Steven D. Booth

Image of Steven sitting on a boulder wearing lime green frames, a grey sweatshirt, and cutoff denim.

Steven De'Juan Booth (he/him) is an archivist, researcher, and co-founder of The Blackivists, a collective of trained Black memory workers who provide expertise on archiving and preservation practices to communities in the Chicagoland area.

His work and research interests include analog and born-digital audiovisual materials, Black cultural heritage preservation, community archives, and digital scholarship. He is currently the archivist/project manager of the Johnson Publishing Company Archive for the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

From 2009-2021, Steven worked at the US National Archives and Records Administration with the Presidential Materials Division, Office of Presidential Libraries, and Barack Obama Presidential Library. He has also held positions at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center and JPMorgan & Chase cataloging papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Steven is an active member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and served on SAA Council from 2017-2020. He has given talks at the Library of Congress, University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, and Brown University's Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

In 2020, Steven co-edited with Stacie Williams Loss/Capture, an editorial project exploring the state of Black cultural archives in and beyond Chicago, presented by Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago-based arts publication and archiving initiative.

He is currently working on a book project with Barrye Brown documenting the contributions and impact of African American archivists in SAA. He is also researching Black LGBTQIA spaces and newsletters published in the Midwest as sites and sources of knowledge production and sharing.

Steven is part of a long lineage of Black information professionals who have matriculated from Morehouse College (BA in Music) and Simmons College (MS in Library Science).