Fabiola Kesselmann volunteered at the Clark Library from January 27-March 14, 2025. A recent graduate from Markgrafen Gymnasium Durlach (near Karlsruhe, Germany), she is taking a gap year that makes us all jealous. Before coming to the library, she spent a few weeks in Tokyo on a Japanese language course and is soon on her way to a tour through Scotland. Fabiola regularly spent 25-30 hours each week assisting the cataloging department with various projects or accompanying the Clark librarians on visits to libraries, archives, antiquarian booksellers, and museums in the greater Los Angeles area. We asked her to write a summary of her time with us and we received this (which is lightly edited for clarity).

–Rebecca Fenning Marschall, Manuscripts & Archives Librarian
–Nina Schneider, Rare Books Librarian

For almost two months I interned at the Clark Library to get an impression of the life as a rare book librarian. While this provided a lot of interesting and informative knowledge about this job, I was also able to get to know other things I didn’t think I would experience beforehand.

As the Clark Library didn’t have a head librarian while I was there, Nina and Becky shared this position and while this was certainly a lot of extra work [for them], it was also a great insight for me. I was allowed to attend a presentation of one of the candidates, the following questions and I learned about all the layers of bureaucracy one has to go through at public institutions like UCLA.
Even though Nina and Becky were so busy with their work, they always cared about my well-being, found interesting tasks and thought about many things to make my time in LA and at the Clark as enjoyable as it was.

The day I arrived, they presented me a sheet full of possible field trips and tasks to do. Once the process of emailing people they knew in the book and archive world was done, we started visiting some amazing places. These trips turned into fun and informative bonding activities for the Clark staff. It was wonderful seeing all the different work spaces, archiving methods, storing places and to hear about the work of the people. Some of them had previously worked at the Clark so there were interesting catch-ups, everybody could relate to certain issues and it was a one-of-a-kind chance for me to get a realistic portrait of how it is to work in this field. To hear not only the positive aspects but also some of the challenges made everything so real that it somehow made these jobs even more attractive. It didn’t feel like a commercial tour, which was very special to me. Also there were the wonderful materials we got to see; beautiful old books and manuscripts, great architecture and the endless fascinating depths of vaults and archives, rooms full of treasures and the people handling them, full of extra knowledge and admiration for these rare materials.

I got to experience the back doors, offices and work spaces of famous institutions in LA such as the Getty Research Institute and the Huntington Library. I had the privilege to see the archive of the Japanese American Museum, even though it’s currently closed to the public because of renovation work. We saw beautiful Polish movie posters at the Art Center in Pasadena, as well as their student press [at the Hoffmitz-Milken Center of Typography]. To learn about all the opportunities students in LA have (to work with old authentic materials and experiment with letter presses, type and printing) was not just interesting but admirable.

One day, the Guild of Bookworkers asked for a tour and requested a few books, so Nina and I spent a day pulling these books, as well as others for which we created little notes and explanations on why we pulled them. That was a very interesting process because I got to see some amazing work and got a more detailed insight on them. I helped set up the books and was allowed to listen to the tour, which was great as I experienced a more official approach on the material and the history of the building than before. [Note: Fabiola did more than listen to the tour, she helped explain one of Veronika Schapers’s books which was pulled for the tour.]

Another great opportunity was to meet the people of the Guild as they were all people working with books and I had some interesting conversations. Jocelyn Pederson even invited us to come to Occidental College, where she showed us their press and we were able to visit their Special Collections archive.

Other days I spent making archival boxes for several books that needed them, which was another nice opportunity to look at some of the amazing books in the Clark Library’s possession.

All in all I had a wonderful time with lovely people who made sure I felt at home, despite the language barrier and my very limited knowledge and skills. I experienced cataloguing, research, archival processes, sorting and handling different materials. I got an insight in the whole wide world of rare books and special collections. I met many interesting people, all passionate about their work, who care about making valuable, old, and fragile objects accessible for everyone who might be interested in them.

I am so thankful that I could experience all of this and that everybody made such an effort to make the best out of my time in LA and at the Clark.