Tara Wood wants to know “all the things.” That’s why she enjoys working in libraries, specifically in Clemson’s Special Collections and Archives.
“The thing that’s great about working here — and it’s the truth about all librarians, I think — everybody wants to know all the stuff. We always want to know things, all kinds of stuff,” she said. “We’re all nosy that way. We all want to know all the things. And I get to go find out all the things when I want to. It’s my job — research.”
A native of Los Angeles, Wood earned her bachelor’s in history from UCLA. She had planned to go to graduate school after graduating, but was not able to, due to financial constraints at the time, so she went to work. She held several different jobs over the next 10 years, from working for an air freight company that shipped artwork around the world, to being self-employed selling men’s clothing, to working at the Disney Store, which she said was a great place to hone her customer service skills.
She did achieve her goal of earning a graduate degree — twice, actually. She earned a Ph.D. in early modern English history from Arizona State University. While she was working towards that degree, she had two children and then battled breast cancer twice, but she persevered.
Wood held teaching positions at various schools, including Creighton University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Ball State University, as she and her family moved around the country following her husband, Doug Seefeldt, and his career moves. Wood decided she wanted something more than contract faculty positions, so she decided to go back to school again to earn her Master of Library and Information Science degree, specializing in rare books and manuscripts, from Indiana University Bloomington. She drove 200 miles round-trip twice a week from their home in Muncie, Indiana, to take classes for three years, completing her degree in 2017.
In June of 2020, Seefeldt was hired to come to Clemson as the first director of the new doctoral program in digital history. Tired of being the “trailing spouse,” Wood said she wanted this move to be “as much about my career as it was about his,” so Clemson hired her to teach part-time in the Department of History and work part-time building an outreach and instruction program for Special Collections and Archives (SCA). She has since transitioned to be the full-time outreach and instruction archivist for SCA.
Wood’s primary role is to teach students and others how to use the archives in research and to raise awareness in the community about the wealth of artifacts and documents available in SCA. She has gone from teaching around 30 instruction sessions per year to well over 100, and that number keeps growing.
“All my years of teaching and the pedagogical training I have had, I’m still using it to help fellow instructors who bring their classes in,” she said. “I’m helping them craft specific assignments that use our materials, so students can learn how to use primary sources in their work.”
Partnering with Nick Richbell, head of SCA, Wood also oversees several oral history projects, including the history of women at Clemson and the veterans’ oral history project. She is also looking forward to helping spearhead a potential Clemson University Press publication on a wide-ranging history of women at Clemson.
Wood is also always thinking of ways to take SCA into the community, such as making presentations and taking exhibits to community organizations, retirement homes and at special events, such as the Golden Tigers Reunion at Clemson every June.
She also started a podcast, “Tigers in the Archive,” to share stories of Clemson’s history by highlighting artifacts in SCA. The podcast is now in its second season and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other podcasting platforms. 
Wood also shared some of her favorite interesting and unique items from SCA with Clemson World magazine in an article titled “History in Your Hands,” published in the Fall 2023 issue. She said her favorite item in the collection is still the gold-encrusted Arabic sword from 1522 that was given to U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia in 1947.
Among the documents, her favorites are all the correspondence between Senator Strom Thurmond and his constituents over his nearly 50 years in the U.S. Senate. She said the letters provide a great record of the life and concerns of South Carolinians during that time period.
“Those letters are from every walk of life in South Carolina for decades. In those letters, you see all of it — the things South Carolinians were mad about, what they were worried about, what they were scared about, what they thought he could do for them, what he could actually do for them … from all races, genders, everybody. It’s fabulous,” said Wood.
Wood said the best thing about her job is that it’s never the same thing twice.
“My day is largely spent finding things out and then figuring out ways to tell other people about them,” she said.
Outside of work, Wood enjoys gardening (she is in the process of replacing her lawn with native plants), cooking, and of course, reading.