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AUTHOR: Trevor Owens

Trevor Owens is a librarian, researcher, policy maker and educator working on digital infrastructure for libraries. At the Library of Congress, Owens served as director of digital services until his departure in 2024. He teaches graduate seminars in digital history for American University’s History Department and graduate seminars and digital preservation for the University of Maryland’s College of Information, where he is also a research affiliate with the Digital Curation Innovation Center. He previously worked as a senior program administrator at the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), where he led the establishment of the National Digital Platform initiative. Under his leadership, the initiative invested more than $30 million in 110 projects to advance digital infrastructure for libraries across the nation. Prior to that, he worked as a digital archivist for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and as a history of science curator at the Library of Congress. Owens is the author of three books, including "The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation and Designing Online Communities: How Designers, Developers, Community Managers and Software Structure Discourse" and "Knowledge Production on the Web." His research and writing has been featured in Curator: The Museum Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Digital Humanities, D-Lib, Simulation & Gaming, Science Communication, New Directions in Folklore, and American Libraries. In 2014 the Society for American Archivists granted him the Archival Innovator Award, presented annually to recognize the archivist, repository, or organization that best exemplifies the “ability to think outside the professional norm.”

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