Alumnus to Discuss Digitally Preserving Theater History

Alumnus Doug Reside will present on his experience in preserving theater history as the New York Public Library’s Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, April 27-28 in the Student Union Building Activities Room.

As the keynote speaker for the Senior Seminar Capstone Conference, Reside will give a presentation on “The Tale of the Ant-Lion: A Digital Humanities Adventure” at 12:30 p.m. April 27 and on “How Do You Catch a Cloud and Pin It Down? Preserving Musical Theatre in the Digital Present” at 1:30 p.m. April 28.

After graduating from Truman in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Bachelor of Science in computer science, Reside earned his Master of Arts from Truman and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, both in English. Since 2011, Reside has served as the New York Public Library’s Digital Curator for the Performing Arts. In this position, he initiated, created and oversaw a number of digital archive and access projects. Reside also served as product owner for the library’s digital repository. His leadership helped advance the work of the repository and related services, such as the metadata management system and importing data from other bibliographic tools.

The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library includes approximately five million items pertaining to dramatic performance in all its diversity. The division’s holdings illuminate virtually every type of performance and include drama and musical theater, film, television, radio and popular entertainment. While it houses an extraordinary array of traditional reference materials, the division’s strength lies in its unparalleled collection of theater ephemera as well as its pioneering efforts to document theater on videotape and film.

Before joining the library, Reside was the associate director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in Humanities, where he taught a course on theater history and digital humanities and worked on projects to develop a standard for the annotation and citation of digital objects, video and 3D materials. Reside has also served on the American Theater Archive Project; as a board member of the Theater Library Association; as an organizer of the 2009 Song, Stage and Screen Conference; and his writing has appeared in Theatre Survey, Studies in Musical Theatre and other publications.

Both presentations are free and open to the public.