Deborah Holmes-Wong

Director, USC Digital Library

Notable work and positions

USC Libraries — Director, Digital Library and Associate University Librarian
U.S.-China Institute at USC — former staff member
UCLA Asia Institute — former staff member

Biography

Deborah A. Holmes-Wong holds a bachelor's degree and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked as a librarian at the University of Southern California since 1987. Earlier in her USC career, she held positions with the U.S.-China Institute at USC and with UCLA's Asia Institute, where her responsibilities included marketing, program development, grant writing, publications management, and coordinating study abroad programs in East Asia and Shanghai.

Holmes-Wong began her work with the USC Digital Library as a project manager, leading its first migration from a homegrown system to commercial software. She went on to become director of the USC Digital Library, and her official title is now Director, Digital Library and Associate University Librarian, within USC Libraries. Founded in the mid-1990s, the Digital Library has grown under her leadership to include roughly 130 collections and nearly half a million digital objects comprising 1.5 million files, spanning the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts and the social sciences, and made publicly available online for research and teaching. As director, she has emphasized building collections documenting the hidden histories of Los Angeles's diverse communities, working with community archives and historical societies that hold the underlying materials.

Holmes-Wong has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on numerous federally and privately funded digital library projects, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. These have included the Association of Research Libraries' Scholars Portal Project; a Mellon-supported project preserving at-risk recordings of performances from 50 dance companies and archives across the United States; the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive; the International Mission Picture Archive; and an IMLS-funded digital residency program training staff and volunteers at community archives across Los Angeles in partnership with California State University, Dominguez Hills and California State University, Northridge. She has also led a large-scale inventory of USC Libraries' special collections, coordinated business-continuity efforts across the USC Libraries system during the COVID-19 pandemic, and overseen upgrades to the USC Libraries' website, integrated library system, and digital library search experience.

Career highlights

1. Director, USC Digital Library. Leads an academic digital library that has grown to roughly 130 collections and nearly half a million digital objects, focusing in part on documenting the hidden histories of Los Angeles's diverse communities.

2. Multi-institution digital residency program. Co-led an IMLS-funded program training 150 staff and volunteers across 30 Los Angeles-area community archives, in partnership with CSU Dominguez Hills and CSU Northridge.

3. Preservation of at-risk dance recordings. Led a Mellon Foundation-supported project preserving recordings of culturally significant performances from 50 dance companies and archives nationwide.