Sarah Tew is a familiar face with a new job at Smathers Libraries. Working as Project Coordinator for the US Caribbean & Florida Digital Newspaper Project since 2022, she will move into her new role as Curator of the Harold and Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection in May.
She holds a master’s degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge from the University of Bologna. Previously, she worked at the University of Pennsylvania Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary. Currently, she leads the History of Papyrology project at the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri at UC Berkeley Libraries.
Her research interests include knowledge compilation, transformation, preservation and exchange with an emphasis on historiography, compendiums, digital editions and the data behind descriptions of rare books.
Sarah Tew believes that students, instructors, and researchers benefit from in-person instruction with rare books and digital humanities projects utilizing rare books. Seeing and handling rare materials safely is exciting, promotes responsibility for cultural heritage and spotlights the varied and vital roles of humans in the knowledge ecosystem. Digital humanities instruction with rare books promotes critical thinking about how knowledge is made through hands-on learning where students transform and create knowledge themselves.
In an increasingly digital world propelled by rapidly changing technology, it is even more vital to understand how the choices we make as humans, including the technologies we use and develop, affect our understanding of knowledge. The breadth of the Harold and Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection, coupled with faculty expertise across departments, offers extraordinary opportunities to understand what, why and how we know.
As the Rare Books Curator, Sarah Tew seeks to facilitate active learning while keeping collections safe, advance learning by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among students, faculty, and staff across the UF campus, and support and inspire others to explore, pursue, and create knowledge through rare books.