[1] In 1972 she was hired by the University of Cincinnati to run their fledgling archival program, a repository participating of the Ohio Historical Society's regional network.
There she collaborated with faculty in the history department in order to create the university's first institutional archive,[1] eventually holding the position as Head of Special Collections.
Based on her experience in this position and funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, she wrote Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities, which was published in 1992, and which received the Society of American Archivists' Waldo Gifford Leland Award.
[2] According to Jelain Chubb and Ben Primer, during her career Samuels established herself as a respected voice in archival theory, particularly for the development of appraisal in an academic setting and her work processing science-related collections.
[4] Samuels' book Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities serves as the introduction to her theory of institutional functional analysis.