When Catherine Popovitch was a student at Normal Community West High School, she imagined herself someday following in the footsteps of the history and social science teachers she admired.
But as an undergraduate student at Millikin University in Decatur, Popovitch quickly learned while student teaching that the profession wasn't for her.
It took a pair of internships at Illinois State University's Milner Library for Popovitch to really find her niche.
Now, after a decade with the Illinois State Archives, the Twin City native is at the helm of the office tasked with the safekeeping of more than 200 million records.
Popovitch started with the Springfield-based agency as an intern in 2014 and worked in every section of the Archives before being named director in January.
"No two days are the same here. I've found that in every position that I've been in here: One day you can be processing records, really just in your world, digging, going down a rabbit hole in a box of records and then the next day, you might be working with researchers all day." Popovitch said. "That's another thing that I'm really excited to continue to be able to do — just have that variety from day-to-day."
Popovitch credits a history teacher at Normal West, Tracy Freeman, with growing her love of history — even if she went on to find that teaching wasn't her strong suit.
"She was a great teacher, just fostering that curiosity and wanting to learn more. That's really what I remember about her classes," Popovitch said.
That passion for history led Popovitch to study the subject at Millikin. While student teaching taught her that something else would better suit her for work, Popovitch said she found fulfilment in working with students one-on-one.
"That's a lot of what we do as archivists. We work with researchers who have research needs. We have folks coming in who really want to learn more about their family, more about the history of the state. Maybe they're wanting to do some legal research, so we work with them on an individual basis," she said. "I really like that component of it."
After finishing her degree in history, Popovitch commuted to Urbana from Bloomington to obtain a master's in library science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While in that program, she ended up working at ISU's Milner Library.
"I got a lot of good experience there working with their reference unit, being able to do behind-the-scenes stuff with them and then with Special Collections, being able to process some of their records," Popovitch said in an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas. "It was a really good introduction into the field — that was really my first hands-on experience doing archival work."
Popovitch is just the sixth director of the Illinois State Archives. She succeeds Dave Joens, who led the agency for two decades. Joens was the first director to push for increased digitization of records and to implement an online search tool. Popovitch said that steady march toward modernization is one she plans to continue as director.
Among the agency's next projects is a digital preservation platform. The State Archives is working on the initiative with the Illinois State Library, housed under the Archives' sister agency, the Office of the Secretary of State.
"We will finally be able to take digital records from agencies. Currently we only take hard copy — paper, photographs, microfilm, things like that. This will allow us to take all of those born-digital records that may still be with an agency and then we can make those accessible," Popovitch said. "We have some regional facilities as well and I'm looking for ways that we can incorporate those collections into our digital preservation platform."
Popovitch says Joens was a mentor to her in her career. In addition to his knowledge, Popovitch said she hopes her longevity at the helm of the State Archives is as lengthy as his was.
"I've got a couple of decades left in me," she joked. "That is definitely my plan. I'd like to stay here, I'd like to keep moving us forward. I have no intention of leaving."
