Current Instruction Team
Dr. Nancy Y. McGovern (2003- ) Director and Instructor, DPM Workshops
Nancy Y. McGovern is the Head of Curation and Preservation Services for the MIT Libraries. Prior to her joing the MIT Libraries in 2012, she was Digital Preservation Officer for ICPSR where her responsibilities included developing and promulgating policies that reflect prevailing standards and practice in the digital preservation community and developing appropriate preservation strategies for the expanding range of social science digital content ICPSR collects. Her research interests include the organizational aspects of digital preservation and the means for the digital preservation community to continually respond to the preservation opportunities and challenges of evolving technology. She has more than 20 years experience with the preservation of digital content. Before joining ICPSR, she served as a digital preservation manager and researcher at Cornell University Library, the Open Society Archives in Budapest, and the Center for Electronic Records at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Kari R. Smith (2008- ) Instructor, DPM Workshop Project Manager
Kari Smith is Digital Archivist at the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. Prior to joing MIT LIbraries in late 2011, she was the Head of the Visual Resource Collections and Media Services at the University of Michigan Department of the History of Art for five years. Kari led the VRC through its transition from a predominantly slide library and image archives to a collection of digital image resources. She was responsible for managing this program in addition to addressing the daily operational needs of the department faculty as well as external users of the photographic distribution project and archival image materials. She engages with colleagues around the University and at peer institutions as well as through professional associations. Kari's research interests include intellectual and long-term access to cultural material especially through interoperable metadata of digital objects. She is a member of the Society of American Archivists, the NEA Roundtable on Digital ARchives, and is a program committee member for both the SAA Research Forum and for the IS&T Archiving conference. Kari earned her B.A. in International Relations from George Mason University and her M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information.
Brad Westbrook (2009-) Topic specialist: Technology issues
Brad Westbrook is the Manager of the Archivists' Toolkit Project and head of the Metadata Analysis and Specification Unit in the UC San Diego Libraries. He has served as lead designer for the Mellon-sponsored Union Catalog of Art Images project, as the Manuscripts Librarian / University Archivist at UC San Diego, and as the exhibits curator at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. He has an MLS from UCLA and MA in English from SUNY-Albany.
During his career, Westbrook has been an active member of RBMS and SAA. He participated in RBMS programming for numerous events, including serving as the program chair for the 1999 Preconference in Montreal. For SAA he has served as a member and chair of the Technical Subcommittee for Descriptive Standards and of the J. Franklin James Archival Advocacy Award. As a member of the Online Archive of California, Westbrook participated in the development of best practices for EAD encoding of finding aids and the construction of digital objects. With Robin Chandler and Bill Landis, Westbrook spearheaded the Archivists Workbench meetings sponsored by the Digital Library Federation in 2004 that led to the development of the Archivists' Toolkit Project.
Westbrook has recently published articles on virtual collections, metadata normalization, and the Archivists' Toolkit.
Robin Dale (2011- ) Topical Specialist
Robin Dale is the director of Digital Services for LYRASIS. In that position, she develops LYRASIS' organizational strategy for digital programs, identifies and implements digital services initiatives, and creates alliances and partnerships with key organizations in the digital arena. Previously, she was the associate university librarian for Collections and Library Information Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she coordinated UCSC's participation in mass digitization projects, as well as worked with her staff to formulate the digitization and digital collection development of local, unique collections such as the Grateful Dead Archive. Prior to UCSC, she was a long-time program manager at RLG, managing collaborative programmatic activities related to digital preservation and digitization and served as the project director of the CRL Auditing and Certification of Digital Archives project. Since 1997, her work has focused on standards and best practice-building activities related to digital preservation, digitization, preservation metadata and data curation, in addition to serving as a associate editor of RLG DigiNews. She co-chaired the RLG-NARA task force which produced the 2007 report, Trusted Repositories, Audit and Certification: Criteria & Checklist (TRAC).