In addition to both of those duties and her council position at the SAA, Sniffin-Marinoff serves on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Archives Advisory Committee and the International Council on Archives.

She is also the former president of the New England Archivists association, a group which organizes conferences and education opportunities for archivists.

Sniffin-Marinoff graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University before receiving a master’s in history and a certificate in the management of archives from New York University. Between 1980 and 1994, she worked at Simmons College, first as an archivist and later as an instructor at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Before starting at Radcliffe, Sniffin-Marinoff was the head of the Institute of Archives and Special Collections at MIT.

Lawson, who studied under her for several years as a graduate student, calls Sniffin-Marinoff a “professional mentor.”

“I think if you had a room of New England archivists, and asked who considers her a mentor, probably 75 percent of the people who know her would raise their hand,” she said.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.