Celebrating Dr. Michael Kurtz’s Accomplishments at the DCIC Center

The DCIC staff (past, present… and future) were very honored to celebrate Dr. Michael J. Kurtz for his leadership and (too) many (to count) contributions at the University of Maryland, most recently as the Associate Director of the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) in the College of Information Studies.

party-768x576Celebrating with DCIC members (past, current, and future) on May 9, 2018: Standing (left to right): Myeong Lee, Sohan Shah, Bill Underwood, Greg Jansen, Richard Marciano, Ken Heger, Will Thomas, Mary Kendig, Katrina Fenelon, Noah Dibert. Sitting (left to right): Cherie Loustaunau, Michael Kurtz

We are very grateful for all of Michael’s contributions, creativity, and boundless energy, and look forward to continued engagements beyond his tenure at the iSchool. Feel free to catch up with Michael over the summer at the Society of American Archives (SAA2018) Annual Conference:

Michael not only taught at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, for the last 18 years, but also became a full-time faculty member in 2011, and cofounded the DCIC Center in 2015 where he was the Associate Director until now. See:

Michael has been a tireless advocate and benefactor to the iSchool. He set up a 2012 bequest of $500,000 to establish the Michael J. Kurtz Professorship in Archives and Digital Curation, and in 2015 provided a second $500,000 bequest to create an endowment fund to support the DCIC Center’s efforts.

“In my life and career, the combination of education and archives has been very powerful, and my goal is to help expose students to the tools and technologies they are going to need for contemporary careers in archives.”

Michael is also co-founder of the Computational Archival Science (CAS) initiative in the DCIC (with colleagues from Kings College London, Georgia Tech, University of British Columbia, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center). See: CAS Portal: https://ai-collaboratory.net/cas

He has led DCIC Student Project efforts on the Legacy of Slavery project, in partnership with the Maryland State Archives, and the International Research Portal Project, with records related to looted Nazi-Era art. See:

Prior to this he worked at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for 37 years as a professional archivist, manager, and senior executive, including leading the National Declassification Center to streamline efforts to make billions of pages of government records public. His leadership was recognized by “Federal Computer Week” in 2005 with one of its prestigious Fed 100 Awards.

Michael received his doctoral degree in European History from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has published extensively in the fields of American history and archival management. His broad and eclectic scholarly work, among others, include: