Jessie McCarty is a writer and database worker. They are multi-certified in cataloging and serve as the newest Digital Asset Management Librarian at James Hardie, as well as the 2026-2027 Digital Archives Consultant at the Illinois Humanities. They are the recent founder of Nua Index Agency, a database and categorization organization.

Their writing practice is influenced between archives, metadata, and narrative structures of folklore and American Southern diasporas. Jessie is the author of three hybrid works: Pretty Punks (Magra Books, 2026), Our Fairy Diary, and The Bovine Huff.

Jessie has presented data research at the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), and was accepted as a lightning talk speaker at the Ireland Oral History Network, & The Digital Repository of Ireland. They have taught creative data/cataloging at Index Space in New York City. 

Research interests include: folksonomies, gender, class, American-South, Irish/Gaeilge, community records, digital-born collections, and more. For collaborations/working groups, email them at nuaindex@proton.me

interested in learning more?

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CV

I am a 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominee and a 2025 Henry Stewart DAM Digital Future Leader, as well as a recipient of the TransTech Linux Foundation IT Associates Scholarship! My professional interests focus on ethical metadata, Indo-European (Celtic) cultural heritage, and data access. My topics of interest include: folklore, Gaeilge/English data encoding, gender, and contemporary poetry methods.


Education

University of Urbana-Champaign, 2026-2027

  • Masters of Library Science, Information Management

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2017-2022

  • Bachelor of Fine Arts, Creative Writing

The California Rare Book School, 2022-2026

  • Cataloging in DCRMB and AARC2

  • Italy International: Northern Italy

  • Librarianship in Praxis

Selected Panels

  • 2026, “Folk Data! Tools for Describing Data & Memory for Human-Centered Systems in DRI”, DPASSH (Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) Conference. Digital Ireland Repository, Belfast

  • 2026, “Folk Data! Tools for Describing Data & Memory for Human-Centered Systems”, January IIIF Online Meeting Online. 

  • 2025, “Meaningful Metadata: Sorting Data for the Online Classroom,” Human and Machine Learning, Thirty-Second International Conference on Learning. Online

  • 2024, “Queer Bibliography: Queering the Explanatory Gap,” (ed. Nike Crawford), The California Rare Book School, Los Angeles. 

Teaching, Leadership

  • 2026, “Introduction to Organizing for Artists (Painting, Writing, & New Media)” for Nua Index Agency. TBD

  • 2025, “Folk Memory: A Workshop for Writing Folklore” The Center for Fiction, New York

  • 2024, Committee Chair, Queer Bibliography, The California Rare Book School, Los Angeles. 

  • 2023 - 2024, “A List is a Letter: Techniques for Writing the Catalog Poem” The Center for Fiction

  • 2023, “An Index is a Diary: Sorting Through Your Personal Lists” Index Space, New York