Introducing the new curator

Upon Betsy’s retirement the curatorship has been assumed by Martha Mahard. Martha grew up in Sherborn and graduated from the Dover-Sherborn Regional High School with the class of 1966. She received a B.A. degree from Barnard College, Columbia University and holds an M.A. in Theatre History from Tufts University, an M.L.S. and a Doctor of Arts degree from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Her career in the Harvard University libraries included curatorial positions in the Harvard Theatre Collection (Houghton Library), the Loeb Library at the Graduate School of Design, and the Fine Arts Library. After completing her graduate education she continued her association with Simmons, teaching courses in photographic archives, preservation management, and digital preservation. In 2005 she retired from Harvard and became a full-time Professor of Practice at Simmons. In 2009 she was the principal investigator for an IMLS grant which supported the development of a new program in cultural heritage informatics. With her colleagues she developed and taught new courses which focused on the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums, and she directed the successful Cultural Heritage concentration. In 2014 she was hired to provide an assessment of the Boston Public Library’s Print Department. Shortly before the final report of her year-long study was completed, the administration learned of two missing art works (prints by Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer). In the wake of the ensuing scandal – the works were found, mis-filed, after a box-by-box, shelf-by-shelf search – the Library hired Dr. Mahard to head up an inventory project which would allow them to finally gain intellectual access to the prints and photographs in the collection. At the completion of the project, in 2019, Mahard and her team had inventoried over 135,000 works of art on paper, posters, and drawings, and over 250,000 photographic prints and negatives in the collection. 

In addition to numerous articles and reviews, Dr. Mahard is the co-author of Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, with Ross Harvey, and Libraries, Archives and Museums: Insights from the Field, with Michele Cloonan and Peter Botticelli. 

In a recent interview Dr. Mahard said, “I look forward to working with the collection of the SHS which I’ve been involved with for more than ten years now, as a member of the Board of Directors. I am in awe of the work accomplished by Betsy and her colleagues in assembling and interpreting the many documents and museum objects in the collection.”