"Making it Personal: Archival Practice and Public Access for Sensitive Subjects"

A dialogue between

David S. Ferriero

Tenth Archivist of the United States

&

Glenn Phillips

Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections

Getty Research Institute

David S. Ferriero served as the 10th Archivist of the United States, nominated by President Barack Obama in 2009. Under his leadership, Ferriero transformed and restructured the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with the goals of efficiency, modernization, and creative engagement in mind. Ferriero led the charge to increase NARA’s public accessibility through digital and social media communication, including instigating the crowd-sourced “citizen archivist” program, and he framed NARA’s activities in accordance with the Open Government principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. Ferriero was previously the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Library (NYPL), responsible for overseeing the landmark consolidation of NYPL’s wide-ranging research and branch services, and has held prominent positions in the academic libraries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and of Duke University. 

Glenn Phillips is Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute. He is a specialist in the history of curating and the international history of conceptual art, with a focus on video and performance art in Europe and the Americas. His acquisitions for the GRI include the archives of Simone Forti, Mary Kelly, Jack Goldstein, Claes Oldenburg, and the video archives of the Long Beach Museum of Art and The Kitchen. His curatorial projects, often organized collaboratively, include Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2021); Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions (2018–19); Artists and Their Books (2018); Video Art in Latin America (2017); Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films (2014); and It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969–73 (2011–12). He is currently working on retrospectives for the artists Barbara T. Smith (2023) and Fred Eversley (2024).

This program is FREE and open both to ATBL Supporters and to the public.

The first American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) David N. Redden Lecture was delivered in 2019 in honor of the ATBL’s then-chairman, David Redden. The son of a diplomat, Redden, born in 1949, travelled the world, living in China, Israel, and the UK before arriving in the United States. Redden was a collector himself, but is known primarily for his distinguished career as an auctioneer and Vice-Chairman at Sotheby’s—later Sotheby’s Worldwide Chairman of Books and Manuscripts. He specialized in the sale of books, manuscripts, and other collectibles. Some of Redden’s many notable sales privately or with Sotheby’s include the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ estate, and rocks brought back from NASA trips to the moon. In his professional capacity, Redden taught buyers to see the value in both the seemingly mundane artefacts of everyday life, such as comic books, and highlighted the sublimity of documents, books, and items connected to American and world history. At the ATBL, his exuberance, passion, and intellectual curiosity set the tone for the ATBL as a vibrant organization in step with the British Library, one of the world’s greatest research libraries, and its mission.

The David Redden Conversation honors the spirit of convening characteristic not only of David Redden’s personal gregariousness and generosity as a host, but also implicit in Redden’s work as an auctioneer and collector, illuminating the historical significance of objects or texts to the public. Framed as a dialogue between an invited panelist and an invited moderator, the David Redden Conversation selects a central topic of relevance to the collections of the British Library or to bibliophilic circles. Such topics might include endangered archives (collection support in the midst of under-resourced areas or in conflict zones), collecting ethics, that nature of digital literacy and digital preservation, or other such concepts. A dialogue format gives room for multiple voices to propose and respond to ideas, and mirrors the importance of interpersonal connection to all facets of David Redden’s life.