UMD College of Information: A Conversation with David S. Ferriero
ESJ 0202: Thursday April 10th, 2025 4-5:30 p.m.
David S. Ferriero, a Massachusetts native, planned for a degree in English literature at Northeastern University. Early on in his college life, his studies were interrupted when he left school to serve as a Navy hospital corpsman in the Vietnam War. Following his service from 1967 to 1971, he finally completed his bachelor's in 1972. For the following 4 years, Ferrerio completed a Master’s program in library sciences in 1976, which commenced a 31-year career at the MIT library, followed by 8 years as the university librarian at Duke. He also led the New York Public Library's research libraries before President Obama appointed him 10th United States’ Archivist. Ferriero became a driving force in modernizing the national archives, bringing new standards and improving accessibility of the archives over his twelve years of service.
During his tenure, Ferriero led the development of three presidential libraries. The George W. Bush library, in Dallas, holds records from the Bush administration, featuring pieces of major U.S. historical events, including 9/11 & the following War on Terror. The Barack Obama library, based in Chicago, is set to be the first entirely digital presidential library. While the documents are all accessed online, the monument serves as part of the public library system, a hub for education and a gathering spot for public events. Ferriero also organized the Donald J. Trump library, an online website that follows the lead of the Obama library. As evident in his influence over the presidential libraries, Ferriero influenced the archives most through his action promoting a transition to digital record-keeping. Ferriero holds the opinion that digitization is a “mission-critical transformation” for the archives, and he offers some clear-cut reasoning for his stance. With the sheer volume of records generated by the modern government that require processing and storage, as well as an extensive amount of these records originating digitally (emails, texts, etc.), traditional archives practices are not sustainable. The transition to digital record-keeping greatly improves efficiency, considering records are stored in a fraction of the space, and are significantly quicker to search and retrieve, saving any user time. These benefits also translate to money saved and decreased environmental footprint by dropping the need for resources like ink and paper. A digital format also decreases the risk of losing documents through damage and deterioration. Water and fire damage is a serious concern for physical documents. Ferriero also adds that computerized archives are key to actively serving the general public. He argues that records should be available to anyone at any time, and geographical barriers limiting access to information are eliminated with online archives. Ferriero also saw an opportunity to improve civic engagement within the archives through his digital change, so he initiated the citizen archivist program. The citizen archivists are invited to review and transcribe new online documents, as well as organize the existing archives by labeling documents with relevant tags.
Ferriero provides a convincing argument in support of digital archives, and the advantages he lists are indeed useful developments, however, there are some implications to consider. An online platform may raise questions concerning how documents can be assuredly authentic. An online environment brings more complexity to maintaining integrity of the documents. Digital archives may be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, like hacks and data tampering/breaching. So a strong system must be built to support online archives, ensuring the safety and legitimacy of their files and reliability of back-ups. Additionally, technology isn’t perfect, beyond human exploits lies the risk of data loss and file corruption. How can we guarantee these dangers won’t affect the archives. Technology is a dynamic frontier that is perpetually advancing, formats, platforms, and hardware change with the technological climate, so it will eventually require efforts to preserve records even in their electronic forms. All things considered, with his time as the 10th archivist, David Ferriero was led by values of modernization and utility. He combined innovation and accessibility in his work to expand the digital archive database, redefining the roles and responsibilities of the U.S. archives in the process.