Summary
Nathan Gerth is the Head of Digital Services at the University Libraries. In this role, he directs a team responsible for maintaining Libraries’ enterprise applications and digital preservation systems. He also provides strategic vision for core system upgrades and serves as the Libraries’ web accessibility liaison.
Outside of the University he has been an active participant in the digital preservation community, especially regarding political collections and the unique challenges posed by complex digital data types. He is an active participant in organizations like the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, Dryad, and the Coalition for Networked Information. He also serves on a working group focused on good practices for email preservation.
Education
M.A. University of Kansas
Ph.D. University of Notre Dame
Selected projects and publications
Publications
Boss, E.E. and Gerth, N. (2020), "Reducing system toil in a university library", Library Management, Vol. 41 No. 4/5, pp. 173-181.
“Data As Collections,” BLOGGERS!: The Blog of SAA’s Electronic Records Section. October 15, 2019
“Bringing the Hammer Down: Using MALLET to Assign Authority Records to Senator Heller’s Press Records,” Electronic Records Committee Blog. May 29, 2019.
Projects
- A Thousand Miles of Desert and Mountains
- Collaborated with the Special Collections unit in the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries and the Washoe County Public Library to produce a virtual exploration of a set of prospecting diaries entitled, "A Thousand Miles of Desert and Mountains."
- Wild Horse and Burro Collection
- Harvested and reconstituted 89,000 pages of documents previously housed in a proprietary database by the Nevada Commission for the Preservation of Wild Horses. Led the processing team charged with ingesting the records into the University of Nevada Reno, Libraries’ repository.
- Anthropology Research Museum Baskets Collection
- Oversaw development of a 3D content model to facilitate rendering of scans produced from a collection of baskets from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Anthropology Research Museum. Managed ingest of the collection into the libraries’ repository.
- Senator Harry Reid Electronic Records
- Developed and configured infrastructure and procedures for processing the 16 million objects (7 TB of data) received from the Senator’s offices. Arranged and described the collection as a lone arranger over the course of two years.