Genna Duplisea is an archivist, writer, and historian attuned to the challenges facing small cultural heritage organizations and the value of these organizations to their communities.

After working in her college’s archives as an undergrad, she worked in higher education for a few years and then earned her Master of Science in Library and Information Science with a concentration in archival management and her Master of Arts in history at Simmons College (now Simmons University) in Boston. For a decade she has been a “lone arranger,” first managing a university archives as a solo archivist, and now working as part of a collections team in a museum. She specializes in project management, policy and workflow development, archival processing, digitization, and training students as the next generation of cultural heritage workers.

She currently serves on the Rhode Island Historical Records Advisory Board (RIHRAB), and previously was the president of New England Archivists. Additionally, she a member of the 2017 Archives Leadership Institute cohort.

Her professional and research interests center on archives labor, women’s and environmental history, and archives in Gothic fiction. As a founding member of Archivists Responding to Climate Change (Project ARCC), she is also interested in the intersection of archives, human rights, and climate change.

As part of the Backlog team, Genna contributes to our archival needs assessments, often designing workflows and making recommendations on archival organization and processing, collections care, and metadata standards. She has presented over a dozen webinars for Backlog, including the following:

• Encoded Archival Description

• Digitization Projects

• Revolutions in 19th-Century Handwriting

• Deciphering Handwriting and Print

• Dublin Core for Omeka