“I’m going to end up in a library, somewhere, somehow,” said Princeton University senior Kurt Lemai-Nguyen. It’s true — he said this while sitting in the Tiger Tea Room at Princeton University’s Firestone Library — and it’s likely to be true at some, as of yet determined, point in the future. 

Lemai-Nguyen, a comparative literature student, has become a fixture in and around Princeton University Library (PUL). In the last three years as a student, he’s held student staff positions at Firestone, Stokes, and East Asian libraries, helped facilitate the Library’s ArticleExpress and Interlibrary Loan programs, and cataloged in the Maps & Geospatial Information Center.

Most recently, over the summer, Lemai-Nguyen worked in Special Collections, a place in the Library you’d be likely to find him whether he was working there or not. 

“This summer, I got to sit in on a Rare Book School course with Associate Professor of English and African American Studies Kinohi Nishikawa and Librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections Jennifer Garcon,” Lemai-Nguyen said. “That was a great, great, great week. I got to spend time sitting in on the class, doing readings. We went to the Schomburg Center in New York, where we looked at everything from pulp novels, old manuscripts, and enslaved people’s narratives while considering questions about the network of publishers, authors, editors, readers, and the question of ‘who is in control of the stories that are told?’”  

If he isn’t sitting in on classes, he’s helping to instruct them, with a focus on how to get students interested and engaged with manuscript culture. During Wintersession in 2024, he gave talks on text recognition software and the 17th century American reverend Samuel Phillips, just as PUL Librarians held sessions on topics like woodblock prints, the Selene Photometric Stereo System, and the LGBTQ community at the University.   

“Part of my job is making sure Special Collections is welcoming and inviting, and showing how all of these alumni and collectors and booksellers are so invested in having younger generations of scholars to come and look at their materials,” Lemai-Nguyen said. 

As one of the co-leaders of the Student Friends of PUL, Lemai-Nguyen also fulfills his responsibility of helping student scholars interact with Special Collections through the events he and his co-leaders plan. In 2023, he and the Student Friends attended the Antiquarian Book Fair in New York. In other years, they’ve visited the homes of scholars and Princeton alumni to view their private collections.

“Last fall we were able to see Leonard Milberg, the namesake of the gallery in Firestone Library, at the New York Historical, which had his collection on display,” Lemai-Nguyen said. “Alumni and Friends of the Library are always inviting us to see their collections and things that are just open. And that’s part of what I love doing, making sure students know that things are open.” 

After gaining experience in a wealth of topics while working at PUL, Lemai-Nguyen has settled on pursuing librarianship, somewhere, somehow. He’s fond of library narratives and investigating how tools are built to deal with cultural heritage objects.

“All of my mentors — Ameet Doshi at Stokes, Gabriel Swift and Jenn Garcon in Special Collections, Marissa Mozek at East Asian, Anu Vedantham and especially the late Will Noel, God bless him — are all really important people to me. I am incredibly grateful to them and the amazing people at Princeton who have supported and guided me,” Lemai-Nguyen said. 

Just as his mentors come from a variety of fields and academic traditions, Lemai-Nguyen added that after graduate school he hopes to end up in a position that allows him to work with as many people as possible. Currently, he’s considering an Information Science Ph.D. program at either University of Texas at Austin or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“I want to have a very wide range of interactions. I don't want to be siloed into some genre or topic. That would be boring for me.”

Related reading: SFPUL visits Antiquarian Book Fair in Spring 2023