Kari Smith’s work and research are primarily centered on digital object lifecycle issues and information management solutions for cultural and archival materials. She has over 20 years of experience working with electronic records, digital archives, and digitized cultural heritage at universities in the United States and in other sectors. She enjoys coaching people who are starting digital archives / digital preservation programs for their institutions and who are interested in extending their workflows using tools and techniques suitable for digital preservation or digital archival processing.

She has co-presented the RBS seminar Digital Sustainability with Nancy McGovern and has been a Senior Presenter since 2008 for the Digital Management Preservation workshops directed by McGovern. She also co-teaches the Digital Curation course for the Society of American Archivists. Kari taught three semesters of the postgraduate course “Archives and Records Management” for the Information Science program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is a tutor for the CAIS program at the University of Dundee. In 2022 Kari started her own consulting company, Global Archivist LLC, after working for ten years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Institute Archives and Special Collections department as the Digital Archives Program Manager and the Institute Archivist. She has provided coaching and consulting services and volunteers in her local Maine region with historical societies and for the Frances Perkins National Historic Landmark.