Climate Change
I’m a leading expert on the impacts of climate change on American archives and libraries. In May 2023, I transitioned to working full-time for Memory Rising, which is my consulting, research, and archival services business that specializes in climate change and cultural heritage. If you’d like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you.
My work has been profiled by Yale Climate Connections, VICE, and Pacific Standard, and has been honored by the Society of American Archivists.
The best way to keep up with my climate change work is by subscribing to the Memory Rising monthly newsletter. This page is a guide to my major publicly accessible climate change work for a general audience (last updated September 2023).
A Green New Deal for Archives
A Green New Deal for Archives is now available as part of the Council on Library and Information Resources Pocket Burgundy series. The publication is available on CLIR’s website.
The purpose of this publication is to articulate two major threats to US archives: climate change and a destabilized workforce. I review the historical precedent for major public support for archival work, and sketch out the beginnings of public policy for archives to ensure their future viability and relevance in our uncertain future. Archives are a public good, and this publication argues that archives need significant public investment for their continuity and survival.
You can read more about the publication and how I wrote it in this recent interview with Ithaka S+R.
California Rare Book School: Archives and Climate Change
In August 2022 I taught the inaugural week-long seminar, Archives and Climate Change, for California Rare Book School. The seminar covered climate change science and governance, climate emotions, and short-term and long-term impacts of climate change on archives and cultural heritage institutions.
Mapping climate risks to archives
In 2017, my collaborator Ben Goldman and I received a grant from the Society of American Archivists Foundation to create a comprehensive data set of US archives known as RepoData. We set out to try to answer a seemingly simple question that had challenged us during our earlier study on archives and climate change: How many archives actually exist in the United States? And where are they located?
The result was RepoData, an open data set of over 18,000 archives and institutions with archival records across the United States. You can interact with RepoData through ArcGIS online, and learn more about the data set through this StoryMap.
RepoData is recognized as a vital data set in the American archives profession, and is being incorporated into a larger cultural heritage data set through the PROTECCT-GLAM project through Louisiana State University.
The original RepoData data is available in GitHub, and further documentation is available through an Open Science Framework repository.
Scholarly Research
I’ve written several peer-reviewed articles on archives, climate change, and environmental recordkeeping issues. The one that started it all was my 2015 article “Archival adaptation to climate change.” Then I was a co-author on the first study to examine climate change threats to American archives.
I’ve also explored the connection between shoddy paperwork and environmental safety hazards, and the fossil fuel industry’s lack of data transparency.
Keynotes and Conference Presentations
My keynote at Access (2019, Edmonton) focused on information and hidden infrastructures, drawing on the role of pipelines that connect Canada and the United States via the Great Lakes. At NDSA (2017, Pittsburgh) I looked at the importance of environmental information to environmental regulation, inspired by Pittsburgh’s rich history.
I have presented at several library, archives, history, and research data conferences. A list of my presentations can be found on my CV.
Editorial Work
I served as co-editor for two special academic journal issues dedicated to climate change: Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene (2020, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies), and Records Management in the Anthropocene (2021, Records Management Journal).