Mark A. Greene

Mark Greene has been the director of the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, since 2002. The AHC is a 75,000 cubic foot manuscript repository, university archives, and rare book library, and administers a host of programs including Wyoming History Day. Under his direction, the AHC performed a six-year comprehensive collection analysis, developed its first formal collecting policy, cataloged the entirety of its 3,000 collections, and implemented one of the nation’s largest reappraisal and deaccessioning programs. In the absence of a dedicated acquisition archivist, Mark has trained all the archivists at the AHC to perform donor relations, appraisal, and acquisition in specified collecting areas.

Prior to coming to the AHC, Mark was Head of Research Center Programs at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. (formerly Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village), including supervision of the library, archives, museum cataloging, and digitization. For eleven years Mark was the curator of manuscripts acquisition at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), responsible for donor relations, collection development, and appraisal. (He acquired one of the nation’s first collections of websites, documenting the 1997 Red River Valley floods.) At MHS Mark also worked closely with museum acquisition personnel, and served on the appraisal/accessioning committee for the state archives. Mark’s first full-time professional position (1985-89) was as archivist for Carleton College. He received his education as an archivist from the University of Michigan, as part of his MA in US History.

Mark has published more than twenty peer-reviewed articles and chapters in U.S., Canadian, British, Swiss, Spanish, and Brazilian archival publications, on the topics of appraisal and collection development, reappraisal and deaccessioning, business records, congressional collections, privacy in personal papers, the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, using university archives as instructional material, working with under-represented communities, the tension between context and content in archival theory, the relevance of postmodernism to practicing archivists, collecting and preserving web sites, and archival values. With Dennis Meissner he researched and published the article now known as MPLP. He developed the Midwest Archives Conference’s one-day workshop on the Fundamentals of Archival Appraisal, and taught the workshop at regional meetings across the country. Mark has chaired the SAA Manuscripts Repository Section, Congressional Papers Roundtable, and Committee on Education and Professional Development, served on SAA Council and as SAA President, and was elected an SAA Fellow.