Head of Archives & Special Collections
Maureen Cresci Callahan is director of Archives and Special Collections, where she supports the team’s mission of bearing witness of the wide diversity of human accomplishment and creativity by providing access to archives. She believes that archives are engines for empathy and provide the opportunity for us all to understand the world differently through the careful study of another person’s life and work.
Maureen is very active in the world of archival standards and is currently part of the leadership team for the national best practices group for archival accessioning. She had been co-chair of the Society of American Archivists’ technical subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard where she led that group’s effort to revise the core principles of archival description. She formerly worked as a curator of the women’s history archives at Smith College and as an archival technologist at Yale University, New York University, and Princeton University. Maureen is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the University of Michigan.
Areas of expertise
- Archival technical services
- Archives and library standards
- Metadata management and system integration
- Archival acquisition and appraisal
- 20th century US women’s history