Keynote

Every Job Is a Climate Job (Especially Those That Steward the Digital)

Lisa Spiro and Justin Wadland

This talk encourages art librarians, curators, and any other professional that steward digital materials to bring an awareness of climate change to their work. As co-facilitators of the Digital Library Federation Climate Justice Working Group, we will share our efforts to build a community of colleagues who seek to take action as a collective and within their institutions. We offer insights from work we have done at our home institutions and will close with an opportunity for participants to begin to identify a path toward climate wayfinding in their professional practice.

Professional headshot of Lisa Spiro with short brown hair standing against a tree

Lisa Spiro is co-facilitator of the DLF Climate Justice Working Group and Assistant University Librarian for Digital Scholarship and Organizational Development at Rice University’s Fondren Library. At Fondren, she leads the Green Team, which received one of the American Library Association's Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change seed grants in 2020 to support its work on environmental justice. She presented a poster on how the digital humanities community can address climate change at DH2024 and co-authored the CLIR publications “Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?” and Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective.

Justin Wadland is co-facilitator of the DLF Climate Justice Working Group and serves as Head of Digital Scholarship Services at Michigan State University Libraries and the lead for the Digital Scholarship Lab. At MSU, he is a member of the Library Environmental Committee and is contributing to the MSU Libraries Sustainable Library Initiative Certification Process. His career in digital scholarship and digital collections began at the University of Washington Tacoma Library, where he established a campus institutional repository, initiated the UW Tacoma Oral History: Founding Stories, and contributed to the UW Libraries tri-campus efforts to establish digital scholarship programs. He writes creative nonfiction and is the author of the award-winning book Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound.

Professional headshot of Justin Wadland with smile and glasses in front of a tree

The SEI 2026 Keynote will be live-streamed over YouTube on Wednesday, June 17, at 1:30 pm EDT.