Lori Lindberg

About me:

I am an incurable academic, a classic Type A person who charges ahead on everything...speak up, or I'm long past you, waving as I go.

I have made my living, and learned life experience the most, as a barmaid in college; a singer: at churches, in the opera, at funerals, at weddings; as a music store manager for the Wherehouse (when they were a decently successful, but stupid, company); as an archivist both for the private and public sector, mostly in banking and the arts; and as a teacher of English, of music, of information science.

I am an archivist by trade, meaning I work with the organization and preservation of records of all types, whether they be paper, film, sound, photograph, or electronic. Without me historians cannot search history, governments would run more amok than they already do, and the marginalized would be even more marginalized. I work as a consultant, and I teach. I am full-time faculty at San Jose State University, teaching in the graduate School of Library and Information Science. I teach an introductory course in Archives and Manuscripts and two seminars: one in electronic records and one in EAD: Encoded Archival Description, an XML-based document type for the presentation of archival information on the internet. I am an expert on recordkeeping metadata.

My research interests lie in electronic records and archival informatics: the role of technology in archivy (some call it archival studies, some archival science, others archivology, or archivistics): how we organize, describe, preserve, and provide access to the artifacts of our culture. As we become more and more dependent on technology, less is produced in a viable medium that can be easily preserved. I work with a couple of international research projects connected with the preservation of born-digital objects...what happens to these MySpace pages, for example? What about blogs, e-zines, bulletin boards, e-mail, websites? What will we have to tell the stories of lives as we live them in this 21st century? Preservation of our electronic artifacts is key.

I have two beautiful children who I don't get to spend enough time with at this point, but I am busting my ass now in order to get tenure and settle down.

I am an avid concert-goer, and I have been to lots of shows. Not as many as other maniacs I know, but I haven't done too badly. What stops me now? Forget child care, it's the ticket prices!