Trevor Owens

Reflecting on 2025: Researching, Connecting, and Exploring

2025-12-22T18:51:34Z

This blog has slowly transformed into a place where I just publish annual year in review posts. I may still consider other types of posts in the future, but for the time being, I will be sure to at the very least maintain this annual tradition.

This is the 13th one of these year end reflective posts. If you are curious, you can see my reflections at the end of 2024, 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 some I read this year in order on Goodreads.

Exploring Kyoto together in the spring.

Rounding Out Year Two at AIP

I started as AIP’s first Chief Research Officer in February of 2024. So, 2025 was my first full year in this role. I feel like I hit my stride this year. Back in January we put out AIP’s first annual research agenda. Over the course of the year, the fantastic team of social scientists, historians, archivists and librarians that I support delivered a lot of great results aligned to that agenda.

At the start of the year we launched an interactive with info on physical scientists and engineers employed by the U.S. federal government. In April, we put out a report on the Impacts of Restrictions on Federal Grant Funding in Physics and Astronomy Graduate Programs. In the fall we published a short report that provides data on International Students in U.S. Physics and Astronomy Graduate Programs and some of the first national data so far to document a decline in STEM graduate student enrollments. That is just a sampling of some of the 17 reports that our social science team put out this year.

Graphic for the 2025 Research Agenda.

While I am proud to have supported all of that work, I should note that I am particularly proud of this report that we came out with in this month that focuses on the stories of 22 different early career volunteer leaders in science and engineering societies in AIP’s federation. Along with that report, we were able to put out this article earlier in the fall in Physics Today that focuses in on four of the early career leaders stories and offers practical and clear advice for early career professionals and their mentors.

In support of that research agenda, we were able to kick off some great digital collecting initiatives through AIP’s Niels Bohr Library and Archives. We launched a new tool to receive photo submissions from physical scientists and kicked off a new initiative founded by the Henry Luce Foundation focused on documenting and celebrating women’s contributions to the physical sciences. In September we kicked off a project to collect stories from physical scientists whose career journeys have been impacted by funding cuts. Following along with our focus on collecting photos this year, I also wrote a piece for Radiations Magazine about my experience encountering the NIST-4 Kibble Balance.

Dinner of the American Physical Society (APS) at the Ambassador Hotel . Fred Hess & Son, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, gift of Mark Zemansky.

Along with those activities that help to advance that overall research agenda, I was able to make some time to explore and share out some small stories highlighting some of the unique historical materials of the Niels Bohr Library and Archives. I wrote about a fun story that Physics Today ran in 1969 to identify everyone in a photo from a banquet at an American Physical Society conference from 1932. I also wrote a short piece exploring some telegrams and photos in our collections from the J.H. Van Vleck papers. I wrote about Jack Oliver’s fascinating memoir, Shakespeare Got It Wrong, and used that as a prompt to invite more physical scientists to document their lives in memoir for us to preserve and provide access to. I was then excited to share out about some of the new memoirs from scientists that we received for the Sigma Pi Sigma newsletter.

I also interviewed a number of researchers and memory workers about their work. I interviewed author Olivia Campbell about her book Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. I interviewed the sociologist of science Janet Vertasi about her ethnographic research on robotic space missions. I interviewed historian of science Joe Martin about his research on the history of the development of solid state physics. Lastly, I interviewed Leontien Talboom about her work at Cambridge University Libraries with Stephen Hawking’s floppy disks.

Web Archives & Digital Preservation

I’ve been channeling most of my research and writing energy directly into my work at AIP. With that said, I did also make some progress on a few other side projects related to web archiving and digital preservation that I had been working on for a while. Ben Lee, Jonah Estess and I had a piece on digital traces and records of Colin Powell’s Case for War in Iraq PowerPoint on the web come out in the journal Internet Histories.

Screenshot of some of the slides from Powell’s PowerPoint in our article.

I was also able to get the full manuscript Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary, the edited volume that Rebecca Frank and I have been working to support, up online and submitted. I anticipate that we will likely be able to get the final version of the book worked through the process to be published next year.

Bridging the Last Book and Work at AIP

In the spring, I was invited to give a talk on campus at the University of Michigan as part of their Data, Archives and Information in Society Seminar program. It was great to get the chance to talk a bit with students and faculty and further develop the through-line between my last book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory which came out last year and the work that I’m supporting around collective memory in my role at AIP.

Along with that, I was thrilled to have the chance to have a conversation with Shannon Mattern about the book and in the context of all the disruptive change that has been happening to the culture memory community as part of the Internet Archive’s Future Knowledge Series.

Last but not least in this run of interviews, I very much appreciated the chance to participate in a two part interview post, Science As Story, Memory as Infrastructure (part two) for the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog with Wendy Queen. That presented a nice opportunity to discuss how the work I am trying to support these days is focused on demonstrating ways that social science and humanities work and research can, and should, support empowering positive change in the physical sciences.

Receiving the Luminary Award in Madison in the fall

Along with all that work and interaction, I was honored to be invited back to Madison Wisconsin this fall to be recognized as a luminary of alum of the institution. While I was back in Madison, I also had a conversation with some of the current students in the Integrated Liberal Studies program about careers and the role of study of the humanities. There is a nice piece about that event in the fall newsletter from the Integrated Liberal Studies Program. I was also honored to be inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics and astronomy honor’s society this fall.

Travel and Exploration

There was a good bit of travel and exploring this year too. We rang in the new year at a cabin out in the woods in West Virginia. We had an amazing trip to Japan at the start of the year. We had a few trips back to Chicago for family events. I ended up getting the chance to go to Alaska for a quick trip for work. I got to Santa Fe and Denver for meetings. I tagged along with Marjee for a conference she was going to in San Fransisco. We went for a getaway out to the beach in Delaware and we went up to Woodstock NY for a bit to see the leaves change.

Reflecting on 2024: Connecting, Learning, and Growing

2024-12-22T00:02:22Z

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.

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.

Awe, Tree Rings, and Stars: Top Five Reads of 2023

2024-01-01T16:52:11Z

It was a pretty good reading year for me. I met the target of 50 books that I set for my Goodreads reading challenge. As part of gearing up for this new year, I went back and pulled the five books that I am sure I’m going to keep thinking about. In no particular order, below are my top five reads of 2023.

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life – by Dacher Keltner.

Keltner provides a powerful tour of contemporary social psychological research on the importance and need for us all to experience awe and wonder. The book does a great job of laying out how valuable awe experiences are and the ways that the natural world and cultural institutions enable awe.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut.

Labatut’s work of historical fiction explores a number of issues around the philosophical implications of break throughs in physics and mathematics in the early 20th century.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being – by Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin set out to write a book about his approach to producing creative works, but ended up offering a broader meditation on how to live and interact with the world. Many of his ideas/practices for producing works of art map over into useful ways into any number of other kinds of work.

Vera Rubin: A Life – By Jacqueline Mitton & Simon Mitton

Jacqueline Mitton & Simon Mitton provide a great tour of Vera Rubin’s life and work. Following along in Rubin’s life and career is fascinating and inspirational, both as another way to get a perspective on life and science in the 20th century, and as a powerful exploration of how our understanding of the universe outside our galaxy changed in that period.

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, by Valerie Trouet

Trouet presents this engaging tour of both how dendrochronology (the science of dating trees by their rings) works, and it’s history. Both of which turn out to be fascinating. It has a bit of a travelogue and memoir aspect to it, too, as she takes you along on research trips to visit trees around the world.

Reflecting on 2023

2023-12-29T22:53:04Z

As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year 10th one of these year end reflective posts that I’ve written. You can see my reflections at the end of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can see the 50 books I read this year in order on Goodreads.

Year two as Director of Digital Services

At the start of 2022, I was about six months into my new role as the Director of Digital Services. This year I was really able to get into the swing of things. Early in the year, I was excited to be able to share out about the Library of Congress Digitization Strategy. If you are curious to learn a bit more about what kinds of things folks across the Digital Services Directorate are working on, you can check out some of these interviews I was able to get up over the course of the year with Thomas Crowley, Carly Boerrigter and Lauren Algee.

After Disruption is Complete

At the end of 2021, I shared that I was under contract on my next book, After Disruption a Future for Cultural Memory. At the end of 2022, I’d shared that I submitted the full draft manuscript for the book. For anyone interested, I’ve had open review drafts of the first and second half of the book, out online since July of 2022. I’m happy to share that the full manuscript of the book was well received by peer reviewers. This year I worked through a short set of revisions to the manuscript to address reviewer comments, developed the index for the book, and worked through two rounds of reviews of page proofs. The book has gotten some really great advance praise. I’m thrilled that this book will be available open access when it comes out. It looks like it should be published in May of 2024. So stay tuned for that.

Cover of La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital.

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Cover of La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital.

After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory

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Spanish Translation of Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation

The open access version of the Spanish translation of my last book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation was published earlier this year by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital was produced by a team of library and information science experts led by Isabel Galina Russell. It was published earlier this year in print. I’m very grateful for the work this team put into making this book more accessible.

The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation en Español

2023-12-09T21:16:08Z

The open access version of the Spanish translation of my book The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation is now available online. La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital was produced by a team of library and information science experts led by Isabel Galina Russell. It was published earlier this year in print by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Now the digital open access version is freely available online. Below are a few images from the book.

I wanted to take a moment here to both share out about this new publication, the journey that brought it about, and share some gratitude for everyone who made it happen.

I’ve been interested in the idea of seeing The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation translated into other languages, particularly into Spanish since I started working on it. The whole point of the book is to try and make digital preservation more accessible, and this translation makes the book much more accessible to the more than half a billion readers and speakers of Spanish. The fact that this translation has been published open access, freely available for anyone to download and read, makes the book all the more accessible.

The Journey of the Text

The idea for this translation came about as a result of an invitation to speak at a conference. In December of 2019 I gave the Conferencia Magistral at the Simposio Internacional de la Maestría en Conservación de Acervos Documentales hosted by the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía in Mexico City. Below are a few pictures from that visit.

My talk largely focused on the digital preservation axioms that I open the Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation with. Isabel tweeted out about how useful she found those axioms and we went back and forth on Twitter about the possibility of developing a Spanish translation of the book. We ironed out permissions with Johns Hopkins University Press, and then she ran with it. She provides more context, and a screenshot of our exchange on Twitter as part of her introduction to the book. I like that the story of the origin of the translation of the book is contained in her introduction to it.

Gratitude and Thanks

The full team involved in producing the translation includes 15 people, all of whom are experts and thinkers working in library and information science, several of whom I have had the chance to meet and connect with at digital preservation events over the years. I’m including a list of them all below.

Pedro Ángeles Jiménez
Fernando Cruz Quintana
Jimena Escobar Sotomayor
Isabel Galina Russell
Maribel González González
David Alonso Leija Román
Norma Aída Manzanera Silva
Ana Cecilia Medina Arias
Betsabé Miramontes Vidal
Jo Ana Morfin
Ana Yuri Ramírez Molina
Lorena Ramírez López
José Antonio Salazar Carmona
Pamela Vizner Oyarce

It is a little bit overwhelming to know that this whole team has engaged deeply with this book. While it might seem like a book about digital preservation would be technical and somewhat dry, the book has a good bit of myself in it. It is the first piece of my professional writing where I feel like I could fully bring in my personal voice and point of view. I’ve come to believe that anything that honestly and genuinely engages with the complexities of and issues present in memory work ends up needing to be tied in with our personal memory and personal journeys. This isn’t a technical book, its actually a very personal one.

I’m particularly honored to have had my book translated by experts in digital preservation and library and information science. The work of translation involves such an in depth engagement with a text, and I am deeply grateful for the in depth work that everyone involved engaged in to produce this.

Book Launch Event

Last March, the print version of the book came out, and the Biblioteca Nacional de M?xico hosted an online book launch event with some of the team involved in the translation of the book. If you are curious, you can see a video recording of that event below.

Advance Praise for After Disruption

2023-12-09T21:18:54Z

My next book is a little closer to being fully finished. After working through some thoughtful feedback from peer reviewers I am now reviewing a round of copy edits. In fun news, the book now has a page on the University of Michigan Press website. It also has BISAC subjects, a DOI, and three different ISBNs.

Page for After Disruption on the University of Michigan Press site.

It is really rewarding to see the book becoming more and more finished. This view of the book is particularly exciting in that I also got to seem some advance praise/blurbs from the book that come from two scholars whose work I deeply admire and respect which I have included below.

“After Disruption provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by cultural memory institutions today and suggests how we might get out of the mess we’re in. It critiques modern management theory as applied to libraries to explain how we got ourselves into the mess. And it offers a thoughtful explanation and expansion of the radical futurity/possibility literature on cultural memory to propose ways we might get out of it. This book will be of value to workers in memory institutions, especially libraries and archives, and students interested in working in them.”
– Steven Lubar, Brown University

“Trevor Owens’ After Disruption is a highly compelling look into the rhetorical, educational, managerial, and economic histories of the Silicon Valley ideologies that have come to dominate US organizational life and—in particular—the ways those ideologies about the future imperil cultural memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums and render the lives of those who work for them precarious.”
—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University

The book cover is now also finished, and I’m really pleased with how that turned out. The cover photo is one I took about a year ago of the “Apple Carnegie Library” in Washington D.C on my iPhone. The story of of that building exemplifies some of the themes that the book engages with.

After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory

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Reflecting on 2022: Exploring, Growing, and Writing

2023-12-09T21:22:27Z

As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year marks a milestone in that reflective practice itself, now being the 10th year I have written one of these posts. You can see my reflections at the end of 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year.

Back into the world: Teaching, Working, and Exploring

At the start of 2022 I was still deep in what become my routine for living in the pandemic. After working and teaching from home for roughly two years, I started teaching my digital history seminar in person during the spring semester at American University and started venturing back into the office at the Library of Congress. It was disorientating at first. But it was great to get back in the classroom with my students and while it took some adjusting, I’m really enjoying being back in the office. At this point, I’m going in three days a week and teleworking two days a week. Personally, that feels like a great balance for me.

In the summer, I taught a week long intensive course called “Born Digital/Digital Collections” for California Rare Book School. Teaching a week long intensive class like that virtually was a bit intense, but it was also rewarding to have the chance to connect with bright and engaged current professionals working in libraries and archives.

New Adventures in the New Job

In the summer, I had the distinct honor of being appointed to a new job as the Director of Digital Services. I’m now about six months in this new role and I am deeply grateful for the chance to apply my knowledge and experience across a broader portfolio of areas of digital services. Back in 2017, when I came back to the Library of Congress from IMLS I was really excited about the idea of being able to help grow and support thoughtful and sustainable development of digital programs.

I’m grateful for the chance I had to help build up and support teams doing that creative but sustainable work in that role and I’m doing my best to think about how I can continue to provide that kind of support in my now broader role. So far I’m really pleased with how it’s going.

Getting out there and Exploring

After staying local for 2020 and 2021, this year ended up being a great chance to get back out into the world. If you’re curious, I tend to post a lot of photos of our adventures up on Instagram. In February we took a trip to St. Lucia, in April we went to Portugal, in May I had the chance to spend three weeks consulting on digital strategy at the National Library of Kosovo through the Fulbright program, while in Kosovo we also were able to visit Albania, and in December I tagged along on a work trip Marjee had to visit and explore around the Yucatan.

Each of those trips offered me chances to explore and connect with new cultures and histories. I think we visited more than two dozen cultural heritage sites and museums. Across those experiences, collectively, I think those experiences contribute to a more complex, interwoven, and connected understanding of cultures and communities and the key role that cultural memory work plays in advancing a more sustainable approach to envisioning and enacting a better future.

Getting more words out there

Along with work and travel this ended up being a good year for finishing off and getting a few pieces published that I’d been working on for a while. I had three articles come out each of which grew out of great collaborations. In Library Leadership & Management, Beyond Good Intentions: Developing and Operationalizing Values in the Structure of Digital Library Programs came out. I’m really proud of all the work that team members put in on this to draw out how the values we developed together have grown into key tools we use all the time in our work. Along with that, Ben Lee and I had a Grappling with the scale of born-digital government publications: Toward pipelines for processing and searching millions of PDFs come out in the International Journal of Digital Humanities and Jonah Estes and I had Slide Decks as Government Publications: Exploring Two Decades of PowerPoint Files Archived from U.S. Government Websites come out in Archival Science. It was also a good year for reading, if your curious about the 50 some books I read this year you can see them all on Goodreads.

My biggest writing project this year was getting the manuscript for my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, completed and submitted. In January I shared out drafts of the first half of the book for comments. In July I shared out drafts of the second half of it. Huge thanks to everyone who gave me such right and thoughtful comments. I spent the fall revising the drafts based on all that great feedback and sent the full manuscript into the press in November. Early in the spring, I should get comments on the manuscript back from reviewers and then I will dive into any further work I need to do on it from there. This was a fun book to carry with me and be thinking about as I went on trips and worked through transitioning jobs. It’s a bit more personal than previous books I’ve written. In that respect, it represents my own memory work to make sense of my experiences in two decades of work at the intersection of digital technologies and cultural memory work. In any event, I’m excited to carry it with me into next year and hopefully we will see it come out and appear in the 2023 wrap up post on this blog.

New Paper: Slide Decks as Government Publications

2023-12-09T22:02:35Z

I’m excited to share that I have a new paper out, Slide Decks as Government Publications: Exploring Two Decades of PowerPoint Files Archived from U.S. Government Websites, in the journal Archival Science. This paper is a collaboration between myself and Jonah Estess. If you don’t have access to the final version, you can see a preprint of the paper here. It was a lot of fun to work on and I’m thrilled to see it up in print. As a side note, the team at Archival Science was really great to work with. We got really thoughtful peer review feedback and the paper is a lot stronger for it. Below is the abstract, and some images from the piece.

Abstract

Over the last three decades, US government agencies have published hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of PowerPoint files on the web. Hundreds of thousands of these files have been captured and preserved in web archives. With that noted, it remains difficult to find and interact with these files. This paper analyzes a public dataset of 1,000 PowerPoints from US government websites in the Library of Congress web archives to explore the properties of these kinds of files. This publicly available dataset published in 2019 includes a random sample of a thousand files from the more than 300,000 files that purport a PowerPoint media type in the Library of Congress web archives. The study focuses on characterizing the nature of these publications, the extent to which embedded metadata in these documents could be used to improve access to them and exploring what properties of these files are likely to be important to future users. Exploring these data provides a means to begin to understand the value and nature of PowerPoint files as a format of government publishing and government records.

Gallery of Images and Figures

We included a number of images from specific archived gov PowerPoints and some charts illustrating trends in the data which I’ve pulled out into the image gallery below.

Open Review of the Second Half of “After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory”

2023-12-09T22:05:02Z

I’m excited to be able to share the second half of my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory with you for input and comments. For more background on the project, you can read the full book proposal for it here. You can also read drafts of the first half of it here.

Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter.

These are very much in progress drafts. So, I’m interested in any and all feedback and input. I’m interested in any feedback that can help strengthen the project, but I’m also interested in hearing about any parts of it that particularly resonate with readers. To that end, if there are parts that resonate with you feel free to screenshot them and share them on social media and or to add comments attesting to things that you think work well in the chapters. If you do share out about this on twitter please tag me @tjowens. Along with that, I’m particularly interested in any suggestions for work that I should be citing from women, people of color, and early career professionals. I’m also interested for any more scholarship written by memory workers (archivists, librarians, curators, etc.) that I should focus more attention on.

For the next few months, I’m planning to shift to work on revisions on the first chapters. At that point I will post those chapters and shift to work through revising and improving these first four chapters based on input I’ve received. So if you do have feedback on these, it would be ideal to hear from you on it by late August or early September.

If you do provide input on any of the drafts and you would like to be acknowledged for that in the final book, please list your name at the bottom of any of the chapters you provide input on so that I can make sure you get added to the acknowledgements list.

If it’s useful, you are welcome to cite these draft chapters, but when doing so cite them as something like Trevor Owens.(forthcoming). After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Open Review of the First Half of “After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory”

2023-12-09T22:08:24Z

I’m excited to be able to share the first four chapters of my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory with you for input and comments. For more background on the project, you can read the full book proposal for it here.

For the next 3-4 months, I’m planning to shift to work on the last four chapters, the ones that focus on Maintenance, Care, and Repair. At that point I will post those chapters and shift to work through revising and improving these first four chapters based on input I’ve received.