Martha R. Mahard

Martha Mahard recently retired after a 35-year career at Harvard University where her first position was in the Harvard Theatre Collection of the Houghton Library. She became Assistant Curator and Manuscript/Special Collections cataloger in the Theatre Collection in 1981, the Visual Resources Librarian at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1989, Curator of Visual Collections in the Fine Arts Library in 1995, and Curator of Historic Photographs in the Fine Arts Library in 2000. After leaving Harvard she joined the full-time faculty at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She has taught at Simmons since 1994, specializing in art documentation, photographic archives, and preservation of both analog and digital media. Mahard has lectured and published on a variety of topics including education for visual resources librarianship, and the collaborative experiences involved in the successful implementation of VIA (Harvard union catalog of visual materials). She has been active in ARLIS/NA, VRA, and the Visual Materials Section of SAA. In addition to her teaching responsibilities she was co-principle investigator for the IMLS-funded project “Curriculum, Cooperation, Convergence, Capacity - Four Cs for the Development of Cultural Heritage Institutions” which is focusing on the education of information professionals for the cultural heritage sector.