Today’s blog post is an interview with Genevieve Havemeyer-King of the Digital Services Directorate here at the Library of Congress. You can read other interviews with digital collections staff here.
Carlyn: Hi Gen, could you tell us a bit about what you do in the Digital Services Directorate? How would you explain your job to someone outside the Library of Congress?
Gen: Generally my role is to manage digital content from various sources across the Library throughout the digital lifecycle, and part of that involves helping get content where it needs to be at any given time, whether that’s on loc.gov, in Stacks, or stored for safe keeping. More specifically, this involves developing, implementing, or enhancing workflows and tools; leading collaborative content management or publication projects; and working with stakeholders to produce and maintain guidance and technical documentation about how we do this work. A few main programs I’m involved in are: Paprika – the Library’s next generation Digital Collections Repository (DCR), the Digital Collections Management Compendium, and a related internal series of skill-sharing presentations called Digital Library Practitioners.
C: Can you tell us a bit about your professional background and journey. In particular, what professional or educational experiences prepared you for your role?
G: My background is in audiovisual media preservation, with a concentration in digital preservation. I’m originally from California, and I started my journey interning at Oddball Film + Video (a.k.a. The San Francisco Media Archive) as an undergrad, where I was thrown into fast-paced stock footage research and film digitization work serving clips to companies like HBO and Discovery Channel. This is also where I began my supporting career as a projectionist, and where I curated my first film screenings. After moving to New York City, I graduated from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. My internships during that program – at the Harvard Film Archive, CUNY TV Archive, and Human Rights Watch – were invaluable. I gained more hands-on experience working with physical collections, digital formats, and obsolescence. Following that, in addition to some consulting work, I had two formative roles: my wonderful time as a National Digital Stewardship Resident at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and my most recent position at the New York Public Library as Manager of Media Preservation Services. Both roles involved managing archival collections at large scales, navigating digitization and born-digital migration issues, and collaborating to develop standards-driven programs for long-term preservation. I feel lucky to have had many amazing mentors and opportunities along the way, and I still pull from all my experiences in my work at the Library of Congress. While my academic experience was an important foundation, I have always learned best by doing the work and engaging directly with content creators and preservation system stakeholders.
C: What part of your work do you find most meaningful or engaging?
G: It’s impossible for me to pick one thing; I feel like everything I do is so interrelated, but I’m certainly energized by participating in the implementation of the Library’s new Digital Collections Repository. The new platform has already revolutionized how we preserve and provide access to digital collections here, and it’s exciting to be part of a team working to identify and address the challenges that digital library practitioners face in confronting such an enormous scale of digital content.
C: Do you have any advice for people interested in getting into the kind of work you do? Are there any skills or competencies that you think are really important for folks that want to get into this field to develop?
G: There are many roads that can lead to the same place. My background in media preservation felt somewhat limiting at first, but I found that most of my skills were transferable and easily expanded on by being open to working with new and different collections and being creative about how to apply them in new contexts. There are certainly some technical skills that are handy – project management, Python, Git, data analysis, HTML, XML, to name a few. These have all been mentioned before, and they continue to be key for working at a large scale. One thing that has become more relevant for my role though beyond technical skill is communication. Technological challenges can be difficult to pick apart, and collaboration is crucial. Communication – being able to think about or consider challenges from multiple stakeholder perspectives and effectively drive discussions about them is often the key to finding and implementing solutions. You can have all the tools in the world at your disposal, but if you don’t have agreement on what the problem is or how to use them best, a program can get stuck. It’s also a skill that cannot be automated by AI (yet).
C: Aside from work, what sorts of things are you passionate about? Do you have any hobbies or interests that you’re up for sharing out with folks?
G: I love long bike rides, spending time with family, and seeing shows of any variety – theater, circus, expanded cinema, movies, concerts. I’ve also enjoyed guest curating film programs and am especially proud of my January 2020 series that interrogated the history of otherism and expressions of satanic panic in various forms throughout the history of cinema, which screened at Anthology Film Archives. Most recently, I’ve been really interested in socioeconomics, philanthropy, and about how digital librarianship, humanities, and cultural preservation initiatives can support social change and efforts to reduce inequality. I hope to find time to engage in this more.