Helen Tibbo

Helen R. Tibbo is an SAA Fellow and former SAA President in 2010-2011. She also served on Council and numerous SAA committees and boards for over 40 years and was the co-founder of the SAA Research Forum with Dr. Nancy McGovern. As SAA President she developed the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) program and certificate.

Dr. Tibbo retired from a chaired professorship in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) at the end of 2024 after 36 years of teaching. She taught in the areas of archives and records management, digital curation, electronic retrieval, and reference. During her time at SILS she was awarded numerous grants that furthered the study and practice of archival studies and digital curation. These included the IMLS-funded DigCCurr project I that developed an International Digital Curation Curriculum for master's level students (2006-2009) and DigCCurr II (2008-2012) that extended the Digital Curation Curriculum to the doctoral level and provided week-long summer workshops for digital curation practitioners from 2009-2017.

Dr. Tibbo was a co-PI with collaborators from the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto for a Mellon Foundation-funded project to develop standardized metrics for assessing use and user services for primary sources. Along with Drs. Elizabeth Yakel and Wendy Duff, Dr. Tibbo won the SAA Council Exemplary Service Award in 2020 for this work.  

Dr. Tibbo earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland College Park in Library and Information Services and has Master's degrees in Library and Information Science, and American Studies.