Faculty Spotlight: Ken Heger, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Archives and Digital Curation Specialization
After being adjunct faculty for three years, Ken Heger joined the iSchool full time at the beginning of 2015. Given his career-long experience in the National Archives (NARA) in a variety of different roles—reference archivist, front-line supervisor, assistant branch chief, branch chief managing the research rooms in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., and program manager in the Office of Research Services—the iSchool’s Archives and Digital Curation Specialization is lucky that Ken wanted to continue working in the field of archives. His practical experience presenting at conferences as NARA’s representative and working with NARA’s national and international stakeholders means that Ken is ideally suited to lead the Archives and Digital Curation Specialization in its continued growth and to ensure that growth responds to the needs of modern-day archives. Some MLIS students will have the luck of having Ken for their field-study and others will get hands-on experience with archival issues such as processing, describing, and digitizing records. In his own research, the Global Journeys, Local Communities Project, he is looking at the records of American veterans from 1865–1917 and has produced a dataset within which students can mine correspondence files, digitize and datafy vintage postcards and maps, and use the data they extract to create dynamic datasets. Ken is proud of how his students apply what they have learned from him in class at home or chat excitedly among themselves about what they have discovered in their own research. Outside of the iSchool, Ken enjoys walking, especially at his western Maryland house near a few state parks and hanging out in his FROG…that’s a “furnished room over garage” in case you didn’t know, where he watches old episodes of Dr. Who.