Grant Hurley currently serves as the Digital Preservation Librarian at Scholars Portal, the service arm of the Ontario Council of University Libraries situated at the University of Toronto. He is a 2015 graduate of the Dual Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies program at the University of British Columbia. He also holds a Master of Arts in English from UBC. He currently serves as a director and editor of Off the Record for the Archives Association of Ontario and as a researcher with the InterPARES Trust project at the University of British Columbia.
During his degree at UBC, Grant had the opportunity to write a final paper relating to digital preservation and community archives, the study area that he initially proposed as part of his O’Brien scholarship application. This paper, titled “Community Archives, Community Clouds: Enabling Digital Preservation for Small Archives,” was then nominated for the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Gordon Dodds Prize, which led to its being published in the journal Archivaria this past Spring. The subject area of the paper is directly related to his recent position at Scholars Portal, including setting up resources for the preservation of local born digital and digitized content via the cloud. Grant notes that his initial research, and now work, in this emerging area was spurred by the O’Brien Fellowship, and is very grateful for the support that the Foundation provided during his course of study.