Staff Spotlight: Michelle Light
Every day UNLV Libraries’ new director of Special Collections, Michelle Light, comes to work, it’s a bit of a homecoming. A Las Vegas native, Light has not only seen the transformation of the city, she has spent many years living it. Although her studies and career initially took her far from our city, Light could not stay away from her life’s calling to collect and preserve Southern Nevada’s history.
Light began her work in libraries as a graduate student of history at University of Michigan and quickly realized she stood at the forefront of a major academic revolution. “I took a job in Michigan’s digital library right in the early days of the World Wide Web,” Light said. “I realized how digitization of key historical texts and images would fundamentally transform scholarship—that is, how knowledge might be discovered, created and shared. I wanted to be a part of that.”