Description
Written by Meredith R. Evans
Our newest Fellow is a practitioner and professor, cataloger and metadata specialist, historian and archivist, and to me a colleague and friend. Kathy and I have shared a few milestones together and some of my fondest memories of North Carolina are times spent with Kathy Wisser. We debated history, theory and pedagogy, discussed updates to the North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online (NC-ECHO) project, and worked together at North Carolina State University. Along the way we listened to quite a bit of Led Zeppelin and celebrated birthdays.
Kathy understood early on that how information is organized has societal influence and even global impact. She recognized early that consistent, inclusive description enables accurate and equitable sharing and discovery. Her contributions as an archivist and educator are visible in the changes she brought to various repositories and in the numerous archivists she educated at Simmons College, where she serves as director of the Archives Concentration and as co-director of the dual degree in archives and history. Kathy has built a career examining how information is organized and the implicit bias and varying perceptions within classification systems. She brings her deep knowledge of both to inform and develop archival metadata encoding standards that benefit us all. Her contributions to developing, expanding, and updating standards like Encoding Archival Description (EAD), Encoded Archival Context (EAC), and Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) is nothing short of phenomenal. Her publications, teaching, mentoring and most of all commitment to SAA help us to better understand the power of structured data and how to improve the ways in which we approach our work in a swiftly changing profession and world.
Please join me in welcoming to the ranks of the SAA Fellows, in the words of her nominators, an educator with tremendous pedagogical energy, a mentor who teaches us that we all play a role in shaping the future of the field, an outstanding professional, and also an outstanding person: Kathy Wisser.