The Academic Preservation Trust (http://aptrust.org) announced today that Bradley J. Daigle will become the consortium’s executive director on March 25, 2021. APTrust is an institutional-membership organization working together on the unique challenges of preserving rapidly increasing amounts of digital scholarly and cultural-heritage materials for future generations. At present, the consortium has 16 higher-education members that have deposited some 156 terabytes of digital content in the preservation repository first built by their collaboration in 2014.
“Bradley is known at national and international levels for his contributions in digital preservation practice,” said Winston Tabb, the APTrust governing board chair who is Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins University. “His recent work leading a National Digital Stewardship Alliance team that updated a core resource in that practice--the ‘Levels of Digital Preservation’--is great evidence of his readiness to guide APTrust in coming years.”
The new full-time role of executive director was created by merging the two formerly part-time roles of program director, previously held by Chip German who is retiring in May, and of content and strategy expert, previously held by Daigle. The executive director is accountable to the APTrust governing board and reports to board member John Unsworth, who as Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Virginia oversees hosting of the APTrust consortium at his institution. APTrust staff are UVA employees.
“Bradley is a long-time UVA librarian who has been working on APTrust since its birth as an idea more than a decade ago,” Unsworth said. “APTrust is fortunate to have someone with his combination of passion and experience at the helm as it heads into its next phase.”
Bradley Daigle has been actively immersed in digital preservation since 2008, recently leading a team that won the Digital Preservation Coalition’s International Council on Archives Digital Preservation Award for Collaboration and Cooperation. Currently he also leads the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Service Hub, Digital Virginias. A librarian for more than 20 years, he has published and presented on a wide range of topics including mass digitization, digital curation and stewardship, sustaining digital scholarship, intellectual property issues, mentoring in libraries, and digital preservation. He received his MA in literature from the University of Montréal and an MLS from Catholic University.