Jessica Grimmer, Ph.D., MLIS

I investigate how digital infrastructures sustain cultural memory, with a particular focus on music and the performing arts. My work asks how archives, technologies, and communities intersect to preserve creative processes and ensure long-term access to cultural heritage.

I contend that digital curation is not only a technical practice but a cultural act, shaping what stories, sounds, and records endure. By uniting perspectives from archives, information science, and musicology, I seek to demonstrate how infrastructures of preservation actively construct cultural memory and how we might sustain them more effectively into the future.

I currently serve as the Co-Director of the Center for Archival Futures (CAFe) and Lecturer at the University of Maryland's College of Information.

Current Research

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Digital Humanities in Music

I research how digital humanities methods are reshaping the field of music scholarship—changing how we conduct research, share knowledge, and teach. My writing examines both the opportunities and the challenges these methods bring, with particular attention to the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) as a case study in how disciplinary standards evolve. A central concern of this work is sustainability: how digital projects in music can endure over time, remain usable across generations of scholars, and continue to foster collaboration.

Preserving Composers' Process

My research examines how composers work in the digital age, where creative sketches often take the form of software files, notation programs, and audio workstations rather than paper manuscripts. In partnership with composers, archivists, and musicologists, I am studying born-digital workflows to identify strategies for preserving compositional process. This project develops best practices for safeguarding contemporary music—ensuring that the next generation of scholars and performers can trace the creative path behind today’s works.

Opera on the Nation's Stage

This project investigates the history of opera in Washington, D.C. from the late 19th century to the present, considering how the nation’s capital has served as a stage for both artistic innovation and cultural politics. My co-author Christina Taylor Gibson, and I are pioneering the “narrative bibliography,” a new scholarly genre that combines archival research with historiographical reflection. We also employ digital humanities methods to map the interconnected networks of artists, institutions, and venues that have shaped the city’s operatic life.

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Sustaining Digital Knowledge Infrastructures

As a contributing researcher on the Sustaining Digital Community Collections initiative, I collaborated with community archives and cultural heritage institutions to advance equitable, community-centered strategies for preserving digital collections. Through this work, we addressed key questions of ownership, representation, and sustainability in digital humanities, ultimately producing guidelines and a toolkit to empower both community archives and cultural institutions to co-create enduring digital resources that remain accessible, impactful, and community-driven over time. See more here.

Teaching

At the University of Maryland’s College of Information, I teach courses primarily for students in the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program. My classes introduce students to the principles and practices of records management, digital curation, and archival theory, always with an emphasis on connecting scholarship to professional practice. I also design and teach special elective courses that bridge music and information, drawing on my background in musicology and digital humanities to explore how emerging technologies transform cultural heritage. Across all of my teaching, I emphasize experiential learning, critical engagement with information infrastructures, and the creation of resources that serve both scholarly and community audiences.

Courses:

TBA AI and Music: History and Practice ( Spring 2026)

LBSC671 Lifecycle of Records (Fall 2025, Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024)

INST 643 Curation for Cultural Institutions (Fall 2025)

INST785 Documentation, Collection, and Appraisal (Spring 2025)

INST646 Principles of Records Management (Spring 2025)

INST728 Music Encoding for Preservation and Research (Fall 2024)

INST341 Intro to Digital Curation (Spring 2024)

Publications

Fenlon, Katrina, Jessica Grimmer, Alia Reza, and Travis Wagner. "The Oyster Model: Understanding Community Roles in Sustaining Digital Cultural Knowledge Infrastructures." Archival Science 25 (2025): 37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-025-09510-z.

Grimmer, Jessica H. "Trust and Sensitivity in Teaching Music and the Holocaust." In Teaching Difficult Topics in Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, October 2024.

Davis, John, Vin Novara, Jessica Grimmer. “‘Everybody's talking about their hometown scene’: Digitizing Ian MacKaye’s fanzine collection at the University of Maryland.” Journal of Digital Media Management, December 2023.

Kijas, Anna, Joy Calico, Jake Schaub, Jessica Grimmer, Anna Plaksin, Javier F. Merchán Sánchez-Jara, and Sara González Gutiérrez. ““Roundtable: Pedagogical Approaches to Music Encoding.” Journal of Musicological Research 1-32 (2023): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2023.2231837

Grimmer, Jessica. “Copyright.” Notes 80, no. 1 (2023): 50–57. 10.1353/not.2023.a905314

Grimmer, Jessica. “Mapping Jessye Norman’s Singing Legacy.” Archival Outlook, (September/October 2023): 9, 31.

Grimmer, Jessica H. “‘But I Have No Recollection…’: Representations of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Schoenberg’s a Survivor from Warsaw.” Journal of Musicological Research 42, no. 1 (2023): 2–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411896.2023.2200182

Fenlon, Katrina, Jessica H. Grimmer, Alia Reza, Courtnie Thurston and Travis Wagner. “Community-Centered Strategies for Sustaining Digital Humanities Scholarship (1.1).” Zenodo, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6964682

Grimmer, Jessica H. "The Composer in Exile: Darius Milhaud's Suite Française." Journal of Band Research, Vol. 57 no. 2, Spring 2022.

Fenlon, Katrina, Jessica H Grimmer, Alia Reza, and Courtnie Thurston. “‘Meaning in the Present’: Understanding Sustainability for Digital Community Collections.” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, October 2021. Winner, best short paper. 10.1002/pra2.476

Fenlon, Katrina, Jessica H Grimmer, and Courtnie Thurston. “Purpose, Completeness, and Evidential Source: Typological Signposts in the Collections Landscape.” Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology57, no. 1 (2020). 10.1002/pra2.262

Grimmer, Jessica. “Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change through Music by Tricia Tunstall and Eric Booth.” Notes 74, no. 3 (2018): 409–12.

Grimmer, Jessica H. “Book Review: The Music History Classroom.” Notes 70, no. 4 (2014): 713–15.

Grimmer, Jessica H. "Book Review: Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth Levy. Music Research Forum, 2013.

Presentations

Conference Papers

Presented, with Katrina Fenlon, Alia Feza, and Travis Wagner, “Mutual Sustainability Among Communities and their Knowledge Infrastructures” at the Association for Information Science and Technology annual meeting, London, England, October 2023.

Presented, with Anna Kijas and Timothy Duguid, “Pedagogical Approaches to Encoding” at the Encoding Cultures: Joint Music and Text Encoding Conference, Paderborn, Germany, September 2023.

Presented, with Katrina Fenlon, Alia Reza, and Travis Wagner, “Community-centric factors in sustaining digital scholarship” at the Digital Humanities Conference, Graz, Austria, July 2023.

Presented “Community Roles in Sustaining Digital Humanities Initiatives in Music: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Music Library Association Conference, St. Louis, MO, March 2023.

Presented, with Eric Hung, Christopher Macklin, and John D. Spilker, “Applying Bryan Stevenson’s Anti-Racism Strategies to Music Libraries, Archives, and Music Studies” at the Music Library Association Conference, St. Louis, MO, March 2023.

Presented, with Michael Homme, “Browsing Guides for Student Engagement in the Music Library” at the Atlantic Chapter of the Music Library Association, Philadelphia, PA, October 2022.

Presented "Communities and Pedagogies for Sustaining Music Encoding" at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Society for Ethnomusicology; on co-chaired session, "Music Encoding for Research, Pedagogy, and Discovery," New Orleans, November 2022.

Presented, with Tim Duguid, Maristella Feustle, and Anna Kijas, “The X[ML]-Files: Pedagogies to Interrogate and Expand Music History” at the Teaching Music History Conference, Kansas City, June 2022.

Presented “Community-Centred Sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Music Encoding Conference, Halifax, Canada, May 2022. Winner, best paper.

Presented, with John Davis and Vin Novara, “‘Everybody’s talking about their hometown scene’: Digitizing Ian MacKaye’s fanzine collection at the University of Maryland, at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, March 2022.

Presented “Community-centred sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference, “Sustaining Digital Scholarship,” October 2021.

Presented “Adapting Content to Platform in the Digital Music Research Methods Classroom” at the Teaching Music History Conference, held virtually, June 25, 2021.

Presented “Music Encoding and Digital Derivative Sources: Creation and Use of the Beethovens Werkstatt Collection” at the Music Library Association, held virtually, March 4, 2021.

Presented “The Composer in Exile: Darius Milhaud’s Suite Française” at the Within and Without: Les Six at 100 Conference, Princeton, NJ, January 16, 2020.

Presented “From Femme Idéale to Femme Fatale: Context for French Exotic Opera Archetypes” at the 20th Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, Huddersfield, England, July 3, 2018.

Presented “‘I cannot remember everything…’: Constructing Holocaust Trauma and Memory for American Audiences in Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw” at the Trauma and the Medical Humanities International Conference, Durham, England, April 13, 2018.

Presented “Collaboration and Resistance: Conservatoire de Lyon under the Nazi Occupation and Vichy Regime (1940–1944)” at the Michigan Music Research Graduate Symposium, March 2018.

Presented “From Femme Idéale to Femme Fatale: Context for French Exotic Opera Archetypes,” at the American Musicological Society Capital Chapter, October 2017.

Presented “Globalization and Cultural Preservation in Bourdieu’s Habitus” at the Confucius Institute Advanced Seminar, Beijing, China, July 2015.

Presented “Approaching the Divine in Mahler’s Third Symphony” at the University of Michigan’s CLIFF Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, March 13, 2014.

Conference Posters

Exhibited poster, with Ben Jackson, "Reimagining Punk: Designing a Season of Outreach" with Ben Jackson at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, October 2022.

Exhibited poster “Mapping Jessye Norman’s Legacy” at the Society of American Archivists National Conference, August 2022.

Exhibited poster “Mapping Jessye Norman’s Legacy” at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, October 2021.

Exhibited poster “‘I cannot remember everything…’: Constructing Holocaust Trauma and Memory for American Audiences in Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw” at the American Musicological Society Capital Chapter Meeting, October 2019.

Exhibited poster “Collaboration and Resistance in the Conservatoire de Lyon,” at the American Musicological Society South-Central Chapter Meeting, March 2018.