Meredith Evans is an archivist, historian and scholar and the director of the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta.[1] Her work focuses on the African-American experience in the United States, including the documentation of archival records from African-American churches in the Atlanta area,[2] and the preservation of social media from recent civil rights protests such as those of the Ferguson unrestinFerguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown.
While a curator at Atlanta University Center, Evans was instrumental in obtaining an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for the digitization of the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.[1] As an archivist, she co-taught a workshop in archival preservation titled "The Lessons of Pilgrim Baptist Church: Preventing the Loss of Your Heritage," which addressed the care and preservation of church archives and records in the wake of a tragic fire that destroyed the historic Pilgrim Baptist ChurchinChicago in early 2006.[7]
Later, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Evans held the title of Associate University Librarian for Special Collections & Digital Programs.[8]
Meredith Evans was formerly the Associate University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis.[9] During her tenure there, the WUSTL library was active in the creation of Documenting Ferguson, a community-curated digital repository documenting the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of police.[10][11] She has written about the impact of new archival methods to "collect the now" as related to born-digital materials that are preserved by modern archives in a post-custodial era of archival science.[12] In 2014, WUSTL joined with the University of California at Riverside and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park, and later received a Mellon foundation grant to create Documenting the Now: Supporting the Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content, an initiative to ethically collect and preserve Twitter feeds around topics of social justice for future scholarly research.[13]
In November, 2015 Dr. Evans was named as the new director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.[1]
Evans, Meredith R., PhD (2007) The Digitization of African American Publications, The Serials Librarian, 53:1-2, 203-210, DOI: 10.1300/J123v53n01_16
Evans, Meredith R. (2015) Modern Special Collections: Embracing the Future While Taking Care of the Past, New Review of Academic Librarianship, 21:2, 116-128. DOI:10.1080/13614533.2015.1040926
^Shannon, Davis; Rudolph, Clay; Meredith, Evans; Makiba, Foster; Chris, Freeland; Nadia, Ghasedi; Jennifer, Kirmer; Sonya, Rooney; Micah, Zeller (1 January 2015). "Documenting Ferguson: Building a community digital repository". Washington University Open Scholarship.
^"Documenting Ferguson". Process: a blog for American history. 10 August 2015. Retrieved 20 February 2017.