Andrea Jackson Gavin

Andrea Jackson Gavin is the inaugural Program Director of the HBCU Digital Library Trust.  The Trust is a partnership of the HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard Library to sustain and deepen capacity for the digitization, discovery, and preservation of African American history collections held by HBCU libraries and archives.  As Program Director, she will provide strategic leadership and facilitate collaborative planning and implementation to build out services and develop business models for the HBCU Digital Library Trust. As a Harvard employee based in Georgia, Jackson Gavin will work out of an office at AUC Woodruff Library to engage with stakeholders across the HBCU community.

Jackson Gavin brings extensive professional experience and personal passion to this role. She previously served as Director of Engagement and Scholarship at the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Robert W. Woodruff Library, where she was responsible for grant writing and compliance, and led collaborative initiatives, outreach, and creative programming to enhance scholarly engagement with library and archival collections.  A professional archivist for 20 years - she also served as Grant Writer and Head of Archives Research Center at the AUC Woodruff Library.  Jackson Gavin was also the Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium based at the University of Chicago Libraries, where she provided strategic leadership and operational management for Consortium activities to support preservation, digitization, accessibility, and acquisitions of collections on African American history in the Chicagoland area. 

She is very passionate about preserving Black and HBCU history, and was honored as a 2018 Fellow of the Society of Georgia Archivists. A proud alumna of Spelman College, Jackson Gavin obtained her Master’s degree from New York University in US History and certification in Archival Management, and participated in the Archives Leadership Institute and the Harvard Graduate School of Education Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. Jackson Gavin co-authored “Funding the Future of African American Religion Archival Collections at the Atlanta University Center’s Robert W. Woodruff Library” in the Theological Librarianship Journal, as well as the chapter, “‘Loving Blackness’ as a First-Year Composition Student Learning Outcome in the Archives” in the book, Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism.  She formerly served on the International Archives Committee of her beloved sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.