LEWISTON – Katherine A. Stefko is the new director of archives and special collections at Bates College.

Stefko, who started at Bates on Oct. 1, previously worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the museum.

She managed an archives project to bring the museum’s manuscripts and institutional records into an integrated program of processing and digitization, including publication on the World Wide Web.

At Bates, she directs the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, and oversees the college’s archival and special collections programs.

Passionate about history, Stefko believes that its study can’t be divorced from the photos, papers and recordings that history leaves behind – “especially now, when people are so tied to this presumption that if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.”

Previously, Stefko worked as information coordinator at the Property Information Resource Center at Harvard University, as a resident fellow at the Cambridge Historical Society and as an intern and consultant for the Visual Resources Collection of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard.

Stefko is a Cleveland native.

She has an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, a master’s degree in art history from University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in library and information science from Simmons College.