Hi all! I’m Kelsey Marie Rogers. I'm a naturalist with the Cleveland Metroparks where I get to lead hikes looking for fungi, create programs on the delightful lives of detritivores, and provide curious folks with resources and information on the wonderful and weird natural world around them.

Although I've spent the past few years in Ohio, I’m originally from the Missouri Ozarks where my love for digital cultural heritage began. My rural middle school received a grant that gave every student access to a computer, and with it, the internet. We now had access to a whole new world. This early experience emphasized the power that digital access to cultural heritage resources can have. Even museum and library websites in the early 2000's gave us inspiring and engaging access to resources we otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to.

After I graduated with a BA in Anthropology from the University of Missouri, I gained experience at a variety of cultural and natural heritage institutions across Ohio and earned my MLIS degree with a focus on digital LAMs (Libraries, Archives, and Museums) at Kent State. My professional career has been particularly varied, and I wouldn't want it any other way. I've found myself at the wonderful intersection of the digital and natural, knowing both the solitary world of detailed behind-the-scenes archival and digitization work and the wetland mud-covered world of informal education.

I'm now in the greater Cleveland area, looking at urbanized life through the lens of a semi-feral rural Ozarks kid, finding nature popping up in unexpected places and realizing that the city and mother nature aren't so much separate as they are co-habitants. Mushrooms pop up in golf courses, in tree lawns, in parking lots. Birds nest in strip malls. Cormorants catch catfish in the shadow of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I want to create and share tools for discovery. Those tools can be the digital or physical such as websites and books. But they can also be interpersonal, ways of using the senses, of seeing and slowing down, of learning to be aware of the body, learning the stories of the commonplace, awakening wonder and creativity in all ages.

If you want help creating, managing, and sharing your stories, the stories of your collection, and providing access to heritage and resources in engaging and innovative ways in both the digital, physical, and interpersonal worlds, drop me a line at kelsey@kelseymarierogers.com. From natural history to digital humanities, I would love to help you bring your institution's resources to life.

Header images from: Toadstools, mushrooms, fungi, edible and poisonous. Indianapolis, The Bowen-Merrill Company [c1902]. Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library