Forgive Jessica Farrell ’08 if her work makes her hungry. As a corporate archivist for McDonald’s, Farrell spends her days sorting through all sorts of documents, television commercials and historical artifacts related to the Golden Arches, helping catalog the paraphernalia in climate-controlled storage and answer questions from colleagues. Questions like: How much lettuce was placed on the first Big Mac hamburger? What year did the diameter of a McDonald’s drinking straw increase? What was the price of chicken nuggets when they first debuted in the United Kingdom?
Farrell, a French major who got her start in archives by working at the College’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture as well as Special Collections within the Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library, takes pride in being able to find answers to most of the questions that come her way. Working outside Chicago in a former Hamburger University building, Farrell is constantly amused and intrigued by the history of the world’s largest fast-food chain, which opened its first franchise in 1955 and today operates in 120 countries.
Digging into the corporation’s vast archives, Farrell has discovered treasures that include Ronald McDonald tennis shoes, McDonald’s-themed video games, a McDonald’s Japan stationery set, correspondence between McDonald’s executives, and every Happy Meal toy ever created in the USA. Each item, Farrell notes, is treated as a museum object and handled with extreme care.
Indeed, Farrell even gives tours of two McDonald’s museums near her office, including the first McDonald’s Corporation restaurant and a general history exhibit featuring a replica of the office used by Ray A. Kroc, the founder and first CEO of McDonald’s Corporation. Additionally, she supports internal and media reference services and manages intellectual property and preservation strategies for the Golden Archives’ growing collection of digitized and “born” digital records.
Whatever her workday brings, she’s lovin’ it.
“I never considered working for a business until I saw this job, just because most archives exist in an academic setting,” says Farrell, who also earned her master’s in library and information science at the University of South Carolina in 2011. “However, after I started working here, it blew away all my misconceptions of what working for a big corporation would be like, and so far it’s been an amazing – and fun! – experience.”
– Jason Ryan
