Amanda Focke
Director, Woodson Research Center
Fondren Library
Rice University
Amanda Focke, director of the Woodson Research Center in the Fondren Library at Rice University, is a certified archivist and digital archives specialist. The Woodson Research Center is home to the library’s rare books, university archives and a wide variety of archival collections, including the Archives of the Impossible. Focke is a past president and board member of the Society of Southwest Archivists, and currently serves as an instructor for Texas Archival Resources Online. Her work in the archives focuses on expanding the voices included in the collections, and on preservation and access for various formats, such as photographs, letters, oral histories, ephemera, audio, video and born-digital materials. Focke has advised many digital humanities projects which transform handwritten, print, and image data into electronic formats that allow new paths of inquiry and visualization.