Meet our team

Tiffany Trimmer

Executive Director 

Staff Member since June 2017

She/Her/Hers

OHP’s mission is to create, preserve, and promote oral history as a mechanism for understanding our community’s memories and shared experiences.  As Director, I’m responsible for our day-to-day preservation work which includes being a project manager for our digitization efforts, fundraising, and collaborating with Murphy Library’s Special Collections, Cataloging, and Digital Collections units to make it easier for researchers to access the parts of our collection we have donation and consent forms for.  

My job also includes a second really important component: leading OHP’s educational efforts.  In this capacity I created an upper-level oral history course where students helped me design, and launch, OHP’s new “College Life: What We Remember” oral history project, and then created a curriculum based on it for sections of FYS 100 (First Year Seminar) that I teach here at UWL.  Thinking about the most effective ways to help students learn through oral history also led me to collaborate with OHP’s previous Director Julie Weiskopf as guest editors on a forum of articles, “Oral History Informing World History,” in the journal World History Connected.

The other part of our educational mission involves OHP’s role as a professional development site where CASSH students build career-ready skills while helping us preserve and interpret community history.  Since starting at OHP I have mentored 24 students working for us as Digital Preservation Technicians, Copyeditors, and Web & Social Media Developers.  Working with OHP’s student employees is my favorite part of my job.

Isaac Wegner

Digital Preservation Technician

Staff Member since June 2023

Senior

Majors: History and Cultural Anthropology

Pronouns: He/Him/His

My personal research interests are rooted in community, particularly the communities of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan.  In my recent HIS 490 project I narrate communal histories defined by copper extraction, migration, and labor resistance to the hegemonic power of monopolistic mining companies. Ethnicity, gender, and class defined the way folks worked, lived, and died together in the Keweenaw. In turn, they defined how communities like Calumet, Michigan were broken apart during periods of labor resistance and corporate oppression. 

Like the Keweenaw, La Crosse has been defined by migration as both a river town and a college town. At OHP, much of my work revolves around transcribing and interpreting oral histories from alumni and emeritus professors while contextualizing them with information gathered from UWL’s archives and related oral histories. This process requires me to make indexes (subject matter guides) and extensive footnotes in our transcripts to help researchers, students, and the general public easily understand the nuance of each oral history. For example, Dr. James Parker’s oral histories dive into the founding of the Office of Minority Affairs (now the Office of Multicultural Student Services) in the 1970s and civil rights work done on campus during the late 20th century. While working on Dr. Parker’s recordings, I listened to two related oral histories from OHP’s Centennial Project (dedicated to the 100th anniversary of UWL’s founding), that discussed student perspectives on civil rights and discrimination on campus from the 1960s - 1990s. I used these histories to create course content (blogs, Canvas pages) that helps contextualize the history of race relations and inclusivity and UW-La Crosse. For me, sharing these histories with first-year students is an important first step for OHP to publicize its rich oral history collections. OHP can become a bulwark of collective memory for the greater La Crosse area. Our work transcribing, indexing, digitizing, and publishing short form blog content highlighting some of our holdings helps OHP meet its mission as a public-facing institution that preserves community history.

As a history major and future graduate student in history, the work I have done for OHP has honed my craft as a historian and an educator. I can present key historical narratives within our oral history collections to a variety of audiences creating concise connections between our shared experiences of La Crosse as a college town and its position as a historical space. As a result, I have learned to write history for, and discuss history with, multiple audiences in the form of canvas course materials and public blog content created for first year seminar students, professional historians, and the general public. 

Julia Milne

Project Manager & Digital Preservation Technician

Staff Member since November 2021

Senior

Major: Theatre Arts: Stage Management

Minors: Theatre Arts: Arts Administration and Theatre Arts: Design/Technical

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

I create indexes (subject matter guides), transcribe oral histories, conduct archival research, and digitize interviews in our collection that are currently only available on cassette tape.  The work I do at OHP helps ensure our collection is preserved for future researchers, and provides necessary contextualization so they can better understand the oral histories they are engaging with.  As Project Manager, I work closely with our Executive Director to create processes that improve our workflow for tasks like digitization, transcription, blog post production, and electronic file archiving.  In this role, I help OHP think about what work needs to be accomplished in order to complete projects and how those projects fit within our program’s mission.  During my time at OHP, I have also helped create and lead training sessions with university faculty and students about how to conduct oral history interviews, have embedded in two sections of UWL’s FYS 100 (First Year Seminar) as a research assistant to support first-time oral history users, and conducted collection research to assist OHP in making ethical judgments about interview access.

As an arts administrator, working for OHP has provided me invaluable skills I will take with me into my professional career.  Working with oral histories has taught me how to present an evidence synthesis appropriate for a specific audience, how to express my thoughts succinctly, and how to work through difficult situations that result in a productive outcome.  My time at OHP has helped me to become a better communicator, storyteller, and problem solver. 

Kellen Szumski

Digital Preservation Technician

Staff Member since September 2023

Senior

Broadfield Social Studies, History Concentration

While on the job, I create and edit oral history transcripts and indexes (subject matter guides), search for primary sources to contextualize interviews in our collection, and turn cassette recordings into digital files. Working at OHP requires lots of flexibility and adaptability, as one second I’m digging through newspaper articles relating to UWL’s history and the next I’m acting in a promotional video for a fundraiser! My experiences at OHP have helped me develop accountability, honed my researching skills, and bettered my ability to collaborate with coworkers to solve problems. OHP has also given me the opportunity to practice my teaching skills while serving as an embedded research assistant in a section of UWL’s FYS 100 (First Year Seminar) to support first-time oral history users and advise them as they worked on their final project proposals.

Olivia Steil

Website and Social Media Developer

Staff Member since June 2023

Junior

Major: Communication Studies: Organizational and Professional Communication

Minor: Communication Studies: Digital Media Studies and Design

She/her/hers

I was hired by OHP to assist with the development of the “College Life: What We Remember” project. Since then, I have worked on creating and designing OHP’s website, embedding audio clips, and publishing blog posts. To accomplish this, I also work on editing audios and keeping our production files organized. I have really enjoyed having a role in the process of publicizing our work and gaining experience in the world of web design. Also, from my time at OHP, I have been able to greatly expand on my professional communication skills, as I engage in weekly meetings about the progression of my work.

I am very passionate about my minor, Digital Media Studies and Design. I love the challenge and practice of designing a website and having a role in deciding how our project will be presented to the public. The interviews from “College Life: What We Remember” are incredible and provide such valuable information for students, faculty, and those who care about UWL. It’s important to me to find ways to connect the gap between our work and the public, so that this piece of UWL’s history can be enjoyed by all. I have been happy and excited to create an online space to accomplish this goal.

OHP has also been a great space for the development of professional skills. The “College Life: What We Remember” project is the first to be produced and publicized by OHP in this way. There is no preexisting template for us to follow and we’ve all had to practice a great deal of adaptability as we move forward. One of the goals of OHP’s College Life project is to eventually create individual profiles for each interviewee on our website. Last summer, I played with designing these profiles, finding what looked and functioned best to fit OHP’s needs and wants. For example, we wanted to implement the images given to us by a couple of interviewees on their profiles in the form of a slideshow. The images were all different sizes, so I created multiple different slideshows experimenting with different methods of resizing and cropping the images to see what version looked best. This process required great adaptability, as I often changed directions, edited my work, restarted certain aspects, and received constructive feedback.

Shaylin Crack

Digital Preservation Technician

Staff Member since June 2023

Senior

Major: History: Public & Policy Emphasis

Minor: Professional & Technical Writing

I joined OHP to work on our “College Life: What We Remember” project.  I make transcripts, indexes (subject matter guides), and blog posts for our latest collection of interviews with UW-La Crosse alumni. I also conduct research in Murphy Library’s Digital Collections and in Special Collections (campus archives) to help contextualize oral history interviews.  Examples of recent research projects have included figuring out the timeline for the appearance of the blue emergency lights on campus and how campus safety concerns changed over the 20th - 21st centuries, and what kinds of primary sources exist to document how UWL professors create learning environments for their students. The information I gather and analyze about topics like these helps my coworkers and me create transcript footnotes and blog posts that enhance the “College Life” oral histories.

I’m also an embedded research assistant for OHP’s version of FYS 100 (First Year Seminar).  Helping to create teaching materials that support the FYS students and working with them in the classroom connects to many of the tasks we do as preservation techs at OHP.  In Summer 2023, we analyzed the “College Life” oral histories to locate relevant interview content connected to FYS course themes including college studentness, involvement, and career readiness. Then, in Fall 2023 we met with FYS students in the classroom and helped them figure out what kind of information they needed to find for their final projects. We then conducted research in Digital Collections to provide them with additional information they could use as primary sources.  Working collaboratively to come up with ideas and researching information are a few of the tasks we do as preservation techs that can be seen through working with first-year seminar students.