January 26, 2011 -- Trevor Owens joined the Office of Strategic Initiatives in October, 2010 as digital archivist on the Technical Architecture Team. He will be working on a variety of NDIIPP projects, including Recollection and other projects involving access and discovery components of digital stewardship. Trevor comes to the Library after working for George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (external link).
Trevor Owens. Photo credit: Barry Wheeler
Owens' previous experience as community lead and "technology evangelist" at the Center for History and New Media prepared him well for his current work with NDIIPP. There, he was coordinator for all outreach and promotional efforts for Zotero (external link), an open source research management tool. His principal responsibility was to work with students, teachers and researchers and in this capacity led workshops for university and professional librarians on the use of Zotero. He comments, "I was responsible for representing the diverse community of users needs in the ongoing and iterative development of the software."
In addition, he authored the blog, wrote software documentation, gave presentations at a variety of conferences and in general served as "ombudsman" for the Zotero user community.
A few other interesting jobs in libraries and technology led him to this point. He worked as the press coordinator for the Games + Learning + Society (external link) conference in Madison Wisconsin for two years, worked as a part-time orchestra librarian and also as a mentor in a "Teach for America" literacy program.
Owens had been closely following the developments in NDIIPP long before he was a part of it, and was a speaker at last year’s NDIIPP sponsored National Strategy for Digital News Summit. So he jumped at the opportunity to work for the program full time. "It was very exciting to be part of the conversations about issues I was passionate about at the national level and it was clear that the NDIIPP team was full of great people working on great projects," he says.
Owens received a BA in the History of Science from University of Wisconsin: Madison, and an MA in History, with a focus on American history and Digital history, from George Mason University. He is currently completing a PhD in Research Methods and Instructional Technology in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University.
