.
What I want from graduate school is a grounding in appraisal and archival theory, in description standards, and in digital preservation practice, along with the professional judgment to apply them to collections that are not my own. After that, I want to work where science and memory meet: in scientific and medical archives and research data curation, and in digital curation, where the way a collection is designed and presented shapes whether anyone can use it. That last part matters to me. L'Archive is as much a work of design as of engineering, and I want a career that draws on both. In the long run, I would like to bring those skills to community and personal archives, the records of ordinary lives that no institution is collecting. I applied for the accelerated MLIS/PhD path as well, because the questions I care about most — about provenance, memory, and what we owe the records we keep — are research questions as much as practical ones.
At the top of my own archive is a line I wrote for myself: a thing documented is a thing not yet lost. I want to spend my career making that true for more than my own shelf. Contre l'oubli. Against forgetting.