Heather Yager
Digital Media Archivist
650-810-1895
Heather manages the Museum's digital artifact collection. She is currently working on building a stable storage and content management system to house the Museum's 70 terabyte (and growing) digital collection. Her other projects include collecting and preserving video game sound and music, exploring the ways modern tech companies can begin to self-archive their largely digital institutional records, and expanding the Museum's collecting scope to include new digital archival media such as data sets, email records, and personal filesystems.
Before joining the Museum, Heather worked as a database programmer and system administrator at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, where she designed and administered collections databases and managed the web servers for the Academy's research group. She began her archival career several years earlier at the Xerox Historical Archive in Rochester, NY, where she provided technical and archival assistance. Since then, Heather has also worked in library reference at Carnegie Mellon University, done web programming at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and volunteered as the general library manager at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, NY.
Heather completed a Master of Library and Information Science degree at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences, where she concentrated on digital collections and database design. She also has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Binghamton University.
When she is not at work, Heather plays the piano, reads extensively, and seeks adventures.