In our newest Getting to Know the Center, we’re highlighting some of the incredible people, projects, and resources in Countway's Center for the History of Medicine.
This month, meet the Center's Center's innovative Collections Services Archivist, Charlotte Lellman, MS!
Charlotte Lellman is Countway’s Center for the History of Medicine Collections Services Archivist, which includes managing the Collections Services group. She is responsible for ensuring that collections are discoverable by library users. Her role includes working with metadata from a single item to the entire catalog in a variety of systems. Together, the Collections Services team improves access to collections, both by making new catalog records, finding aids, and digitized material available, and by developing practices to address metadata challenges, such as updating older metadata to make it more accurate and useful or describing born-digital archival material.
The way we describe collections – in our catalog, in our finding aids, in digital object metadata -- conveys critical contextual information to users. It’s important that we use language that is clear, accurate, consistent, humanizing, and that we provide transparency about our descriptive choices. In 2020, Charlotte was part of the team that developed and implemented the Center’s Guidelines for Inclusive and Conscientious Description. She performed a finding aid audit to identify description in need of improvement, and remediated more than 20 finding aids, providing context for harmful and outdated medical terminology, among other changes. The guidelines are reviewed and updated annually, and they continually inform processing and cataloging decisions.
Before becoming the Collections Services Archivist, Charlotte was the Center’s Processing Archivist. Before that, she worked as the Archival Processing Assistant at the Mary Baker Eddy Library. Charlotte earned her MLIS with a concentration in archives management in 2018. Her bachelor’s degree is in French Language and Literature from Haverford College. Her interest in the archives field developed during her time using 18th century Parisian police reports for her undergraduate thesis research.
Charlotte’s professional services include a three-year term on the Newsletter Committee for New England Archivists (2020-2023) and membership on the Program Committee for the (canceled) April 2020 annual meeting of that organization. For 2025, she is chairing the Local Arrangements Committee for the Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences annual meeting, which will be hosted by Harvard Medical School.
Outside of work, Charlotte is a competitive cyclist. She also enjoys running and cross-country skiing, which bring her to the most beautiful places in New England.