Spending his career connecting historical records with emerging technologies to broaden access for the public, Peter B. Hirtle ’74 has been called a digital pioneer in information preservation and intellectual property.
A history major at Carleton, Hirtle earned a master’s degree in history from Johns Hopkins University and later a master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland. He has worked for leading institutions such as the National Library of Medicine, the National Archives and Records Administration, Cornell University, and Harvard University. In the early 1990s, he was among the first to advocate for the use of databases to preserve records and make them easily accessible to scholars and the public, leading the charge to introduce materials from the National Archives to the internet. In 1994, Hirtle was asked to join the national Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information and helped produce a report, “Preserving Digital Information,” which defined potential solutions for preserving digital media just as the internet began to explode with content.
Hirtle’s intensive work digitizing archival materials led to a newfound passion for intellectual property rights. He became an in-demand speaker at international forums and has authored several articles as well as a book, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitizing U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums. His expertise led to an appointment on the Library of Congress’s Section 108 Study Group, convened to consider ways to amend copyright law provisions, balancing the needs of copyright holders, libraries and archives, and public interest.
Hirtle has been actively involved with professional organizations such as the Research Libraries Group and the Society of American Archivists, where he has served on numerous committees and as president; in 2001, he was also elected a Fellow of the Society. He has also been a writer, reviewer, and associate editor for D-Lib Magazine. He and his wife, Sarah, live in Baltimore, Maryland.