Julie Rogers

Julie Rogers (she/her) is a public historian, curator and archivist with NPR's Research, Archives & Data Strategy Department.

Rogers is NPR's first historian. She came to NPR in 2015 and, together with RAD colleagues, began an initiative to produce a comprehensive inventory of all NPR content and media across platforms since NPR's creation, including: early radio broadcasts, newscasts, podcasts, and born-digital web content. This mega project involves identifying asset formats, and topics used to strategically prioritize content for at-risk digitization, archiving, outreach partnerships, and preservation. An example from this project is her rediscovery and championing of content produced by NPR's Department of Specialized Audience Programming that led to subsequent outreach efforts and new points of access.

As a historian, Rogers brings new energy to RAD as she conducts research to discover and interpret NPR history. In 2017, Rogers introduced the History of NPR to the onboarding process for new staff. She has initiated several outreach and research projects including capturing oral histories and co-founding the NPR Employee Resource Group NipperCorps. Rogers documents and promotes NPR institutional history with the goal of increasing visibility for the archives in the organization

Rogers's efforts have made the NPR archive usable and available to new audiences, especially scholars and students, and cited in scholarly publications. Rogers believes the NPR archive is a valuable historic artifact that should be preserved and be made accessible to the American people. Collaborating with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress, Rogers successfully presented grant applications to support the digital preservation of NPR content. Rogers has also worked with legal counsel on researching archival rights and permissions, with RAD colleagues to integrate historical content into Artemis, NPR's internal repository.

As Curator, Rogers works closely with RAD colleagues and with technical staff, actively engaged in informing the development of RAD products. Rogers leads the curation of diverse sourcing research for the Vice President of RAD and NPR Chief Diversity Officer. Rogers's curiosity and expertise with the digital humanities and coding motivates her to experiment with and deploy new audio models, frameworks, and approaches, adding greater alignment and functionality across NPR systems. She plans and implements strategic initiatives in support of data-intensive research, with the goal of ensuring the high functionality, discoverability, reuse, and preservation of data throughout its lifecycle.

Before joining NPR, Rogers worked in publishing at The Atlantic and The Washingtonian; she was a Public History Fellow at the White House Historical Association and a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Rogers has a Master's degree in Public History from American University and a Master's degree in Publishing from the George Washington University; she received her BA in History and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.