Polly Darnell

Polly C. Darnell is currently the Archivist and Librarian at the Shelburne Museum, a diverse collection of art, artifacts, and architecture from the 18th through the 21st century in Shelburne, Vermont. She was hired to establish the archives in 1995, as the museum prepared for its 50th anniversary. Between 1980 and joining the Shelburne Museum, she ran the research center of the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, whose local history collection was intensively used by Middlebury College, as well as members of the public.

Darnell has taught workshops for SAA, New England Archivists, New England Association of City and Town Clerks, Vermont Historical Records Advisory Board, and New York State's Documentary Heritage Program and taught a course for the Sheldon Museum on doing historical research. Further, she does private consulting for archival institutions and presents brief programs about archives management to a wide range of organizations. She contributed two chapters to the upcoming SAA Manual on Museum Archives and is co-author of a book based on a collection of drawings at the Sheldon Museum: Visual Mechanic Knowledge: The Workshop Drawings of Isaac E. Markham (795-1825) New England Mechanic, published by the American philosophical Society in 2010.

Polly has a BA in American History from Goddard College; and an MLS from the University at Albany, State University of New York.