Trevor Owens

Trevor Owens is a Digital Archivist/Historian with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Broadly speaking, he works on digital strategy for cultural heritage organizations. His work focuses on analysis and preservation of born digital artifacts and tools and practices for making digital and digitized cultural heritage objects accessible and useful to a wide range of audiences.

At the Library of Congress he plays a key role in defining national strategy for digital preservation. In this respect, he contributed to Preserving.exe Report: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software and Science at Risk: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Online Science. He also serves as a co-chair for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Infrastructure working group and as a project manager for the open source source Viewshare cultural heritage collection visualization tool.

In 2013, he served as the Special Curator for an expansive online collection and thematic exhibition Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: From Galileo to Sagan and Beyond.  Before joining the Library of Congress he was the community lead for the Zotero project  at the Center for History and New Media and before that managed outreach for the Games, Learning, and Society Conference.

Trevor has a doctorate in social science research methods and educational technology from the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. Trevor’s research focuses on the history and design of online community software systems, video games and culture, and software tools for humanities scholarship. His training is in the history of science, digital history and research methods in the social sciences.

His work has been published in Curator: The Museum Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Journal of Digital Humanities,  D-Lib,  Simulation & Gaming, Science Communication, Cultural Studies of Science Education and On the Horizon. In 2009 he was chosen by Read Write Web as one of the 50+ Semantic Web Pros to Follow on Twitter, and won the C. W. Bright Pixel Prize for the Best History and New Media Project for building PlayingHistory, an open collaborative directory of digital historical games and interactives. He also wrote a book for Arcadia Press about the history of Fairfax County told through postcards.

Trevor holds a bachelors degree in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin, and a masters degree in American History with an emphasis on digital history from George Mason University. He is also a violinist. He likes to read graphic novels. Trevor lives Burke Virginia with his wife Marjee Chmiel and their dogs Bowser andZelda.