School of Information Management

Faculty of Management

Greg Bak

Assistant Professor of History (Archival Studies), University of Manitoba

Favourite aspect of your job? Most exciting part of your job?  Most rewarding part of your job? Proudest moment so far? Without question my favourite part of my job, and the most exciting and most rewarding part of my job, is working with students. In addition to teaching digital archives, I also teach the history of digital culture. I am particularly proud of my students when they begin to identify and analyze the historical and cultural contingencies of the technologies that they use every day - including the technologies we use in teaching and learning, and the various technologies involved in archiving analogue as well as digital materials.

Have you followed a circuitous path to your current position, or a straightforward path?Circuitous, for sure. Since graduating with my MLIS from Dalhousie I have been employed as a rare books curator, a digital information specialist, a digital archivist and as a manager.

What skill is most in-demand for people entering the field today? Digital archivists have now established stable, robust approaches to appraising, acquiring, describing, preserving and providing access to digital records. The archival field as a whole, however, still needs many, many more archivists who are comfortable working with digital archival systems on both an administrative and a technical level.

Words of advice for MLIS students? Is there anything you wish you had known when you entered your professional that would be helpful to someone entering it today? We are smarter together than alone - a lesson that I learned, in part, through group work at Dal SIM.