Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

We are pleased to announce that Digital Assets Administrator/Archivist J. Dustin Williams has been promoted to Assistant Director/Archivist effective 13 January 2022.

Williams joined the Hunt Institute in 2013 as our new Archivist, coming to us from the University Archives here at Carnegie Mellon. Williams has an M.L.I.S. with a focus on Archives, Preservation & Records Management from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and B.A.'s in English and Computer Science from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Utilizing his computer knowledge and skills, he commenced digitizing our Archives collection and making it accessible online. To date 403,000 pages and 160 collections have been digitized with numerous collection finding aids placed online. Seeing his success, we quickly tapped into his knowledge to expand the digitization efforts in our other departments as well as to upgrade our database offerings. By 2017 he was promoted to Digital Assets Administrator/Archivist to better reflect these increasing responsibilities. Since he arrived at the Institute, Williams has demonstrated exceptional leadership. He established a server to maintain our numerous Drupal databases enabling the staff to work from home during the early dark days of the pandemic. The Institute was able to maintain productivity thanks to his leadership and foresight.