Eira Tansey will open Digital Preservation 2017  with a talk entitled “The Necessary Knowledge,” which will explore the relationship between environmental policy and the preservation of records.

Tansey is the Digital Archivist/Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati, where she is responsible for institutional records management, developing digital preservation policies, and working with born-digital archives. She previously worked at Tulane University Library’s Louisiana Research Collection, and has a B.A. in Geography from the University of Cincinnati, and an M.L.I.S. from San Jose State University’s School of Information.

Tansey’s research and writing focuses on the intersection of archives, the environment, and climate change. Her 2015 article “Archival adaptation to climate change” called for a broad response from the American archivist community to consider the impact of climate change on the profession and documentary cultural heritage. Her current work focuses on the relationship between records, land ownership, and environmental policy. She is also working with colleagues from Penn State University to map American archives’ exposure to climate change, and is collaborating on a Society of American Archivists Foundation grant to develop a comprehensive open  database of archival repository location data to aid future spatial analysis.

She currently serves as the vice-chair of the Society of American Archivists Records Management Section, as co-chair of the Midwest Archives Conference 2018 meeting program committee, and is resident caretaker for ProjectARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change). Tansey is a member of the 2017 Archives Leadership Institute cohort.