A Suitcase that Opened a Career
When we last checked in with Erin Dini Davis in the fall of 2001, she was just embarking on what would be a life-changing adventure. Through an undergraduate internship at the Pattee Library, Dini Davis was the first person to open an old maroon suitcase filled with items belonging to Vivian Virtue, one of the most important Caribbean poets. Virtue, who died at age 87 in 1998, is often considered the successor to his father-in-law, Claude McKay, the Jamaican national poet. The items in the suitcase eventually became part of a Pattee Library exhibition on Virtue that Dini Davis produced to commemorate Black History Month.
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| Erin Dini Davis with husband, Ryan Davis '03 Ag, in Chicago |
At the time, Dini Davis had no idea that her work on the Virtue exhibition would translate into a career at her current job as a librarian at Utah State University.
“It was that internship, and the opportunity to work on the Virtue papers that helped me discover that I loved library work,” she says. “Before then, I knew nothing about archival research.”
An English major who graduated in 2002, Dini Davis grew up near Pittsburgh, in Greensburg, and was the daughter of two teachers. She was a book lover from an early age, thanks to weekly library visits with her mother. “I loved exploring the card catalog and searching for new books,” she recalls. “I don’t think other kids appreciated the library like I did.”
After graduating from Penn State, Dini Davis worked for a year as an editorial assistant at Penn State Press, and then made the decision to attend graduate school for a master’s in Library Science. The choice was a direct result of her internship, which she’d gotten thanks to Liz Jenkins, her academic adviser in the English department.
“When I was doing a semester abroad in England, Liz wrote to me,” Dini Davis says. “She said we need to find you some good internships to build up your résumé. She said that’s what employers are looking for—and she was absolutely right.”
Dini Davis moved to Boston to earn her master’s degree at Simmons College. After that, she relocated to Logan, Utah, so her husband, Ryan, could earn his master’s degree in forestry at Utah State. She initially found a job at the local public library as assistant library director where, among other projects, she created the library’s first Web site. She then accepted her current post as a reference librarian in engineering and physics at Utah State.
“This is a different experience for me since it’s an academic/tenure-track position,” she explains. “I like the job because there are a lot of different aspects to it. Besides working at the actual library, I give presentations to high school teachers, and I have an opportunity to teach, which I really enjoy.”
Dini Davis counts her experience at the Special Collections of Pattee library as probably the highlight of her Penn State education. “It’s really where I discovered how interesting archival research can be,” she says, “and I’m forever grateful for having the opportunity to open that suitcase.”