Gretchen Neidhardt joined the Galter team in January as our new Metadata and Digital Projects Librarian in the Collection Management and Metadata Services department. Gretchen has an MLIS from the University of Missouri, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago and received a Certificate in Special Collections from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gretchen most recently worked at the Chicago History Museum as Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, where she focused on making the museum’s unique collections discoverable through the creation and maintenance of metadata. Her research and work have centered around the deliberate assessment of current and legacy language as it applies to cataloging and librarianship and to institute critical cataloging procedures and policies to identify harmful language and highlight diverse voices. 

Gretchen is an active member of the Chicago Collections Consortium and the Chicago Area Archivists, where she serves on the anti-racism working group, and most recently has worked on their goal of advocating for greater preservation, transparency and access around records that document and affect the lives of people of color in the Chicago area. She is passionate about bringing ideas of critical theory to librarianship by examining the use of current information systems and further establishing metadata as a means to address systemic biases. Gretchen is looking forward to cultivating collaborations within the medical community to maintain accuracy of author contributions and to identify information gaps and cases of misrepresentation. She will be supporting resource discovery through her work in cataloging and metadata and will contribute to the optimization of Galter library systems. We are thrilled to have Gretchen as a part of our team and are excited for the way that her expertise will contribute to the Feinberg Community. Please help us in welcoming Gretchen to Galter Library!

You can reach her at gretchen.neidhardt@northwestern.edu or 312-503-1596. 

Berg, Jeremy; Chapman, Cathy; Neidhardt, Gretchen; Porrata, Stephanie; Young, Jennifer; and Willey, Eric, "Social Justice in Cataloging Annotated Bibliography" (2021). Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library. 141.

Chicago Municipal Records: Access and Accountability. (Oct 2021). Chicago Area Archivist’s Panel. Chicago, Illinois, United States.

• Moderated by Gretchen Neidhardt
• Featuring: Lakeidra Chavis, The Marshall Project; Emiliano Aguilar, Edward Remus and Joshua Salzmann, Northeastern Illinois University and Northwestern University; Sam Stecklow, Invisible Institute and South Side Weekly; Matt Topic, Loevy & Loevy’s Freedom of Information Act Practice

Gross, Tina; Neidhardt, Gretchen. This is the Library Now [Exhibition]. (2022). University of Massachusetts Amherst, Science and Engineering Library. Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. 

• View the entire Unseen Labor Exhibition, on display from 31, January-6 May 2022. Kardos, Ann. Unseen Labor [Exhibition]. (2022). University of Massachusetts Amherst, Science and Engineering Library. Amherst, Massachusetts, United States.