June 3, 2015 – The National Digital Stewardship Residency Boston (NDSR-Boston) program, a program to develop professionals in digital stewardship through post-graduate residencies, welcomed a new group of residents and hosts for the 2015/16 cohort. Each resident will have the opportunity to work on an exciting and challenging project at one of the Boston area institutions beginning in September 2015.
Andrea Goethals, NDSR Boston Project Director and Harvard Library Mentor welcomed the new group, saying, “We are fortunate to be in the position of having another really great group of residents. All of us are looking forward to welcoming them when they start in September, and getting to know them as they work with us on projects within our institutions.”
Alexandra Curran – MIT Libraries
Alexandra Curran’s interests include audio/visual archives, digital curation, and the preservation of multimedia collections in libraries and cultural heritage institutions. While earning her B.S. in Digital Cinema from DePaul University, she explored editing, compositing, data management and the long-term management of digital assets. Her M.A. in Library and Information Science and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies, both from the University of South Florida (USF), prepared her for curatorial duties with interviews in the USF Tampa Library’s Oral History Program, including the significant Speaking Out Against Genocide digital oral history collection. While interning at the National Archives and Records Administration’s Motion Picture Preservation Lab she prepared materials for long-term storage and digital conversion, and also learned the principles and techniques of photochemical and digital restoration. As an intern for the City of Tarpon Springs, Florida, she created a community-based website for the Greek Community Documentation Project. Current volunteer activities include assisting a local historical society with preservation issues for video oral histories in older formats and ingesting content into an institutional repository. A fan of tea, cinema, and spy novels, Alexandra currently works in a tea store. She is looking forward to her residency with MIT Libraries.
Jeffrey Erickson – University of Massachusetts at Boston
Jeffrey Erickson is 2015 graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College with a focus on Archives and Cultural Heritage Informatics. Jeff was attracted to the Cultural Heritage concentration because of its emphasis on technology and digital preservation. Building on his extensive professional career in IT, Jeff’s interest was to become an archivist so he could work on issues related to digital materials. Jeff has studied digital preservation, preservation management, digital asset management, XML and metadata at Simmons and applied his newly acquired knowledge to solve issues related to digital materials and technology at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Forbes House Museum, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Jeff has a personal interest in preservation; he has restored an antique building, has collected artifacts from his family’s dairy farm in New Bedford, MA and is building a family archive to pass along his family’s heritage to his children and to future generations of his family. Jeff enjoys working on DIY projects, reading non-fiction, traveling with his family, playing basketball and working on his golf game.
Alice Sara Prael – John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum
Alice Sara Prael recently graduated with an MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in the curation and management of digital assets. During that time she served as the Digital Programs and Initiatives Graduate Assistant at University of Maryland Libraries. In this position she discovered a passion for digital preservation and partnered with the Special Collections and University Archives to create a workflow for processing born digital content. She spent the past summer interning with the National Archives and Records Administration where she oversaw the digitization and description of a series of records from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Alice currently lives in Maryland where she hikes, crafts and plays roller derby with the DC Rollergirls. She is thrilled to continue work with digital preservation at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library through NDSR.
Julie Seifert – Harvard Library
Julie Seifert graduated from the MLS program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a concentration in archives and records management, and a certificate in Digital Curation. While at UNC, she focused on digital preservation and completed a Master’s project on digital forensics. She also received a scholarship to go to the Czech Republic, where she met Czech colleagues and studied digital libraries in the Czech Republic. In her free time, she enjoys paddle boarding, reading, and traveling. She completed an internship in Boston during graduate school and is looking forward to being back! She will carry out her residency at Harvard University.
Stefanie Ramsay – State Library of Massachusetts
Stefanie Ramsay is a recent MLIS graduate from the University of Washington. Drawing upon her background in American history, Stefanie’s focus in graduate school has been on the preservation of historical materials for long-term access and use by diverse user groups. She’s worked in digital collections for the University of Washington Special Collections Library, performed archival processing for the Washington State Jewish Archives, and implemented a pilot digitization program for architectural drawings at the Seattle architecture firm NBBJ. She believes digital preservation is a necessity for modern information organizations, and is eager to learn more about best practices as well as how libraries and archives adopt the appropriate workflows to ensure greater access to and preservation of their important materials. Having previously lived in Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle, Stefanie is looking forward to walking all over Boston, eating lots of lobster, and cheering on the Red Sox at Fenway Park. Stefanie will carry out her residency with the State Library of Massachusetts.
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