The Digital Collections and Archives and the Tisch Library are pleased to welcome Samantha (Sam) DeWitt to Tufts University as a National Digital Stewardship Resident. Sam comes to us as a nine-month resident through the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program in Boston. The program is administered by Harvard Library and MIT Libraries with generous funding from the Laura Bush 21st Century Library Program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. NDSR—Boston is sponsoring five residents this year at Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, WGBH, and Tufts. This program and a parallel program in New York are part of effort to develop a digital stewardship residency program initiated by the Library of Congress. The goal of the program is to “develop the next generation of digital stewardship professionals, through funded, post-graduate residencies.” More information about the NDSR-Boston program is at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ndsr_boston.
At Tufts Sam will be working on exploring strategies for Tufts to gain a more complete understanding of the research data produced by its faculty, research staff, post docs, and graduate students. In particular, this project will investigate and test strategies for producing metadata objects that represent Tufts-created research datasets and managing those representative objects in Tufts’ Fedora-based institutional repository.
Sam was previously at the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard University where, among other activities, she reviewed DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), Harvard’s model service for sharing and preserving scholarly objects. She also has experience at the Watertown Free Public Library; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Fuller Craft Museum. Sam has a MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. She has also maintained a steady practice in fine arts, specializing in abstract landscapes.