Riccardo Ferrante

Riccardo Ferrante is a digital curation practitioner, administrator and educator with a focus on digital preservation methodology, tools and best practices applied in the contexts of analog and born digital archival collections. Currently, he is Director of Digital Services at the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, D.C. where he manages large scale and on-demand digital preservation projects, the Electronic Records Program, the biodiversity-focused Field Book Project, and the Archives’ web and social media activities. He spearheaded the Archives’ contributions in the development Smithsonian Transcription Center, recipient of the 2016 Gold MUSE Award for Digital Communities.

Before this position, Ferrante worked as the Archives’ Information Technology Archivist where he established the Electronic Records Program in 2004 and implemented a standards-based, best practice born-digital preservation practice to address the breadth of formats and technology challenges poised by the Smithsonian’s digital history. Today, the program addresses the preservation of born-digital collections in an average of one hundred new accessions annually.

As a project manager and investigator of the Collaborative Electronic Records Project (2005-2008, Rockefeller Archive Center and Smithsonian Institution Archives), Ferrante led a team of archivists and computer scientists to create guidance and software for the archival preservation of email correspondence.

Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Mr. Ferrante worked in product management and software development for a global integrated library systems vendor. He earned his B.S. degree from Northwestern University.