As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this trip around the sun. This is the year 11th one of these year end reflective posts that I’ve written. If you are curious, you can see my reflections at the end of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.
I’m a big fan of the value of self reflection, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can check out the 50 books I read this year in order on Goodreads.
First year as AIP’s First Chief Research Officer
At the start of the year, I left my role as the Director of Digital Services at the Library of Congress for a new role as AIP’s inaugural Chief Research Officer. I had thought I would spend a lot more time working with and supporting the my amazing colleagues at the Library of Congress, but Chief Research Officer opportunity at AIP was just too interesting to pass up. Supporting collaborations between teams of social scientists, historians, librarians and archivists to empower positive change in the physical sciences has turned out to be even more engaging, interesting, and fun than I’d thought it would be.
If you are curious to learn a bit more about what I’ve been up to at AIP, I shared a bit about my approach and focus in a short piece in the Spring Issue of the AIP History Newsletter. After learning more about how interesting AIP’s collection of unpublished memoirs from scientists are, I wrote another short piece titled Legacy Mindset: AIP’s Library & Archives Preserves Stories—And They Want Yours, for Radiations Magazine. I was also able to interview John C. Besley about his research on strategic approaches to science communication.
For a fuller view of some of how I am approaching this work, you can check out videos of a few talks I gave. I gave a talk titled From Collections to Connections: Centering Belonging in Archival Futures as part of the University of Maryland’s Center for Archival Futures. I’ve embedded a video of that talk below. In that talk, I shared a bit about how I see the work we are doing on on the research team at AIP advances a broader vision for the role that belonging should play in the function of libraries, archives, and research institutions more broadly.
Alongside that UMD talk, I also had the distinct honor of giving the opening keynote at the Future of Historical Medical Libraries in the Digital Age event at the New York Academy of Medicine. That talk, Catching up to the Digital Present: A Future for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Collections is also available to view online. I’ve embedded the video below in case you are interested in checking it out.
I had a lot of fun participating in this event and working on this talk. It provided me a fun opportunity to draw out connections between some of my research and explorations with digital collections back to my longstanding interest in supporting research in the history of science, technology, and medicine.
Below are a few photos from work over the year. It has been a lot of fun to explore the collections, connect with and support the team, and host a number of visitors who stopped by.
New Book, Next Book, and an Article
The year was also productive in terms of research and writing projects. After several years of work, I was excited to have my fourth book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory published. I’m thrilled that the University of Michigan Press was able to support making the book open access, so if you have not yet explored the book you can read it for free online right now.
This book grew out of my 2021 Elizabeth w. Stone lecture, Caring for Digital Collections in the Anthropocene. This book is a bit different than my previous books in that it has a bit more of my personal journey in it. So, I felt a lot more vulnerable in sharing more of my experience in this. It has been really rewarding to hear from folks who have really connected with the message and themes of the book.
Beyond that book, I was also excited that Giving back, learning, relaxing, and having fun: personal motivations and impacts of a virtual volunteer transcription program came out this year in the International Journal of the Digital Humanities. While there is a growing body of literature on virtual volunteering and crowdsourcing projects in the cultural memory/cultural heritage space, very little of that work has broadly explored the impacts of these projects on volunteers and motivations of volunteers who participate. I’m really proud to have been able to help get this piece published that helps underscore and demonstrate how valuable the work is that the By the People team does at the Library of Congress.
Another piece I wrote, Essential Entanglements: Digital Preservation and the Digital Humanities, came out in The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities. Back in 2014 (which doesn’t feel like a decade ago but was — in fact — a decade ago), I gave an invited talk at the University of Pittsburgh’s iSchool called Digital Preservation’s Place in the Future of the Digital Humanities. I had always intended to develop that talk into a more robust piece. So I was delighted when Isabel Galina Russell had reached out to me about the Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities book project back in early 2022. It is exciting to see how the whole book ended up coming together and I’m thrilled that it provided a home for this point I’ve been wanting to make for a number of years about how entangled research in the digital humanities and research in digital preservation is and should be.
Along with my book, the crowdsourcing article, and the book chapter, I was also able to work with Rebecca Frank as co-editors of the forthcoming book Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary. Under contract with MIT Press, this edited volume brings together a really rich set of chapters from experts in digital preservation who work to draw out and explore assumptions embedded in a lot of the language and terminology of digital preservation. For more on the concept of the book, you can read the introduction we wrote for it here. This year, we were able to launch the open peer review process on the full set of chapters for the book. So, if you are curious you can go ahead and read the full set of draft chapters online and any of the draft chapters. Next year, we will be working through formal blinded peer review process.
Altogether, this year has been a great adventure. I will admit, after a decade and a half of working in federal government I was a bit unnerved about leaving federal service. I’m very much glad that I pushed past that to embrace this unique and exciting opportunity.
Beyond the work
Beyond all of the new adventures in work, Marjee and I had a lot of fun with our friends, families, and pups. We were able to take a trip to Placencia in Belize, which I highly recommend. We made a quick trip to NYC to see Illinoise on Broadway. We made trips back to Chicago and Detroit to celebrate family weddings and two back to back 80th birthday parties for our aunts. We also were able to spend some time recharging out in the mountains in Virginia. Below are some more photo highlights from the year.
More Flexible Scheduling:
Share Exotic and Esoteric Research Tools:
Connect Existing Instruction Networks:
Trevor Owens 