Tessa Walsh (she/they) is a digital preservationist, archivist, and software developer based in Montreal. She currently works as Senior Applications and Tools Enginer at Webrecorder, and previously was a software developer at Artefactual Systems. Prior to her software development career, Tessa worked as an archivist and librarian at institutions such as Concordia University, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Harvard Business School, and Tufts University. She is a recipient of a 2019 NDSA Excellence Award and was a 2018 Summer Fellow at the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University. Tessa is also the maintainer of several free and open source software projects that support digital preservation and curation activities, including Brunnhilde and Bulk Reviewer.
As the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s first Digital Archivist, Tessa created and managed a five person team dedicated to arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to born-digital and hybrid physical/digital archives of architecture and design projects. Tessa has presented on the topic of digital design records at many conferences, including the 2017 Library of Congress Summit “Designing the Future Landscape: Digital Architecture, Design & Engineering Assets,” and has published on a number of related topics, including digital processing workflows and environmentally sustainable digital preservation.
