I’m an archivist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on digital stewardship and responsible collecting practices for vulnerable cultural heritage materials.
Prior to my career as an archivist, I received a master’s degree in Latin American and early modern European history from the University of New Mexico. My research focused on 15th and 16th century travel and contact literature, apocalypticism, and the impact of the Protestant Reformations in 16th century New Spain and Peru.
When I came to the University of Texas at Austin School of Information in 2015, I planned on training to work with rare books and manuscripts, to complement my research background. Work with contemporary digital human rights records quickly grabbed my attention however, and my focus shifted instead to post-custodial projects at UT’s Benson Latin American Collection.
From 2016 to 2021 I contributed to the Benson’s Latin American Digital Initiatives online repository, launching digitization projects, overseeing digital collection QC, helping guide repository development, and leading collections ingest. Since graduating in 2017 the scope of my work has grown to include digital preservation, bulk processing with Python and the command line, and systems administration.
When I’m not archiving, I’m cooking, watching ’80s B movies, playing soccer, woodworking, and playing video games.
David A Bliss 