About Dr. Acker
Amelia Acker (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) is an assistant professor in the iSchool at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on the emergence, standardization, and preservation of new forms of data created with mobile information and communication technologies. Currently, she is researching data literacy, social and mobile media, metadata and data infrastructures that support long-term cultural memory. You can read more about Dr. Acker’s research, teaching and other activities on her website.
We are thrilled for Dr. Acker to join the FCoP Project team and we look forward to sharing more about the process and outcomes of her work with the FCoP project cohort!
Personal Greeting
Hello friends,
Earlier this month I heard the great news from Jessica and Zach the FCoP project leads that I’ve been awarded the research travel award as part of this important project to foster practice-based community around software preservation.
Over the course of the next two years I’ll be visiting a few of the current FCoP project sites to observe how software preservation practices are applied in different stewardship contexts and cultural heritage organizations. I’ll be interviewing team members and researching how administration and technical workflows, preservation standards, and metadata documentation are developed and deployed across different work sites. We know that cultural heritage organizations are currently engaged in a variety of new and emerging software preservation services—from metadata workflows to emulation as a service. But what we don’t know is how the unique environs of a cultural heritage organization and the people that make up these teams impact the theories, workflows, and applications of software preservation and emulation in different ways. What can libraries, archives, museums, LIS researchers and educators learn from these different workplace contexts? How do values, ethos, and unique community traits manifest in different places and shape software preservation practices? I can’t wait to find out.
I am thrilled to be joining the FCoP project team as the recipient of the research travel award! As part of this generous support from IMLS and the Software Preservation Network, I’ll be able to continue my research on the complex, changing, and contested roles of digital preservation in society.
If you have any questions or want to follow the work, you can read my Field Report series on the Research Field Reports page of the FCoP subsite, you can reach out to me directly or visit my homepage for updates.