Julianna Barrera-Gomez

I am part of the Digital Preservation team, where I've established the Digital Accessions Program (DAP), a centralized service for capturing content from digital storage media, and cloud storage, to support digital accessioning needs for collections stewards across Harvard Library.  I also run the DAP Lab, our collections processing workspace, where we use forensics equipment and legacy drives to connect to many types of removable media.  In DAP, we work with collections stewards to create outputs that work for their specific born-digital and/or hybrid collections processing goals.  See our wiki page for more: Digital Accessions Program

Prior to my arrival here, I worked in many capacities and roles in libraries, including: my first public services student job at the Gerstenzang Science Library at Brandeis University; working in technical services at the Ann Arbor District Library; learning from mentors about the intricacies of digitization and digital preservation at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan; interning with the Electronic Record Program leads at the Smithsonian Institution Archives; engaging in research at OCLC; and pushing through various archives and digital preservation milestones to build a digital stewardship program at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

As a former anthropologist, I am fascinated by the affordances, dependencies and limitations of digital preservation, and am interested in examining how original meaning and context can be better captured to ensure that long-term access goes beyond technical rendering.  As an archivist, I accept that information is impermanent, and am interested in finding the balance between what can be saved and what resources are required to save it.  As a digital preservationist, I strive to be a steward of good digital stewardship (and its good people stewards).