Dr. Alexandria Rayburn is an assistant professor in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her PhD and MIS from the University of Michigan School of Information. Before and during graduate school, she worked in a variety of library, archive, and museum collections. Her research centers around the data practices in these collections.
Museum collections are many things, but primarily they function as repositories of information, where data-intensive work has been conducted for decades. These collections require highly skilled technicians to work on computing projects and maintain long-lived digital systems. However, in prior representations of this computing work, women’s voices and perspectives are underappreciated, even though they have significant labor contributions in this area.
Her presentation on September 9, 2026 explored two examples of early gendered data work at the National Museum of American History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art鈥攊nstitutions whose leadership in museum computing has had lasting implications for museum best practices and the value placed on computing tasks like data entry.
