On August 16, Nicole Gray joined Archives & Special Collections at the University Libraries as assistant professor and Digital Archivist. In this position she will evaluate digital materials coming into the Archives to determine ways to make them usable, accessible, and available to researchers in the long term.
“Twenty-first-century records take many forms, from emails and websites to files on computer disks and hard drives,” explained Gray. “We’ll be working to manage those records, whether they come from University departments or on media that is part of donated collections.”
Part of her goal in this position is also to share knowledge about digitization, digital research, and digital preservation with faculty, students, and the broader community.
“So much of what we’re thinking about in Archives can relate directly to what people do in their everyday lives,” explained Gray. “Lots of people are accumulating digital photos and documents and starting to think about how to organize them, what to save, and how to find and access them into the future, even as technologies change.”
In 2014 Gray joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s English Department as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and worked on the Walt Whitman Archive as its project manager. Other positions at UNL include Research Assistant Professor in the English Department, Project Specialist, Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, for University Libraries and most recently as a developer in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Gray’s credentials include a B.A. in Journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and a M.A. in Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona with a graduate certificate in Archival Studies.
Much of her research has been in the history of print and other media and Gray described herself as having one foot in the digital world and the other in the archival world--a great combination for this position.
Gray looks forward to working with colleagues, faculty, and students at Nebraska, welcomes questions and can be contacted at: ngray2@unl.edu.