Elizabeth Yakel

Elizabeth Yakel is an archivist, researcher, and educator in information science. Yakel is known for work advancing archival practice, the use of primary sources in archives education, studies of data reuse practices, and digital curation. Yakel is the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, where she has been on the faculty since 2000. She is the former coordinator of the Preservation of Information specialization in the Master of Science in Information program and teaches in the Archives and Record Management area. She specializes in digital archives and digital preservation and has developed five such graduate level courses at UM, including "Economics of Sustainable Digital Information" and "Practical Engagement Workshop in Digital Preservation."
Education.
She holds an A.B. from Brown University (1980), an A.M.L.S. from the University of Michigan (1982), and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1997). Her dissertation, "Recordkeeping in Radiology: The Relationships Between Activities and Records in Radiological Processes", won the 1997 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE). After graduation, she became an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences from 1997 to 2000 before returning to her alma mater.
Publications.
Yakel has published extensively, especially in academic journals. Her oeuvre includes more than 130 writings that have been cited over 2,600 times. Articles cited more than 90 times include:
One of her earliest publications of note is "Starting an Archives", a 1994 manual published by SAA and Scarecrow Press that provides the rationale for the establishment of an archival program and discusses the work involved in doing so.
In 2016, she and Doris Malkmus co-authored a module titled "Contextualizing Archival Literacy" for "Teaching with Primary Sources," a volume of SAA's "Trends in Archives Practice" series, which aims to "fill significant gaps in archival literature." This module has been praised for doing "an excellent job of describing the current state of teaching with primary sources."